Mission, Strategy, Vision and Purpose

Responsibility and Accountability

The First Federation is a community of schools bound together by:
 

• Shared Responsibility and Accountability
   

• Trust and Common Vision
   

• Intellectual and Social Capital
   

Schools in the 21^st Century need to believe that the future is that we are all in this together. We must believe there are no limits to what schools can achieve together and this achievement will be ensured if we ensure we have:
 

• Responsibility before accountability engendering distributed leadership

• Trust established through Character and Competency in equal measures

• Intellectual capital that innovates and social capital that becomes the glue which holds us together

Federation – a Hardwired Learning Community

The First Federation is a clear example of a ‘hardwired’ learning community where everyone is responsible for the success of every school. All the staff are members of the First Federation and believe in collaboration and the sharing of best practice. Research shows that when schools fully embrace the concepts of collaborative practice and collaborative capacity, they rapidly improve and become sustainable, high performing organisations.

The power of collective capacity is that it involves ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things – for two reasons.

One is that knowledge about effective practice becomes more widely available and accessible on a daily basis.

The second reason is more powerful still – working together generates commitment. Moral purpose, when it stares you in the face through children and your peers working together to make lives and society better; is palpable, indeed virtually irresistible. The collective motivational well seems bottomless. The speed of effective change increases exponentially…

Collaborative practice is more powerful and more lasting than other forms of accountability, performance management, appraisal or Ofsted as it provides the mechanism for peer accountability and peer learning.

Michael Fullen

Collaboration and the 5es

The Federation has identified 5es that we want embedded in every school. Excellence is one of the Trust’s 5es. We will achieve excellence through excitement as well as the effort, and enthusiasm as well as the energy.

From its inception in 2006 the First Federation has championed Collaborative Autonomy. Every school in the Federation is recognised as being unique and is encouraged to be the best it can possibly be through releasing the 5Es. We also understand that to be an outstanding organisation the federation has to ensure that best practice and innovation is spread quickly and accurately across all its schools. This is best achieved through Organisational Knowledge Creation. Collaborative Autonomy ensures Organisational Knowledge Creation.

‘Organisational Knowledge Creation is the capability of the Federation as a whole to create new knowledge, disseminate it throughout the schools, and embody it in pedagogy, systems and structures.’

Based on work by Nonaka and Takeuchi

Trust

Relationships are the lifeblood of schools. Schools work on trust at every level, children trust their teachers and one another. Teachers trust their children and their colleagues. Deep trust is built upon two fundamental areas; character and competence. Children need to believe that their teachers will treat them, with care, fairness and honesty. They also need to trust their teachers to have the knowledge, skills and attributes that will enable them to learn and achieve at the highest standard. Teachers also need to trust that their colleagues and senior leaders will treat them the same and have the highest set of competencies.