Bellingham Community Middle School

Background

Bellingham Community Middle School caters for 160 pupils from age nine to thirteen and is in partnership with three other schools: Allendale Middle School; Haydon Bridge Community High School Sports College; and Samuel King School Technology College, as the North Pennine Learning Partnership, an early adopter Trust formed in March 2007. The partnership covers a very large geographical area with a catchment of 1000 square miles and the schools are dispersed across the region within two local authorities: Northumberland and Cumbria.

There had been collaboration between the schools in the past, but this tended to depend on goodwill and the individual personalities within the schools. The decision to form a Trust was taken to continue to further improve educational outcomes for all pupils through formal collaboration between the schools. Trust status will be used to effectively ‘glue’ the schools together and ensure the partnership is sustainable, irrespective of changes of governors and headteachers.

Vision

‘The whole reason for becoming a Trust is to improve children’s life chances and to increase their rate of progress through the school system’, Sue Dowson, Headteacher, Bellingham Community Middle School

With falling school numbers in the area, collaboration was seen as an important way of sustaining and enhancing high standards of achievement for the children, while at the same time making crucial savings through achieving economies of scale and making effective use of resources for the schools in the partnership.

The Trust’s vision is to create a learning partnership, linked to strong external partners, which will extend learning opportunities for young people in this rural area; a partnership that is sustainable through collaborative and distributed leadership across the schools.

‘Becoming a Trust gives my school the required autonomy and flexibility to meet local needs and this has led to massive support for the school from the local community’ Sue Dowson, Headteacher, Bellingham Community Middle School

External partners

In addition to the four schools, the Trust has identified a number of external partners to help them meet the Trust’s vision including; Cumbria and Northumberland County Council; Northumberland College; the universities of Cumbria and Liverpool John Moore’s; the Institute for Outdoor Learning; North Country Leisure; the Rugby Football Union and Royal Mail.

Partners bring a wide range of benefits to the school, such as developing ICT capacity and e-learning opportunities, enhanced business and financial management of the Trust, support to ensure that students continue to aspire to lifelong learning opportunities as well as providing a vital local perspective on the development of the Trust in areas such as education, work experience and employment.

Potential partners were initially approached by individual headteachers, who met with them to share the Trust’s vision and discuss their possible involvement. Once it became clear that the benefits of partnership were mutual and their commitment was secured, an external consultant was engaged to draw up a memoranda of understanding using the DCSF Trust School Toolkit.

‘It was staggering how quickly the partners came on board. The schools all share a passion for ensuring that children’s chances and opportunities aren’t limited, and our potential partners heard this loud and clear’ Sue Dowson, Headteacher, Bellingham Community Middle School

It is envisaged that partners will provide staff development opportunities for teachers, governors, students and other stakeholders, whilst advising on income generation and better use of resources. The Trust are investigating with their higher education partners the potential to offer bursaries and research opportunities. The involvement of the Rugby Football Union opens up a whole new area of development for their sports specialism including raising standards through sport, volunteering, qualifications, event management, developing role models and leadership.

The benefits of Trust status

• Cementing existing collaboration to help the schools meet their vision
• Bring key external partners to the Board
• Additional expertise to the schools’ governing bodies
• Opportunities to investigate additional funding through the charitable status that being a Trust brings
• The opportunity to work with the National College for School Leadership to fund a development project for partnership school management and bursarial support

The benefits to Bellingham Community Middle School in particular are already becoming very clear:

• There is now a greater capacity to build on the school’s existing strengths
• We are developing 'leaders' with a range of expertise, rather than relying on one or two experts
• Shared expertise in teaching
• Shared resources with the other schools - especially at key stages 3 and 4 - at a time of a falling pupil roll and associated budget reductions
• Most importantly, greater control of our own destiny and the ability to respond appropriately to local needs, ensuring sustainability. The result has been raising the profile of the school in the local community and the local authority.

Challenges

• The schools being so dispersed geographically presents a number of obvious practical and logistical problems, nevertheless a new partner has been identified to support IT systems and virtual learning
• Having established a vision and signed up external partners, the next challenge is to get all the legal arrangements associated with becoming a Trust resolved and in place, solicitors have been recruited to help us through this stage
• It was difficult to convince some understandably more parochial school governors that becoming a Trust did not mean a loss of autonomy or identity. In order to persuade them that the change of status was for the benefit of all young people, it was important to get the governors involved early on in the application for ‘early adopter’ status. The chair of governors attended all meetings and seminars so that he could share the plans and vision with fellow governors and reassure them that the school wouldn’t be ‘swallowed up’ by the high school or any other partnership school; it would still be very much Bellingham Middle School
• It was a prerequisite for the school to be a truly equal partner in the arrangement and this philosophy has drawn the Trust successfully together. Without the heads securing this vision for equal partnership the whole project would have fallen at the first hurdle

Top tips

• It is important to be clear about what you want from and what you can give to partners; the relationship must be reciprocal with each party being able to support the other’s aims
• The local authority should be brought into discussions at an early stage so that they can share the educational vision. Bellingham Community Middle School was able to assure the local authority that becoming part of a Trust would address their priorities as set out in the ‘local development plan’ as well as the problems identified in the latest Ofsted report. By focusing on educational outcomes, by demonstrating that the Trust would address problems that the local authority were finding difficult and by convincing council members that becoming a Trust was politically acceptable, it was possible to take the local authority with them
• It is important to be clear about the reasons for becoming a Trust school, because it is a huge leap in the dark, additional work, but ultimately very rewarding

‘Be brave, passionate and clear about what you are trying to achieve; focus on the outcomes for children; seek advice from those who have been there before’. Sue Dowson, Headteacher, Bellingham Community Middle School