An ATT Community is a group of colleagues with shared priorities and areas of responsibility, who work collaboratively to share knowledge, build solutions and enact strategies to improve our academies and provide the highest quality education for our students.
Our Communities provide:
- Opportunities for our leaders to strategically raise standards across our Trust.
- Development and learning opportunities for leads and members to enhance domain specific knowledge and develop leadership, teamwork, and coaching skills.
- A structure for collaborative development where excellent practice is shared and, as appropriate, aligned across our Trust for rapid improvement.
- A supportive network of reflective and critical peers.
- Opportunities for individual and group accreditation and acknowledgment.
Planning our Communities
Ensuring regular meetings between groups of busy colleagues is a significant challenge, but a priority for us; staff get more out of our communities if they meet regularly. We ensure community meetings are scheduled in advance for the whole academic year, using a predetermined combination of face-face, hybrid and online meetings to ensure the benefits of different mediums are utilized.
Keeping it Relevant
To help academies get the most out of their participation in our communities, members are nominated according to a person specification for each community. These are shared with Principals to support decision making at academy level. From the community members, community leads are identified for their expertise and commitment to continued development. Training for community leads is a significant factor in their (and their academy’s) success; we deliver training on the theory of “Communities of Practice”, orchestrating successful developmental collaboration, alongside the practicalities of our face-face, online and hybrid meetings.
How Our Communities Operate
To support the development of a community culture where colleagues can collaborate effectively and honestly, every group follows the “Communities the ATT Way” framework, which outlines common values and expected behaviours. This framework is relaunched annually with all community members and our “Ways of Working” are shared by community leads at the start of each meeting.
Acknowledge & Analyse Ideas
Our communities are spaces to collaborate with colleagues who have similar responsibilities, priorities and domain specific knowledge. We acknowledge the ideas and expertise of others, whist building a safe space and trusting relationships to allow us to analyse how these ideas may be relevant in our own context.
Transfer Knowledge & Skills
Our communities allow priorities to be explored with varied contributions, active listening, and questions. They allow the transfer of domain specific knowledge and skills which allows us to cocreate solutions to the common and persistent problems in education.
Transform Life Chances
Our communities give us the knowledge, skills and resources to allow effective dissemination, application and embedding of improvement strategies within our contexts. To transform life chances for our students.
Seeing the Impact
Finally, and most importantly, it is essential the work of our communities positively impacts the experience of learners in our academies. We ensure this by providing guidance to community members on how to contextualise the priorities of their community and feedback to their SLT. By continually reinforcing the role that community members play in academy improvement, we ensure feedback is welcomed by senior leaders. Importantly, each of our academies has a professional development lead, a member of the professional development community, led by Director of Institute Cat Rushton. The role of these colleagues is pivotal in assimilating feedback from every community member to ensure academies implement the products and decisions made in communities sensitively and sustainably.
