Form time personal development
5 ways City of London Academy Southwark make it work
Welcome to the Pastoral Champions newsletter where we share pastoral research, resources and recordings from the We Are In Beta community.
This is a guest post by Pastoral Leader and Maths Teacher, Matthew Wood. If you’d like to write for us, head to the bottom of this post.
A very smart individual once said that clever people don’t complicate things; they make them as simple as they can be (read on to find out who it was).
The same principle can be applied to Personal Development programmes in schools. They work when they’re understood by all and rooted in common sense. Simple. Clear. Effective.
We liked seeing this approach at the City of London Academy, Southwark (CoLAS). Pupil starting points are no barrier here, and Shahleeni Gardner is overseeing impressive work as Senior Assistant Principal (Personal Development and Pastoral Intervention).
With close to 50% pupils receiving free school meals, but above local average pupil progress and results in GCSE English and maths, lots is clearly going well (Gov.uk).
Read on to find out why Ofsted commented on pupils being “safe and happy at school”, and grab some ideas to use in your setting.
Read time: 3-4 mins (Ready to build on what’s already working?)
Shahleeni shared a full breakdown of her school’s Personal Development programme for We Are In Beta here.
There’s too much to share fully here. But to get you started, I’ve shared some standout ideas with you, and you can grab a link to the full session and her resources below:
Keep your school’s purpose and values central
Properly use tutor time - don’t waste it
Prioritise and link assemblies
Include and train your staff to build confidence
Stay responsive to need and student voice
Before we get into Shahleeni’s approach, a quick announcement…
6 pastoral challenges: 2 weeks to help
Members have been busy nominating colleagues and submitting sessions for our Pastoral Champions Week conference in March (16th to 20th) across:
Safeguarding
Attendance
Behaviour
Inclusion and SEND
Personal Development and Well-being
Leadership and governance of pastoral issue
Huge thanks to them - lineup is shaping up nicely!
If you’d like to join the line up, here are some key dates:
By 23rd February - tell us you’d like to speak in this short form
By 2nd March - share your session outline in this form
By 6th March – create and upload your session, supported by your SLT
w/c 16th March – conference goes live! Jump in to meet fellow speakers, discuss sessions and learn from a wealth of ideas and resources on offer.
Start: Know the importance of Personal Development in your school
In the lives of your students, there’s more unhelpful external noise than ever fighting to play an influencer role. You don’t need to be Einstein* to see why clarity and consistency across your school’s Personal Development programme is therefore so important.
Your school’s values and how you teach them are the anchor point pupils need to achieve both personal and academic success.
Strategic? Yes.
Research-led? Yes.
Long discussions? Yes.
Drawing on experience? Yes.
Yet ending with something that is easily applicable, usable, and relevant to pupils and staff in your setting - ideally building on what’s already going (and growing) well.
CoLAS have kept it simple to do just this… genius.
* Yes, it was Einstein who said about the hidden genius in keeping things simple. Well done if you knew the reference.
5 ways to make your personal development programme work:
1. Keep your school’s purpose and values central
Do your values still match your school?
If they don’t, change them. If they do, make sure they are clear throughout all your personal development work. If not, your pupils will see and feel (consciously or not) that messages in tutor times and assemblies are disjointed and irrelevant, and they’ll miss out on the real value of your values.
CoLAS puts ‘Exploration of Life’ at the centre of their work, pushing the values of ‘Integrity, Ambition, Duty and Resilience’ as key to giving all students every opportunity to achieve their best.
Yours will look different, but there’ll be similarities. Like CoLAS, make sure they’re clearly visible in any new initiative or programme.
2. Properly use tutor time - don’t waste it
Any pastoral leader will know the repeated cycle of selling and reselling the value of tutor time and tutor relationships.
Thankfully, gone are the days of walking past games of hangman in form time. Yet you’ll still know the healthy frustration of wishing everyone would be as good as your best tutor.
Here’s the truth: the role of the tutor is a sell that we’ll have to keep making and believing in. Still, we know personal development comes out of trust and relationships, which is the very essence of the most effective tutor time work. As a result, driving the importance of the role remains crucial, along with quality resourcing and guidance.
3. Prioritise and link assemblies
A thought: In response to increased individualism and isolation, assemblies and other corporate times like lunches are more important than ever (after reading here, take a look at the ‘Family Lunches’ at Q3 Academy, Langley).
No trick is missed here either. Collective times are prioritised in the Personal Development model at CoLAS, with two-year group assemblies a week:
Pastoral controversial topic assembly (e.g. knife crime)
Events assembly (e.g. Mental Health Awareness week)
The power of the assembly for building your Personal Development programme is in planned and structured follow-up discussions in tutor time.
These are not adult monologues! Instead, different viewpoints (shared respectfully) are encouraged because dialogue is the platform for your important guidance to land.
4. Include and train your staff to build confidence
What about when your staff feel tired or stretched? Or, what about when the topic is tricky? How do you keep the quality high?
Note point 1, and the need to keep driving Personal Development. It’s a reality you face and shows why all your leaders need to push the vision. Beyond this, your staff need to be trained to confidently deliver the full range of topics, including those which are sensitive (e.g. consider an ECT covering mental health or pornography).
CoLAS have supported staff in 3 main ways:
Working groups - All staff were invited to have their say on the personal development needs and programme across the school.
CPD sessions - Tutor time delivery was prioritised in staff training, with six specific sessions, coupled with ongoing input.
Support - All tutor time sessions have guidance slides, and every session has an assigned ‘expert’ member of staff, which means colleagues always have help available.
5. Stay responsive to need and student voice
Need changes, new issues crop up, and (whisper it), staff in the school can be a little behind the curve when it comes to what’s relevant to students. This is where structure, planning and responsiveness all need to work together.
Initiatives at CoLAS show how switched on they are to this. Take the Student Newsletter (‘Explorer’), where articles written by students are discussed across the school during tutor times. Brilliant.
Everything reinforces the point that, in the right context and done in the right way, no topic is off limits.
Would someone you know find this useful?
Next steps for your school:
Personal Development is working at CoLAS and I imagine you can sense our enthusiasm for their work.
Ofsted noted the impact:
“There are opportunities for pupils to take on leadership responsibilities. Pupil-run societies include the green society and feminist society. These provide pupils with a safe space to discuss contemporary issues.”
What I like is that the success has been built on systems already in place, and it’s been about refining them, improving them, and keeping it simple.
Think about these questions:
How would you go about developing your Personal Development programme?
How responsive is your Personal Development programme to new pupil needs?
Sent this by a friend?
Learn more about Shahleeni Gardner and CoLA Southwark’s approach to personal development
You can watch Shahleeni Gardner’s session here where you’l learn:
How to build a responsive personal development programme that aligns with your schools values.
How to support tutors to deliver and facilitate this programme.
How effective and powerful an assembly can be.
How to be consistent with facilitating focus groups and responses.
These are questions you can explore by watching Shahleeni’s full Pastoral Champions session, ‘Building a responsive Personal Development programme through tutor time and assemblies.’
You’ll find free resources, including:
CoLAS Character Education Overview
CoLAS Personal Development Overview Template
CoLAS Assembly Themes Schedule
CoLAS Focus Group Questions
CoLAS Long Term Map
Full set of slides from the Pastoral Champions session.
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Further reading and listening on personal development and form time
Premium members get more. Much more.
Personal development: character education - full analysis, case studies and resource bank
Extra-curricular and enrichment strategies: full analysis, case studies and resource bank
Personal development - how to embed diversity into the curriculum (by The Stanway School)
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5 insights below from reading scores of evaluations*
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