Executive Principal - Cambridgeshire

balance between remaining ‘hands on’ in schools and working closely across a maximum of two schools to provide expert advice and coaching to Senior Leadership Teams. You will have a huge opportunity to be able to make your mark, working very closely with the Regional Director and Principals. You will also help shape and lead on aspects of secondary strategy and projects. The position is a great match for someone who shares the Trust’s vision for educational excellence and has the focus to drive rapid, transformational improvement. Our mission is to tackle historic disadvantage. The Trust is committed to a knowledge-rich curriculum and a traditional approach to teaching, behaviour and culture, influenced by Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion and Tom Bennett.

We believe that schools must teach powerful knowledge, ’the best that has been thought and said’ and an ‘entitlement curriculum’ for all, with an underpinning philosophy that ‘education for all should confer the benefits associated with education for the rich’ (Michael Young). With careful curriculum design, spaced retrieval practice, detailed assessment and achieving mastery in small steps, rates of progress can increase greatly.

We believe in explicit instruction and have been greatly influenced by Lemov’s ‘Teach Like A Champion’, Rosenshine and recent developments in cognitive science. Excellent teaching must sit alongside a very carefully sequenced curriculum, with a culture of deliberate practice and instructional coaching.

We have recently launched the Astrea behaviour curriculum, where behaviour expectations and routines are explicitly taught and deliberately practised. The creation of a scholarly culture that is warm and strict, disciplined and joyful, where there is ‘purpose not power’, ensuring impeccable behaviour, where teachers can focus on teaching and scholars can focus on learning, underpins everything. There needs to be relentless consistency with the implementation of the behaviour policy in every classroom, and overcommunication of the ‘why’ to all stakeholders, to help ensure impeccable behaviour.

We have also embarked on a process of codifying what works across our secondary academies, through publication of a series of frameworks, which inform academy policies. Sir David Carter states ‘Without some degree of standardisation, the turnaround process will be lengthier and more chaotic than is necessary and the casualties are not the adults, but the children who only have 2280 days of schooling between reception and the end of Year 11.’

The position is a great match for someone who shares the Trust’s vision for educational excellence and has the focus to drive improvement at a pace, building on our schools’ improving foundations. You will be a team builder, able to motivate staff and scholars. You will expect a lot from people and provide strong support to them.

As a Trust of 26 schools, we have the capacity to support you educationally and operationally. You will be provided with a strong infrastructure of support– with our financial, HR, technology and data teams, who work with Principals in some key areas – and with educational support, from a Regional Director and subject specialists who you can use to support the quality of provision.

If you are aligned to our mission and values, have a strong track record of improving young people’s education and a drive to do more, we very much look forward to hearing from you. We fully recommend that you take the opportunity to arrange a conversation with the Regional Director (Secondary), Jo Myhill-Johnson. To arrange a telephone or Teams call, please contact Jo.Myhill-Johnson@astreaacademytrust.org.