The day-to-day work and the future development of the School is co-ordinated by a School Management Team. Each year we will be working with leadership and OD colleagues to explore how well we operate as a Team, and we have approached our social care colleagues to see if members of the Team could volunteer as mentors for young people looked after by the Local Authority.
To supplement the work of SMT, a broader School Futures Group is tasked with helping us to think through:
- The longer term aspirations of the School
- What makes us distinctive
- How we want to work together in future
Both groups have worked together to produce the School's strategy for 2015-2020, which aims to help us ensure we are recognised as one of the top 5 units of our kind in the country. There are three particularly important elements of this challenging target:
- Our performance in all areas is already strong and this will need to be sustained.
- A key challenge is 'being recognised' as one of the leading units (not just 'being' in the top 5) and this is arguably as much about internal and external profile as it is the actual level of performance.
- When we want to be one of the top 5 units 'of our kind', we have choices about what kind of School we want to be. This makes our commitment to 'understanding the world, and changing it', even more important, as we need to judge how well we are doing against this mission.