Jacqueline Valin, head of Southfields community college in Wandsworth, London, went on the NCSL/BSF leadership course in 2007, when Ofsted graded Southfields as "outstanding" in all areas.
Southfields plans to spend an estimated £25m on rebuilding an old Victorian building to create new spaces for ICT and the school's specialisms, science and geography, and to remodel the site for learning from "cradle to grave".
The course "got us to look deeply at what we were doing, and gave us time to think about the whole school," says Valin.
As a result, the leadership structure of the school has been revamped. Valin, as executive head, oversees the BSF project through the director of finance and facilities and oversees the day-today running of the school through an associate head with a team of deputies.
"You have to make a conscious decision about restructuring the senior
leadership team early on if you want to cope and, having had the NCSL training, it's so clear," she says. "The governors agreed to make changes and embed them before the building started."
Changes included promoting younger staff to more responsible posts, like the mentor who became head of year and is now training to teach, and the teaching assistant who is now managing absence cover. "The course made us think about distributing leadership responsibilities differently," says Valin.
When building starts (contractors not yet appointed), it will be advised by technical advice firm Faber Maunsell (fabermaunsell.com), architects Ellis Williams (ewa.co.uk), and Cabe (cabe.org.uk).
Valin stresses that workforce reform is not just about the school's 120 teachers, but the whole workforce of 280. "It's not just how you use people in an establishment, but also how you train them for the job." For example, the cleaners, originally from Colombia, have all been off ered English lessons so that they can become fully part of the "school of the future". Support staff are to be offered foundation degrees, along with less academic sixth-formers.
Overall, Valin says, the course "made us look diff erently at how to organise standards and school improvement, along with managing BSF".
