EPISODE NOTES In this episode, Claire talks with Sam Strickland: author and headteacher at The Duston School in Northamptonshire. Sam and Claire discuss some of the key themes from Sam’s book ‘Education Exposed 2: In pursuit of the halcyon dream’ in particular what the halcyon dream of teaching is and some of the practical approaches that leaders can take to work towards achieving this. Sam shares his thoughts on a range of strategies schools might use to help improve and grow including using coaching alongside performance management to hone in on just one element for professional development, eliminating distractions such as unnecessary e-mails, and more effective use of directed time and staff meetings to reduce workload. KEY TAKEAWAYS The classroom is absolutely at the centre of what matters in schools. The classroom and the teaching that happens here should be the main focus of school improvement. Getting that ‘quality first teaching’ in place and happening every day is the number one priority. Everything else – while still important - is mostly secondary to this. While other aspects of education still require attention and focus (for example, the curriculum design) these generally support achieving the ultimate aim of making sure what happens in the classroom is worthwhile and valuable. Strip away what is not important. Teaching should be as undisturbed as possible and allowing teachers to do their jobs in their classrooms effectively is key. The best teaching will take place when teachers don’t fear things going wrong, or are not concerned or distracted by matters outside the classroom. Part of a more general distraction can be performance management – particularly where this is ‘results driven’ because the numbers can become the focus of a teacher’s thinking rather than the quality of what they do each day. Here, a coaching model rather than a data-driven model can reap benefits. BEST MOMENTS “The halcyon dream is that: it's that ability to teach children without a lot of the nonsense and the white noise that gets in the way of it.” “It's giving staff the time to do the actual job rather than all the other stuff that we think is important but, actually, is a detraction from what we're trying to achieve with children.” “Ultimately, the person that makes the biggest difference, or the people that make the biggest difference, are the people in the classroom with the children: the teachers and the TAs. Everything else is kind of superfluous in many regards.” “Sir John Jones describes [teaching] as the 'magic-weaving business' and I completely agree with that. This is where the magic happens: in the classrooms.” “To my mind, the thing that's going to make the biggest difference to pupil outcomes, to pupil experiences, to pupil enjoyment is that interaction with the teacher in the room which is undisturbed by anything else.” “I guess it's the accumulation of marginal gains in a business sense that if every single teacher is improving one element of their practice, but doing it properly and doing it with real intent rather than giving it lip service because we've given it 30 seconds to think about, then institutionally that actually makes a huge difference.” “Our improvement plan, even in this COVID universe, was 'doing the same, but even better'. And that was the thing for the year.” “I guess it's putting your money where your mouth is. Is something a priority, or is it not? If something is, you've got to give time and, indeed, money to making it a priority. And if you don't, then it's not a priority.”   VALUABLE RESOURCES Twitter: https://twitter.com/Strickomaster Education exposed 2: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1913622169 School website: https://www.thedustonschool.org/ Classroom Secrets Kids: https://kids.classroomsecrets.co.uk The Teac