WH Just Teaching Pledge 

After many years working at William Harding, we recognise that demands on our entire school community have got tougher and tougher. We wished to review our approach in order to maximise our staff’s time and your time as parents to ensure our pupils get the very best.  

Therefore, we want to make our priority… 

…Just teaching 

We pledge that; 

  • For our Pupils, we will work as hard as we can to maximise the amount of time our staff spend working with and for your children, ensuring our pupils get extra at William Harding. 

  • For our Families, your family time is precious, so let’s not waste it. We will streamline and simplify what we ask from you as families to maximise your time with your families. 

  • For our Staff, all our decisions will be made based on what we believe is best for our pupils, but whilst balancing staff workload and wellbeing. We will protect our staff; we are joining the ‘no excuse for abuse’ campaign. Happy staff = happy pupils. 

At William Harding teaching is delivering a broad, balanced and enriched curriculum supporting pupils academic and personal development and wellbeing. We support all pupils to ‘Aim high, Work hard and Be kind’. 

Our journey so far… 

After 6 years of working at William Harding, we have; 

  • Improved the outcomes of our pupils 

  • Achieved a Strong Ofsted report 

  • Achieved a range of awards and accolades 

  • Worked alongside the Local Authority to support other schools 

  • Had staff members achieve a range of qualifications 

  • Above all, ensured we have a happy, safe and inclusive school community 

We are very proud of these achievements, yet the education sector continues to get harder. 

The teaching profession is now the hardest it has ever been as; 

  • staff workload increased 

  • pupils’ needs increase  

  • school finances decrease 

  • external support networks decrease 

  • the hours teachers are contracted to work do not cover everything  

  • societal change 

  • Cost of living crisis 

  • Other pressures on parents  

During our time leading William Harding we have; 

  • Tried a large number of different approaches to promote parental engagement including additional roles focussed on parental engagement and marketing 

  • Worked hard to improve our reputation as a school 

  • Faced a huge number of challenges together 

  • Gathered a lot of feedback from families through conversations, meetings and questionnaires to name a few 

  • Worked alongside an external company called PiXL as part of the PiXL Change project, where we have increased our work on improving staff workload and wellbeing  

  • Worked with our staff on peer-to-peer coaching, peer reflection and team building to name a few, to support their development  

On review of the above and as the world gets harder, we want to make it as easy as possible for everyone, whilst we serve our pupils as best as we possibly can. Therefore, we want to take a simpler approach, that maximises staff and families’ time, to ensure the best for our pupils. 

More details on our ‘Just Teaching Pledge’ 

To maximise the time our teachers and families have with our pupils we will; 

  • Continue with our ‘Who to Contact’ sheet of who can best answer your query. There are some queries that can be answered quickly by our office team or via email and if this is the case, this is the approach we will take. This ensures that our staff have the time to speak to you. 

  • Streamline our Complaints policy so that it is simple and easier to use. It also ensures there are less stages to ensure staff time is protected to focus on teaching, but your issues can be resolved as needed. 

  • Remove the additional expectation of social media pressure. We are going to direct all our energies on teaching your children. We don't expect you to join or follow or comment on social media as you're too busy being parents and spending time with your children. We will no longer have school social media accounts.  

  • Prioritise the website with the Friday Comms and the Harding Herald.   

  • Replace the lengthy Year group newsletters and replaced with simple mind maps showing what your child is learning that half term. 

  • Follow on from our removal of homework, we are removing reading books and diaries – these can get lost or left in the car or in the bus. No pen to find or comment to be written. Just read on online portals and any library books that are brought home!  

  • Continue to recognise that families do not have time to commit to a PTA and this is not the right approach for our school. We will complete simple fundraising events in house to raise money for the school and to offer our pupils additional experiences, but not at the cost of teacher time. 

  • Respond to parent feedback and the cost of living crisis, have a new approach to the number of trips we run to ensure pupils get those that most support our curriculum but don’t ask too much money from our families.  

  • Introduce drop in sessions where you can pop in and talk to leaders throughout the year more details to follow. 

  • Continue to offer our range of previously successful parent events ensuring you have a opportunities to come into school; come and read, open classrooms, craft events, class assemblies, parents evenings and sports days. 

  • Reinforce our school's policy on ‘no excuse for abuse’ campaign regarding acts of violence or aggression. We have a no excuse for abuse stance on any form of violence or aggression, whether physical, verbal, or through social media, directed at our staff by parents, carers, or pupils. It is essential that staff are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. By working together, we can ensure that William Harding School is a safe and positive place for everyone and that it is a place that staff want to work and pupils want to attend. 

  • Review the hours teachers are meant to work and readjusted the hours in the school day so that teachers have more time teaching pupils. 

  • Limit the paperwork that staff need to do as far as possible, which is supported by our reduction of trips and unnecessary communications, as detailed above. 

  • Have an ongoing commitment to staff workload and wellbeing, ensuring we have termly committees to discuss and review any ways in which we can minimise any high workload, low impact work. 

  • Recruit additional staff to work with pupils, to ensure we can focus on delivering interventions and boosters to those pupils who need it most, whilst keeping the job manageable for staff. 

  • Build our enrichment and personal development curriculum into our school day as far as possible, to reduce teacher workload. 

  • Promote the wellbeing of staff, we will also continue with our approach of ‘growing our own talent’ to develop staff in school, ensuring we have high expectations but high support for upcoming staff, to help combat the recruitment and retention crisis. 

  • Continue to set up a school structure to ensure our teachers don’t have to work well above their directed hours, through the range of staff and teams in school to support, e.g. SEN and FLO teams.