Teaching

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 will mean:

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

• Our staff's reduced timetable will also allow us to train them more effectively. Staff will have an hour 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 intend to continue working with great organisations like Teach First and Future Leaders to help find and recruit the brightest teachers out there.

• We intend to use data much more effectively to help improve performance. For example, using 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 will be focussed on continually developing their practice. We will create opportunities for them to work together to plan better lessons and watch each other teach. We will arrange visits and secondments to other schools so that they can learn from their colleagues elsewhere. We will implement 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 will use a range of methods to keep our teaching and learning under continual review. Our headteacher and his senior team will conduct frequent internal visits to classes to ensure consistently excellent teaching, whilst we will bring in external partners to spot-check the quality of learning and teaching much more regularly than normal. We will, of course, still be 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 will mean 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!