In-depth: How and why we invest in our staff to support under resourced students succeed: IntoUniversity’s Developing Excellence in Delivery Approach

One thing I love about working at IntoUniversity is visiting our classrooms across England and Scotland and seeing our staff in action. To observe the moments when staff effectively support young people to make learning breakthroughs, confidently de-escalate challenging behaviour, help students re-engage with their work, or lead high quality facilitation allowing young people to have positive educational experiences. These all reinforce the importance of our staff and of how they work with our students to most of their time in our centres and, ultimately, support their future outcomes. 

I also love working with staff to develop their facilitation skills – this might be equipping staff in our training/CPD sessions, observing them in delivery paired with coaching or arranging for them to observe other expert delivers. This tri-fold support is key – we provide consistent space, time and opportunity for our staff to develop, as educational researcher Dylan William asserts, not because “they aren’t good enough, but because they can be even better.”

We believe this is important because we know that the quality of facilitation correlates with student progress and positive student outcomes. In the post Covid world where the impact of lost learning continues, alongside ever-growing pressures on schools and families, this is paramount. For young people from under resourced backgrounds, navigating the education system can be even more complicated and for those, like us, who support such young people, the stakes of not getting this right can be stark. The recently released Department for Education figures showing that Higher Education progression rates for students eligible for Free School Meals have fallen for the first time since the measure was introduced is a timely reminder of this. 

Across the education sector, it’s easy to be drawn to neatly packaged solutions or initiatives which will ‘close the attainment gap’, ‘solve absenteeism’ or definitively ‘reduce educational equality’. We understand there aren’t easy solutions but failure to address the challenges which students from under resourced backgrounds face has ramifications, most pertinently for those young people and for the many individuals who attend our programmes. For us, the investment in our staff and their development is key for supporting these individuals. This is why we have pioneered our Developing Excellence in Delivery approach – combining commitment to high quality provision and the ambition that staff can and should continually improve their facilitation skills (regardless of their skillset).

There are three key elements to making this approach successful:

1) Our recognition that quality facilitation supports student progress especially for students from under-resourced backgrounds

Our CEO, Rachel Carr, notes that IntoUniversity’s model has always been to create “a classroom environment conducive to learning, with positive behaviour management and effective evidence-based teaching strategies.” 

This is at the heart of our ‘Theory of Change’. We want the students who participate in our programmes to achieve their educational goals. We want our classrooms to be spaces where students access evidence informed instruction which is applied successfully to our setting. We also want our students to find love in learning. This means we aim to provide the conditions where our staff can achieve this with our students. 

We also know that evidence shows that in the classrooms of the most effective teachers – those who are aware and responsive to the individual needs of students, those who are proactive with behaviour management, those who create positive classroom environments and those who build strong relationships with students – under resourced students learn at the same rate as others (Hamre & Pianta, 2005). Given that these are the students we work with, we want to make sure that our students have access to effective facilitators. 

2) We understand that facilitation is complex and needs to be practiced

In line with a large body of educational research, we know that the teaching of others is not simple. It is, in the words of educational writer Daniel Willingham, a “complex cognitive skill” which “must be practiced to be improved.” Our response to this is to provide frequent opportunities for our delivery staff to learn and practice how to become better. 

This begins with our introductory training combining observation, knowledge-based learning, classroom scenarios and practice of classroom techniques to equip staff in our centres. Over the summer, I spoke to a staff member from our Hull centre who remembered a story I told during their first day of training about working with a young person who was dysregulated and displaying challenging behaviour. She said when faced with a similar situation, she remembered the story and the techniques I had spoken about. She said she could be calm and confident remembering that she did “know what to do.”

When newly in our centres, staff go on to complete observations of practitioners and are observed by experienced staff who provide feedback and coaching and support them to have clear development goals. Subsequently, staff follow a programme structured around our Developing Excellence in Delivery framework. This framework reflects the Department for Education England’s teacher standards while also recognising the additional value our staff and setting can bring to our students. 

Following this framework gives us a shared structure and language around what excellence looks like across our centres however we also have flexibility to be responsive to areas of need where staff may require upskilling. This programme allows for deep dives into topics tailored to staff in different roles and with different delivery experience and skills. It is created by a cross section of staff across our network who have allocated monthly time to develop this evidence informed approach while also utilising their perspectives and experience gained in their roles. 

Beyond the bespoke training programme, we have built a collaborative peer support system. Firstly, through learning within our centre teams who deliver programmes together. Also in our “butterflying” approach (learned and adapted from Nicky Pear and Cubitt Town Junior School) which recognises the experience and expertise across our staff team. Our staff “flutter” to see colleagues in centres (or cities) outside of their own to see them demonstrate specific skills or techniques in action. 

Finally, we have reflections and coaching where senior staff observe teams or individual staff and work with them to identify areas to improve and set specific targets to do this. For example, on a recent trip to Southampton I was able to see a staff member in action, note where they excelled and consider with them what they could do next to have greater impact with the students they worked with – agreeing it could be around building wider student participation in the room and giving them ideas of how they might approach this. Or recently working with the entire Leicester North team, I enjoyed hearing the areas they had already come up with as a team to develop, see them in action, and then identify with them how they could refine their approach. I even saw one team member successfully putting the new target into action in the next session of delivery that day! 

We want to know what works in other educational settings, and we are confident about what works in ours. We have brought in and trialled ideas that work elsewhere through consulting teachers and visiting school classrooms, engagement with organisations such as Voice 21 or the Educational Endowment Foundation and through wider research and from conferences. We also have twenty years of experience operating centres and seeing what supports students to thrive – and we work to ensure that our new cohorts of graduate scheme employees can benefit from this organisational knowledge. Putting in the time for them to learn, financially backing this through supporting their travel to other sites, and clear messaging that this should be prioritised together have helped establish this structure – now it is common, as I did in Manchester recently, to hear our staff say “I’m off butterflying tomorrow” – it’s built in. 

3) We believe a focus on excellence produces positive staff and student experiences

In my previous role managing an IntoUniversity centre at our Bristol East centre, developing my facilitation skills and having the time to learn about evidence backed approaches made me more passionate about my job and equipped me to better support students I worked with. I also know that I had more to learn each year that I did the role (and still now as I support staff). My story is echoed through our staff feedback, for example about our butterflying programme, such as a staff member in their first year in role from our Weston-Super-Mare centre who valued observing ideas to bring back to their centre and having the space to “reflect on [my] own practice” alongside a experienced colleague who said it allowed them to “take a step back and reassess what we know about delivery which helps us to keep fresh with ideas and avoid feelings of stagnation.” 

For our students, I see the impact of this staff learning and development on their successes. The Bristol East student who benefitted from our implementation of immersive learning and Oracy skills who enjoyed how “learning could be fun” and two years after studying in Year 5 it could still remember their created hand signals for ‘Anthropology’ to explain what it was the study of. The Bristol South student I met recently who benefitted from our staff training on emotional regulation and trauma informed approaches who told me he had often felt angry before but now he could use our ‘animal regulation cards’ to be like a flamingo and calm down. Or the student who spent time during my early encounters with him in Bristol hidden beneath a table who now uses his breathing techniques when he is overwhelmed and positively engages with learning. As well as the many older students around our network, where staff knowledge around self-regulated learning and metacognition has been the key to help them improve their learning processes and revision practices. 

These are just a small window into the many impacts possible because of the tri-fold process of training, support, and the opportunities provided for our staff to keep developing their facilitation skills. While these elements exist in other educational spaces, prioritising that our staff learn and practice their skills regularly is crucial. I see how powerful this approach can be through the many moments and encounters mentioned in this article as well as the many more I couldn’t fit in. I think more widespread adoption would better support both students in schools, especially those from under resourced backgrounds, and those young people engaged in widening access programmes, to achieve their educational ambitions.