Teaching

You can see details of our teaching staff here.

The single biggest factor that determines how well a child performs at school is the quality of teaching they receive. We agree with Professor Dylan Wiliam that:

'An effective school is [essentially] a school full of effective classrooms. It matters much less which school a child attends than which classrooms they are in at that school. In England there is a four-fold difference between the most effective and least effective classrooms.'

To make sure that we have a school full of effective classrooms - and that every pupil experiences six good or outstanding lessons every day - we are investing much more of our budget in teaching than most schools do. This means:

• All our teachers only teach for 60% of the week. This gives them much more time to plan great lessons, mark work to a high standard and spend time working with pupils individually. We demand high standards from our teachers, but invest in providing staff with the time to deliver them.

• Our staff's reduced timetable also allows us to train them more effectively. Staff have 90 minutes a week, every week, of training to ensure that they keep improving and sharing great practice. Our aim is that every one of our teachers is made more effective at the Greenwich Free School than they would be elsewhere because of our training, management and support.

• We work with great organisations like Teach First and Future Leaders to help find and recruit the brightest teachers out there.

• We use data intelligently - to help improve performance. For example, we use Arbor's sophisticated information systems to help staff diagnose where they need to intervene to help individual pupils - and for managers to spot trends and quickly work out where they need to support staff with classes, individuals or groups before problems start to occur.

• All our staff are focussed on continually developing their practice. We create opportunities for them to work together to plan better lessons and watch each other teach. We arrange visits and secondments to other schools so that they can learn from their colleagues elsewhere. We operate a mixture of self-review, peer-review and management-observations to give all staff much more frequent feedback on how they can improve their teaching further.

• We use a range of methods to keep our teaching and learning under continual review. Our headteacher and his senior team conduct frequent internal visits to classes to ensure consistently excellent teaching, whilst we bring in external partners to spot-check the quality of learning and teaching more regularly than normal. We are, of course, still subject to regular Ofsted inspections like any other state school.

Obviously, this investment comes at a cost! We don't receive any more money than any other state school; we're just choosing to devote more of it to teaching and learning than normal. This means you'll see fewer classroom assistants and probably slightly older computers at the Greenwich Free School - but as teachers, we think that's a sensible trade-off to help ensure our teachers are the best possible!