Background and context: A history of School 360
In September 2021, School 360, a brand new primary in the Big Education Trust, opened its doors in Newham, London to its first cohort of reception age pupils. The Co-headteachers,
Andi Silvain and Sarah Seleznyov, took on the leadership of a school just as the COVID lockdown was ending, in the middle of a large building site: this was not without its challenges.
The school opened in a brand new area, not yet fully built. Families who had raised their children during the COVID years felt isolated and lacked a support network. Children had not benefited from the social friendships and nursery education that should have been in place, due to the lockdowns.
The name of the school intended to capture their commitment to social justice and to the Head, Heart, Hand model of education: children would receive a 360 degree rounded education, and the school would be both inward and outward facing, working within, with and on behalf of the local community.
School 360s mission statement is: Think differently, learn together, and change the world. This statement intends to show the School’s commitment to social justice, understood as a focus on developing pupil and community agency, as well as two distinct strands of action: around diversity, equity and inclusion and tackling the climate crisis.
Values
The Co-headteachers wanted some guiding principles to help shape decisions taken about leadership structures, curriculum, pedagogies, and assessment, during the year spent planning for opening. They had read about the importance of values-based leadership (Copeland, 2014) and decided to commit to a core set of values that would shape the school.
The importance of values for pupils is enshrined in the current Ofsted framework (under Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education), and for leaders through The Association of School and College Leaders’ (ASCL) Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education (ASCL, 2019). There are numerous case studies of the positive impact of a values-based education on pupils and adults in the name of the school intended to capture the School’s commitment to social justice and to the Head, Heart, Hand model of education: children would receive a 360 degree rounded education, and the school would be both inward and outward facing, working within, with and on behalf of the local community.
At School 360, values are at the heart of any decisions taken and goals set for the school. Values are considered through three lenses: the individual, relationships with others, and the world. The values are clearly articulated for everyone in the school community. They are also applied to school practices, from staff development to curriculum, from school culture to community work.
The book can be downloaded and read and viewed at your leisure. For the purposes of the website the signature practices outlined in the book have been split into 3 groups. Within the book each signature practice is broken down into why? What and how? To help you to understand and get to grips with our approaches and practices. You can find out more about the work of School 360 via their website https://school360.org.uk/
Andrea Silvain and Sarah Seleznyov Co-headteachers at School 360 London
We wrote this book because we realised that what we are doing at School 360 is powerful but complicated. As founding teachers for the school, we hold a lot of tacit information about ‘the way we do things’ at School 360. We needed to make this knowledge explicit so that we could share it with new staff as they joined the school, helping to induct them into our ways of working.
However, we also wanted to help other schools to follow our journey towards a better kind of learning for children, families, and staff. Hopefully this book will inspire you to make changes that lead to higher wellbeing and a better kind of learning in your own school, a more expansive view of what learning could be: a Big Education.
