A Head’s Account of How Bellevue Education Supports Schools

Opinion

Being part of Bellevue Education, a group of 15 schools throughout England and across Europe and the Middle East, has many distinct advantages and is of great benefit to our pupils’ academic and personal development. Whilst retaining our unique ethos and identity, we are supported to meet shared high standards and are united by collective values.

In practice, this means that teachers have the opportunity to share ideas and resources across the group, attend collective training and be part of Bellevue’s excellent developmental School Learning Review cycle. Like all independent schools we are inspected by ISI (Independent Schools Inspectorate) for educational quality every six years; however, as part of Bellevue we receive in-depth feedback annually on the quality of teaching and the impact on children’s learning. For Norfolk House, this year’s Learning Review is next week, where we will welcome senior leaders from other Bellevue schools to spend two days in school and share their objective feedback about how we challenge learners. The feedback is then used to drive our professional development programme in order to enhance the provision for our pupils. However, this type of constructive feedback happens far more often through our own internal professional development and group initiatives, such as video observation, that are developed and supported centrally. This allows teachers to continually reflect on their practice in order to develop the level of children’s challenge, ownership, dialogue and engagement in their learning.

Bellevue Education has more of a direct impact on the opportunities we can provide for children through the group’s programme of collaborative events. Today some children are attending a collaborative Mathematics day hosted at Weston Green School in Surrey and a couple of week’s ago there was an English day. On Monday 19th March, our Junior Choir and ensemble are also performing at the Bellevue Music Festival.

Bellevue Education work with a number of experts, such as ISI inspectors and educators with wide-ranging experience, to help school leadership reflect on their development plans and create a vision with challenging aims for the future. Certainly as a Headteacher returning to the UK from an overseas posting, the outstanding level of support at governance level has been much appreciated.

Paul Jowett

Headteacher at Norfolk House School