As financial pressures reshape the independent school sector, collaboration, creativity and a willingness to challenge conventional thinking are becoming essential to building sustainable futures says Neil Smith. 

Building sustainable futures

Two recurring themes across much of what I have been saying during the last 12 months have been the importance of schools collaborating, either with other independent schools or in partnerships with local state schools, and that schools need to think the unthinkable when developing their strategic response to the financial challenges currently facing them. As has been stated previously, for many schools the norms that had guided their future planning are becoming decreasingly relevant and therefore leaders and their governing bodies should therefore be willing to approach the future with boldness and creativity.

Related to both of these themes, and reflecting on my own experience of being a head in an area where there were five other similar independent schools within a ten-mile radius, it struck me that schools in the sector should be thinking less about their own particular status in the ‘market’ and instead consider how they can work together, where practical, to strengthen the sector as a whole. After all, no head wishes to see parents collectively view the sector as one that, post the imposition of VAT, doesn’t warrant the increasingly high fees that its schools are charging.

Of the many features that independent schools highlight to existing and potential parents to justify charging a fee for education, it is their ability to offer a broad curriculum, including subjects potentially unavailable in local state schools and colleges, which marks out a clear point of difference in their offer. However, offering fewer mainstream subjects, which often run with small numbers of pupils, comes at great cost and it is therefore unsurprising that, faced with governor demands to review school costings, several heads have reluctantly chosen to cut these ‘niche’ subjects from their curriculum, particularly at A level. As a result, one crucial point of difference to the non-fee paying options is removed.

ConnectEd 

At the last ASCL Council ( www.ascl.org.uk/council) meeting, Julie Keller, Head of Nottingham Girls’ High School and ASCL Girls’ Schools Association (GSA) representative, spoke about ConnectEd, a programme that her school and three others from the Girls’ Day School Trust have recently introduced to facilitate cross-school curriculum collaboration, thereby allowing each of the schools to continue offering subjects that otherwise are likely to have been cut from their respective curriculums.

The programme offers a hybrid of in-person, online, group and self-study to protect minority A level subjects, while enhancing students’ experiences of learning in new ways. By combining resources across the four schools, they have been able to offer an innovative approach to preserving curriculum breadth for their students, combining the schools’ teaching expertise with easy-to-access technology.

Typically, a student taking a subject via the ConnectEd approach will experience a combination of face-to-face lessons with a teacher at their own school; online lessons delivered via Google Meet at a different school and including students from across the four schools; and independent study sessions, which may also involve online collaboration with students at other schools on their course. This certainly isn’t the online learning model of the pandemic; this is interactive and tightly structured while also providing opportunities for the development of independent and collaborative learning skills.

Subjects currently offered via this model include German, Latin, and computer science and the response from staff and students has been extremely positive. According to Julie, “Students enjoy the novelty of leaving their own school for a few hours a week to join a wider peer group. It builds their networks early, fosters independence and, most importantly, leads to great academic outcomes. Girls also appreciate the fact that we’re preparing them for the future of work, by mimicking real-life corporate practices.” Much has already been written and spoken about the challenges facing independent schools, but what we are now starting to see is creative and radical approaches to school leadership and strategy.

ConnectEd is one such example, and while appreciating the innovative use of technology to deliver the programme, what appears most impressive is that underpinning it is a recognition that working alone is no longer an option for many schools in the sector, and that those schools likely to be in the strongest position in a decade’s time are those for whom this lesson will be learned and applied quickly.

Neil Smith
ASCL Independent School Specialist
@smitne.bsky.social

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