ASSIST Programme
Are you a school leader seeking support for rapid and strategically focused school improvement?
Do you have governance responsibility for a school that would benefit from external expertise and professional guidance in enhancing provision?
Would you value a sustained, focused and objective contribution to enhance your capacity in enacting change?
Start date
You choose
Format
Online and in-person
Cost
SSAT members: £4,450 + VAT
Non-member: £5,500 + VAT
Need more information?
Get in touch or call 020 7802 2300
Facing significant challenges in your school or college can feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to navigate them alone. SSAT’s ASSIST programme offers tailored support for schools dealing with leadership instability, declining pupil outcomes, or challenging inspection results.
Whether your school is experiencing the impact of leadership turnover, facing persistent underperformance, or preparing for a difficult inspection, ASSIST provides the expert guidance and practical strategies needed to drive meaningful, lasting improvement.
SSAT’s ASSIST programme can help schools and colleges facing significant challenges, including:
- Rapid recent turnover of school leadership team membership.
- Significant and sustained downturn in outcomes for pupils.
- Inspection outcomes that are, or are expected to be, challenging.
- Stubborn underperformance that leaders have struggled to overcome.
Momentum and capacity: A story and a proposition for school improvement support
In this article, I want to share a very personal experience of the challenges presented to me as a headteacher between 2019 and 2023.
Applicable across all phases of education including primary, secondary, special, and across MATs, SSAT’s new ASSIST programme offers schools five days of concerted support in their pursuit of strategic improvement.
This fully customisable programme enables school leaders and governance professionals to:
- Gain an external perspective on the key priorities for stakeholders
- Understand how these views can be used as levers for school improvement
- Identify the most effective strategies for achieving desired changes
- Schedule and align improvement efforts across the school community
- Identify objective and subjective metrics of progress and an evaluation schedule
- Critically reflect on change processes and impact through robust self-evaluation
- Review achievements coherently to sustain improvements over time.
Book a call with Dr Keven Bartle, Senior Education Lead, SSAT
Keven has been a teacher for almost three decades and was headteacher at a richly diverse secondary school in London for nine years. Through his career, Keven has been committed to the power of education for social justice and transformation, working in schools where staff make a difference to the lives of children, families and communities.
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What to expect
Led by an experienced headteacher, the ASSIST programme blends the importance of contextual insights with impartial and objective perspective. For this reason, the action plan for support will be tailored to the specific needs of the individual school without losing sight of the wider context and expectations of continuous school improvement. An example of how schools might choose to utilise the five days of support (three onsite and two remote) is shown below.
Half-day 1: Diagnostic review process (offsite)
- Review of publicly available documentation about the school.
- Review of school improvement literature sent by the school.
- Inspection Tracker Insights school contextualisation review.
Day 1: Stakeholder engagement and insights (onsite)
- Strategic leadership meeting to share findings of the diagnostic review.
- Presentation of Inspection Tracker Insights contextualised to the school.
- Meetings with stakeholders to be decided by school.
Half-day 2: Diagnostic review and stakeholder insights report (offsite)
- SWOT analysis based on school insights and national/regional comparators.
- Identification of ‘key levers’ and ‘high leverage tactics’ for school improvement.
- Proposals and schedule for improving monitoring and evaluation processes.
Day 2: Leadership alignment
- Strategic leadership meeting to review school improvement planning.
- Leadership team meeting to reflect on blockers and enablers to school improvement.
- Meetings with individuals/groups with key responsibilities for delivering improvement.
Half-day 3: Strategic school improvement progress check-ins (offsite)
- Progress updates against key success metrics from school improvement planning.
- ‘How do you know?’ discussions to focus attention on the evidence base for claims.
- Summary meeting with strategic leaders to provide external view on progress.
Half-day 4: Self-evaluation external review (offsite)
- Review of self-evaluation proformas sent by the school for key improvement areas.
- Review of supporting documents that evidence self-evaluation claims.
- Identification of key lines of enquiry for strategic improvement review meetings.
Day 3: Strategic achievement review meetings (onsite)
- Achievement review meetings with key leaders, their line managers and link governors.
- Exploration of self-evaluation claims and evidence base supporting these.
- Identification of ‘causes for celebration’, ‘causes for concern’ and ‘next steps’.
- Presentation to strategic leaders of findings from the achievement review meetings.
If you want to know more about how this programme, or a variation of this programme, could work in your context, please get in touch using the ‘book a call’ button below.
Key information
*Prices exclusive of VAT
Dates and location
Three days of onsite support for strategic school improvement with two further days of offsite diagnostic review of school evaluation processes and data.
