“Nobody feels like they are a professional any more” Staff at Teach Like a Champion academy lift the lid on concerns about trust’s centrally-imposed teaching and behaviour policies

The first of Lemov's "Teach Like a Champion" books, whose techniques are being implemented within the Astrea trust

Teacher sources at a large comprehensive run by a 26-school academy trust have lifted the lid on concerns about its centrally-imposed approach to teaching and pupil behaviour, criticising the policies from multiple angles and suggesting that there will be a staff exodus as a result.

Two teachers spoken to by Education Uncovered took aim at a raft of the teaching techniques as set out in the book Teach Like a Champion, which the Astrea trust is seeking to implement religiously in its schools, including the well-known “SLANT” approach which was branded “ridiculous” by one.

Tightly-implemented behaviour policies which have drawn the ire of parents were also criticised, with one source echoing some families in warning that the trust’s sanctions were failing to work on the pupils needing them most, while simply making conscientious students anxious.

Their concerns have been backed by the NASUWT union, which represents many teachers at St Ivo school in Cambridgeshire on which this article focuses. Allegations of looming teaching shortages at the school seem to have been underlined last term by the trust having to set up classes of up to 90 pupils because, my sources claimed, it was impossible to staff lessons in groups of 30 on occasion.

The Sheffield-based Astrea Academy Trust, which runs St Ivo, has been implementing the policies over the past year, in line with an approach seemingly being taken since September across its secondary schools. They are driven by its Director of Secondary Education, Richard Tutt, who arrived from United Learning before the start of the last academic year. Astrea has defended its behaviour policy as aimed at creating learning in a “calm, purposeful” atmosphere, while it argues that its prescriptive approach to teaching practice will create the best possible education.

The detail

This piece follows up on this website’s reporting last month which had highlighted many parents’ concerns about the strict behaviour policies at St Ivo, which has 1,750 pupils and is the only secondary school in St Ives, in Cambridgeshire.

The policies include children having to line up “military style” in the playground for uniform checks followed by what is a called a “morning address,” with teachers offering their charges scripted thoughts for the day. Critical parents, who have formed a group with several hundred members, say children have faced similar punishments for small misdemeanours such as forgetting a pen or a “minor uniform infringement” to those dished out for truancy or fighting.

The school has implemented what Astrea calls “masterclasses” – teaching sources were scathing about the term – of up to 90 pupils in a hall, which parents and those teaching sources have said have not been staffed with specialist teachers.

The teaching sources spoken to by Education Uncovered discussed the trust’s behaviour policies, and also those of pedagogy, which have been heavily influenced by Teach Like a Champion, the bestselling book by the American educator Doug Lemov, a founder of the charter schools chain Uncommon Schools.

In a separate piece published today, I go into the detail of what teaching materials issued by the trust, seemingly again spearheaded by Mr Tutt, have been telling its secondary teachers to do. This article deals with the reaction from my teaching sources.

Those reactions

Responses from the St Ivo teaching sources I spoke to in detail about goings-on at the school ranged from scathing reactions to the Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) “SLANT” technique to concerns about the top-down nature of the teaching strategies’ imposition, to a claim that Astrea’s behaviour rules were not working.

"SLANT" criticism

“SLANT,” as applied at St Ivo, stands for “Sit up. Listen. Ask and answer questions. Nothing in Your Hands*. Track the speaker,” with the last of these meaning the pupils have to follow the teacher with their eyes. It has also been adopted and advocated by the successful Michaela Community School, in Wembley, North London.

My first teacher source, Anne,** is not a fan. She said: “I’m sure you’ve heard of 3-2-1 SLANT. It’s ridiculous. I can tell children to be quiet, or I can do a countdown, but I can do it my way. I don’t need to follow this script.

“With this policy, it’s like they’ve never met a child before. Because [if you go to do it] they [the pupils] look at you and you’re like ‘yeah, I know this is stupid’. You’re having to implement something you don’t believe in. [Astrea] didn’t ask us about this, they just said this is what you’ve got to do.”

She added that pupils generally did not like SLANT. Year 11s, she said, were the group most “openly revolting” against it. She said: “They are like ‘nah, we’re not doing that’…we have a good relationship; they are quiet when I ask them to be quiet.”

Anne’s comments chime with a couple of observations from unnamed pupils, as reported in a list of concerns compiled by the parent campaign. One, in year eight, was quoted saying: “The term SLANT feels like a dog command and is extremely annoying.” Another, in year seven, said: “SLANT doesn’t work.”

Uncommon Schools was reported in 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, to have scrapped its SLANT policy – alongside its use of silent corridors and “detention for minor infractions” – as part of a “commitment to becoming an increasingly anti-racist organization that continues to advance social justice”.

A letter on this from Uncommon Schools had also reportedly said that removing SLANT had been an attempt at “removing undue focus on things like eye contact and seat posture, and putting greater focus on increasing intellectual student engagement to build confidence within our students”.

At St Ivo, Anne also said she was reluctant to use another technique advocated in TLAC and by Astrea: teachers putting their hands in the air when waiting for pupils’ attention.

She said she questioned what research evidence had informed TLAC, and also whether it could simply be imported into English comprehensives when its reference points seemed to be American schools. She said: “Teach Like a Champion is an American book. All the videos that we got shown [in training] were about American middle schoolers, aged maybe 10 to 13. Well we are not a 10- to 13 American middle school. We are in an 11- to 18-comprehensive in England. It’s not going to work, is it?”

The age profile might be particularly relevant for policies such as SLANT, Anne said, as children tended to get more independently-minded and thus push back particularly vigorously against its level of prescription, as they got older.  

Teaching booklets

Anne was also very unhappy about the trust’s use of detailed teaching booklets, which I document in my other piece on St Ivo’s teaching techniques here. These appear to set out in detail what should happen at different stages of lessons, with exercises provided for pupils to work through.

She said: “You are just reading the booklet to them, and then we do a task in the booklet, and then we move on to the next task. This was not how anybody was taught to teach. This is what we mean when we say that our professional autonomy is being denied, and that Astrea is deskilling us. Because anyone could stand in front of a class with a booklet. You don’t need to know anything.”

Anne was more focused on Astrea’s teaching policies than with the controversy over how it manages pupil behaviour, which has been the focus of the parental campaign, although she recognised that the two approaches were linked.

Parents have complained that many pupils are being made anxious by the behaviour, uniform and equipment rules, which can see children sanctioned for relatively minor infringements.

But Anne said in her view teachers, rather than pupils, were feeling most aggrieved. She said: “I don’t think the children are happy. But I wouldn’t say they are as down as the teachers are. I do think it’s affected the teachers a lot more. Because what’s going to happen to the pupils? They are not going to get expelled because they didn’t SLANT when they should have done, whereas we could lose our jobs for not doing it.”

A second St Ivo teacher, Isabel**, expressed a wide range of concerns.

Implementation

Central to them was the notion that imposing teaching and behaviour approaches on staff without consultation was denying them professional autonomy. She took issue with the very detailed levels of prescription that are apparent in the teaching guidebooks, booklets and advice from a senior member of staff which are set out in my other piece. These had not been discussed with staff, she said, before they arrived.

She said: “They [the central trust] have totally disenfranchised the school. Some of the things that they’ve suggested to us they’ve directed that we have to do, it’s as though they do not know anything about children. They do not know anything about teachers, about the way that learning happens. About the importance of relationships. They seem to think that if they write a 5,000-word document and they hand it to every member of staff and they say you must read this, please sign here to say you’ve read it, it will then happen. And of course that’s not the way kids work, it’s not the way adults work.”

On the detail of the materials, she said they state: “This is how lessons will begin, this is the script you will use at the beginning of a lesson, this is how lessons will end, and this is the script you will use for that. When you want the students to be quiet, you will say ‘SLANT’. And we will train students in what SLANT means. It’s taking any autonomy [for staff and pupils] away.”

She said the school felt very “corporate” now, with the central trust in control. She said: “If you’ve got a problem, [the school’s] response is ultimately a brick wall, where they say ‘well, this is what the trust wants’. The trust has introduced all this corporate jargon for different things that teachers have been doing for years.”

I asked what specifically she meant by the use of “jargon” to describe teaching approaches. She said she was talking about Teach Like a Champion. She said: “This is known as TLAC. Within that, there is SLANT, everyone basically sitting up and listening. Or Signal, Pause, Insist, which is where we maybe put our hands up, we pause, and then people who are not being quiet we then insist, that’s what they call that. We have these things called Show Me boards which are like mini white boards, and you have to go ‘three-two-one show me’. There is Turn and Talk which is have a chat with your neighbour about something. I think the idea is that everyone is silent and you go turn and talk and they literally do it almost like robots, that’s the idea of it.

“Or there is ‘warm/strict’ [the trust’s approach to behaviour management, with the term again taken from TLAC]. That’s a brilliant example of what Astrea/RT does. Everything they have brought in has been so regimented, and so you have to do this and you have to do this. It’s teaching by numbers. They say it codifies things. They are trying to codify education. But then we got a lot of complaints from parents, and a lot of complaints from staff, saying it’s all just feels so negative. Where is the praise, where are the relationships?

“So classic Astrea. they’ll come in and do a training and they’ll say ‘right, we’ve had some feedback from staff and parents about how they feel we’ve been very draconian. We’re really not meaning to be draconian, so can we all just make sure that we are being warm and strict’. And they think that will do it. They think that just by saying this, it will be sorted. They seem to have no understanding of the complexity of teaching.”

She added: “Actually some of these ideas are very good for new teachers who are looking to find a rule in the classroom that they can use. But actually the best teachers are ones that then make those things their own.”

This teacher also had concerns about the constant patrols senior staff were required to make of classrooms, checking that teachers were implementing Astrea’s policies in the classroom. Not only could these leave teachers on edge through a sense of constant surveillance, but this requirement, alongside the need for management to supervise the constant detentions generated by the behaviour policy, meant senior staff within the school had little time for leadership.

She said: “The senior leadership team are put on what’s called ‘on tour’. This means basically going around classrooms observing lessons and checking up, monitoring, that kind of thing.

“They also have to supervise detentions. There are currently three types of detention every night, and each one of these has to be supervised by at least one member of SLT as well as by [non-SLT] staff. So you have members of SLT, they are highly skilled individuals, they are being paid a lot of money, and yet a lot of their time is spent in what is known as the reset classroom. It’s like an internal exclusion unit where members of SLT are literally sitting there supervising students.

“Some SLT are in [the reset classroom] three hours a day. That’s all they are doing. And then after school, they’ve got an hour and a half on detention duties. When exactly are they supposed to be doing their leadership role?”

This perhaps dovetailed with concerns that this contributed to a sense that all leadership was being imposed on schools by the central trust, which in St Ivo’s case is based 100 miles away in Sheffield.

Behaviour policy critique

On the behaviour policies overall, Isabel was also not impressed. She discussed Astrea’s use of what has been called a “morning address”.

She said: “This began about a year ago. All the year groups have their own area around the site and the year groups line up in forms in register order in silence. The form tutors are with them in high visibility jackets pacing up and down, checking uniform. The students are lining up in silence. And the head of year does something called a morning address. They have these scripts that are on different themes, things like respect, like tolerance, pride in yourself, resilience, all those sorts of things. There is a three-minute script that the head of year must read verbatim to the year groups. The kids are standing there and then they peel off one by one in silence in their form groups to register and I guess if you wanted to bring somebody into school and say ‘look how disciplined our kids are’ it might be quite powerful. But in terms of eroding relationships, especially with our kids, this does it. St Ives kids speak up for themselves, and their parents speak up for themselves, and they want reasons why they are having to do things. If you explain things to them, often they will be on board. But they won’t just accept, they will say, why are we doing this, what is the point? And I don’t know what the point of this is.”

Isabel’s take on this matched those of pupils quoted anonymously by the parent group. One, in year 11, is quoted saying: “The militant style morning address creates a tense atmosphere, completely opposing the calm and relaxed start to the day as experienced beforehand when students were permitted to go straight to form rooms and socialise.”

A year eight, quoted above in relation to “SLANT”, said: “Morning address feels like you are in a disciplinary camp and [is] very tedious.”

“Pupils say teachers are more interested in telling you off for uniform than they are about actually looking after you,” says teacher

On the behaviour policies more generally, Isabel was of the view that, although there were some improvements, overall and on balance they were not effective, adding that the pupils “hate the school” because of the behaviour policy.

She said: “Generally speaking, the kids who behave very well find it very draconian, and if they get a detention, they are absolutely beside themselves. And they can get a detention for something very minor. I would say that for some students, who are maybe struggling a bit emotionally, that’s going to be a real problem.

“[But] the other thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that I think there are some students who are just playing the system now. They are just almost going ‘I don’t care’ and they are in detention every night. [Astrea] have upped the stakes so that if they have more than one detention in the week they get an extra detention on the Friday, which is an hour and a half. But they [the students affected] don’t care, they just go, or they just don’t bother turning up. And they are like ‘what are you going to do about it?’

“So the kids who need it, the interventions on behaviour, I feel have got worse. Over the school as a whole, there are times in the day when the school is much calmer, and I think things like the starts of lessons often are a lot calmer than they have been in the past. But overall, there is a real seething resentment. I think kids hate the school. They will say that teachers are more interested in telling you off for your uniform, or telling you off for not having a pen with you and giving you a detention than they are about actually looking after you. That’s what a lot of kids will say.”

Teacher exodus?

Both Anne and Isabel voiced concerns that the detail of Astrea’s policies, and the top-down way in which they had been implemented, were prompting teachers to leave. The phenomenon of “masterclasses” which parents said last term were running at up to 90 pupils in a hall, though teacher sources were quoting the figure of 60 children as being more usual, were a product of teacher shortages already kicking in, said Anne

“Staff shortages are driving this,” she said. “It’s if they haven’t got enough staff [on the day], usually in maths and English and occasionally science. Basically they put them in a hall and they call them ‘masterclasses’. I don’t know who they think they are fooling, but they call them that.”

Astrea had responded to a request for comment from me last month on the ‘masterclasses’ by suggesting they had been a temporary measure to respond to “one period of staff absence due to illness”, pointing to guidance allowing this which was introduced by the government to tackle teacher absence prompted by Covid.

But Anne stated that there had been lots of the classes: “I would say it was at one point once or twice a day,” although she thought it might have been fewer towards the end of last term. She added: “Even if they say it’s a temporary measure, it’s always going to be the same measure, because no-one wants to work at the school.”

I understand that the “masterclasses” have continued this term.

On teacher morale, she said: “Everyone I speak to is not happy working at the school. A lot of people are looking to leave, and have been actively going to interviews, though not everyone is in that position.”

She added: “It’s like a culture of fear, working in the school. When you walk in [as a teacher] it feels oppressive. That’s the atmosphere. It’s weird to describe. Senior people [in the school and trust] won’t accept how people are feeling. They are like ‘that’s not the way we want it to come across.’ But they shoved a booklet in people’s faces, and basically said to them ‘This is how you teach.’ So what do they expect.”

She then mentioned the detailed guidebook on teaching, sent out by the trust in January and covered in my other piece. She said: “We got this coloured document, basically ‘saying this is how you teach, and if you don’t teach like this, on the back of the booklet, is all the ways that they are going to ‘support’ us, in inverted commas, through ‘intensive coaching’. How do they think people are going to respond to that? They are fearful.”

Isabel also talked about the atmosphere around the school among staff, in a description which seemed to carry the overtones of a dystopian novel.

She said: “There are a lot of people [staff] leaving. The atmosphere around the school, we have got a very big site, so quite often teachers have got a bit of a distance to walk between lessons, so we cross each other’s paths, and whenever you cross paths with a teacher, there’s this sort of knowing look that we give one another. We say ‘hi, how you doing’ and there’s this sigh and a roll of the eyes and people are like ‘yeah, I’m just about coping’. There’s that real sense of unspoken solidarity between staff like we’re all in this together and isn’t it awful?”

Anne and Isabel seem not to be alone in their unhappiness with the school’s direction under Astrea, and particularly with the way it has gone this academic year following the arrival of Richard Tutt. Mr Tutt, in a previous role, was once described by the Daily Mail as “Britain’s strictest headmaster”. He is an enthusiast for Teach Like a Champion, setting out its benefits on his twitter feed as well as seemingly being the driving force behind the guidance documents sent to St Ivo teachers which quote TLAC without any critical evaluation. Mr Tutt was also widely thought to have been highly influential in behaviour policies at Coleridge Community College in Cambridge, when he was at United Learning which controls that school, these approaches then prompting their own parental campaign in opposition.

Last month, Adrian Miller, the local secretary of the NASUWT union which represents many St Ivo staff, was quoted in the Hunts Post saying: “The teachers feel very anxious and they’re very concerned their professional autonomy is being undermined.

“All their years of training, experience and judgement is being put into question as they are being made to teach in a certain style.

“In teaching, it is often the quirky and idiosyncratic teachers who make a difference and inspire students to study a particular subject. But that is being taken away from them and they feel frustrated and dictated to as [Astrea Academy Trust] say they can’t teach in their own way.

“They’re being made to start lessons with a particular microscript and to end lessons in the same way.

“I also find it interesting to hear Astrea want to cut creative subjects from the curriculum and have these masterclasses of 60 students in a hall with just one or two teachers.” He added that there were not enough teachers “because so many are off with stress”.  

Astrea had been quoted in response saying: “Our colleagues are our greatest asset and they deserve to be professionally fulfilled,” and they had wanted the trust improve pupil behaviour. “So we listen and respond to them by putting in place effective measures which will free up their time, talent, and energy so they can give our students a brilliant education,” the trust was quoted saying.

“Anti-educational”

Finally, Isabel had some thoughts about the educational merits, or not, of what Astrea was trying to do with its teaching approach.

She said: “The [materials] that they are sending out are anti-educational, actually. That’s quite a strong thing to say, but we have teaching and learning bulletins that are sent out [as detailed in my separate piece today]. They are citing research and whatever evidence they can find for what they are saying. But they are saying stuff like ‘the best way of teaching is the shortest possible route. So if you do too much exploration, and too much creativity on the learning journey, you distract students. And don’t do any kind of skills. Don’t worry about the skills, because kids will learn skills through the knowledge that you teach them.’

“Which is just rubbish. It works both ways. You can teach kids knowledge, and you can teach kids skills and the two work together. You get rid of the skills, and you end up with kids who just want to be spoonfed. And that’s what’s happening. They are telling us to spoonfeed kids and kids are now expecting to be spoonfed. And all of those general scholarly skills that kids need like independence, love of reading, the ability to problem-solve, they are losing those skills. There’s going to be this generation of kids who are like robots. They need everything on kind of like a cribsheet, and then they can follow the instructions but that’s about it.”

Many Education Uncovered readers are likely to agree that such an approach should at least be debated in detail, and subject to intense scrutiny. In providing that, in such depth, these teachers would appear to be doing their profession a profound service.

*The meaning of “N” in “SLANT” has been changed from what it stood for in Doug Lemov’s first “Teach Like a Champion” book of 2010. In the book, it stood for “Nod your head”. The meaning quoted in the text above, “Nothing in your hands,” is what it denotes at St Ivo, I understand.

**Anne and Isabel are pseudonyms.