the red school

date. 2012-2018

city. Plymouth

We made a school. One that brought together a community in the first centile of need nationally. I was the headteacher designate preparing for the opening. We began the school in an open-plan office with about eighty children and grew to over one thousand in 5 years. We developed a wonderful pedagogy with the arts and creativity at the core of the school. Here's a link to the Edge Foundations Report which referred to us as a Beacon of Hope (p.21). Below is our inclusion in the Parliamentary Review. The school met significant challenges regarding how some other schools treated us, managing some long-term absences of key leaders and scaling at such a pace. We had some areas of excellence and needed time to develop consistency across the school. I learned so much from this roller coaster of starting a school and ensured that things were different when I did it again. 

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