Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance

The Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance is a hub for sharing good practice across the city, engaging in collaborative school improvement and training.

Working in collaborative partnerships, sharing effective practice and developing collective school improvement systems are the approaches that the Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance seeks to establish.

Teaching Schools are one way the government hopes to make school improvement school led. However in Bristol, there are already highly effective and well established networks, federations and alliances that are leading the way in school improvement.

The Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance therefore, hopes to provide a vehicle for the promotion and development of what is currently working well and could be shared more widely, as well as a forum for new alliances and collaborations to form and develop based on the issues and concerns of Bristol schools and in response to national initiatives. There are also many schools who have excellent practice to share but who do not have a city wide forum to promote their practice and many schools with similar priorities and challenges who do not have colleagues to problem solve and join with.

The Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance hopes to establish a hub for schools that wish to work together in this way, either on a regular basis or on single issue pieces of work or CPD. The Alliance seeks to complement the work of the Early Years Teaching School, to work with the secondary Teaching School at St Mary Redcliffe as well as alongside the LA, PHAB and other local teaching schools in the area.

The Alliance is currently made up of three schools who have been awarded Teaching School status: Ashley Down Primary School (awarded Teaching School status in 2013); Whitehall Primary and Bridge Farm Primary (awarded Teaching School status in 2014) and Fair Furlong Primary (a strategic partner school).

Teaching Schools have been established to support the delivery of school led improvement and have 6 key responsibilities, these are:

To support, through partnership and collaboration…
the development of high quality teaching, learning and leadership across the Bristol area; the training of new teachers
peer to peer learning and professional development;
the designation and deployment of SLEs;
the identification, nurturing and management of leadership potential
research and development that puts evidence at the heart of practice

We believe that a learning culture of professional openness, honesty, trust and collaboration is essential to enable teachers to grow and improve their professional skills so they can provide the very best learning opportunities for their pupils.

We will seek to work with and learn from a wide range of partners, including schools from different phases, localities and areas of specialism and school improvement organisations from a wide variety of backgrounds – as long as they share our desire for continuous and supportive improvement. The notion of joint practice development must lie at the heart of all we do, based on an understanding that we can all learn from each other to improve the collective educational experience for all learners.

The Alliance is guided by its vision and values:

Vision
Focus on improving Outcomes for children
Focus on Empowering the Workforce
Focus on Strengthening the Community
Focus on Effective Partnerships and Collaboration
Focus on Evidence based Practice
Focus on Working across Phase, Locality, Area, City and Local Authority and National Boundaries

Values
Working with a Spirit of Openness, Integrity and Transparency
Building Sustainability and Building Strength
Being Inclusive and Learning from Each Other
Making sure that Pupil Voice is Listened To and Acted on Wherever Possible
Behaving in a Socially Responsible Way
Being Self-Evaluative