Donna Moulds was the CEO of the Oval Learning Trust. She worked on an exciting project with Early Excellence, looking at Driving Change in Early Years and interrogating their Early Years settings in all the schools in their Trust. As a newly formed trust they wanted to really invest some serious resource to ensure they had consistency and best practice across all their settings.

What was exciting is that they truly believe in a practitioner led system. They wanted their talented Early Years practitioners to have the opportunity to shine, but also knew that they needed some expertise in early years to support and supplement the work that they did.

They turned to Early Excellence which was a fantastic start. Working with Andy Burt from Early Excellence, their lead practitioner, Emma, visited all the trusts settings and looked at their individual needs and identified what was important.

Each setting is very bespoke and unique so these visits were quite a time commitment, but what worked well was that two key leaders shadowed Andy so that they could see and understand how he was working with each individual setting. This meant these two leaders got additional CPD as they saw the various settings go through the transformation.

The trust held a catalytical change meeting with all the head teachers; they knew it was important that they all knew and understood more about the Early Years right from the start, so they could best support each of the settings and the vision that they had as a trust. Andy facilitated a great dialogue, so that everybody could clarify what it was they wanted to see in the outcomes of their children.

What they they’re doing in those early stages was creating their vision and background to their strategic document. Once they’d established that, it was much easier to have conversations around what it was they wanted to see the children doing in the settings.

It felt like it was moving quite slowly, but realized now, on reflection, that they were really challenging every practitioner’s thinking at very deep level. Not only were they asking them to really critique and evaluate their enabling environments, but also to interrogate the way in which they planned.  It was quite an enormous ask. A lot of the team were taking the time to really assimilate what was wanted from them.

The change then really gained momentum; there were a few catalytic change moments in their journey as practitioners where they began to see some of the benefits of just changing the environment. What became immediately apparent to many of them was that the planning time was greatly reduced and much easier to manage and incorporating those adult enhancements into the learning environment became much, much easier.

Donna Concludes “Without a shadow of a doubt, I can honestly say it has been an absolutely phenomenal change. It’s been so significant that I’d like to take the model that we’ve used this year to the other trust that I’m CEO over.  It’s been just fantastic both for the settings themselves and the practitioners as well.”

To enquire about driving change in your MAT, contact Early Excellence or e-mail nikki@earlyexcellence.com