Early years has been fundamental to Clive Webster during his 30-year career in education. When he got the chance to lead the Kent Catholic Schools Partnership, it was important to put something in place at the earliest opportunity to see progress in the early years from the start of their development as a multi-academy trust.

They had a lot of work to do to build the trust and work with the schools as they became academies and joined the partnership. Not long after the first school started to join, they realised they wanted to make a strategic difference in terms of early years practice.

At one level, everyone knows this takes time, but it has been really invigorating to see how well practitioners on the ground have embraced the Early Excellence model. Bringing together specialist teachers and other leaders from across the academies has been energising, they are enlivened by what is being proposed. They are often taken aback by how positive the response is to the challenges as well as the support that Early Excellence gives each academy right across the Trust.

Clive concludes “We can see already from the external reviews and inspections that take place, and frankly from our own eyes, we can see the impact that this is having. We can see children increasingly building on much of the good practice that was there, but beginning to thrive in ways that we didn’t see before. We can see in the eyes of the teachers themselves the extent to which their morale is higher, their motivation is increasingly growing, and all of that creates a virtuous cycle which takes you back to the child. It takes you back to the child and the extent to which we can see from the reports we get written about our academies now. We can see when we walk around, we can see that increasing ‘happiness capital’ in all our academies.”

To enquire about driving change in your MAT, visit EarlyExcellence.com or e-mail nikki@earlyexcellence.com