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Along with being a primary school teacher and leader, blogging is where this all started for Aidan. If it wasn't for his passion for writing and sharing his learning and experiences, he wouldn't be working as an education consultant with schools across the country today. Shared best practice should be available to all and here on the Aidan Severs Consulting blog you can get ideas for making a difference in your own school. The blog is also a great place to learn exactly the kind of work that Aidan can partner with your school on.
How to Tell Your School’s Story: A Guide for School Leaders
School leaders need to be able to tell a clear, coherent story about their school: where it has come from, where it is now and where it is going next. Whether you're explaining your school to governors, colleagues, parents, an external adviser or an Ofsted inspector, people need to understand the context behind what they see. A set of data, a school self-evaluation form (SEF) and a few classroom visits can only tell part of the story. The challenge for school leaders is to co
Aidan Severs
Mar 199 min read
Improving Outcomes By Digging Down Deep into the Data
Improving Outcomes: A Clear Priority Matthew and Leona had one clear priority on their Self Evaluation Form: to improve their combined score at the end of KS2. They ran an excellent school, and had done for years. They prioritised children above all - raising that percentage of children achieving expected standard across writing, maths and reading certainly wasn't just about the accountability measures. They cared about ensuring those children got the best possible outcomes.
Aidan Severs
Mar 125 min read
When Staff Appraisals Go Bad
Imagine this: you’re a deputy head conducting a staff appraisal and in front of you, your colleague is in floods of tears because of the feedback you’ve just given them. Your heart goes out to them, but you knew the words had to be said...
Aidan Severs
Feb 23 min read
Why You Don't Need An Intent Statement (But Why It Is Actually Useful To Have One)
Why don't you need an intent subject for your subject's curriculum? Because no one says you have to, not even Ofsted... However, whilst ‘intent statements’ aren’t a necessity they can help curriculum makers and teachers. How so? Well, they provide a touchstone (a test, or benchmark) for any curriculum development and teaching.
Aidan Severs
Oct 6, 20254 min read
Starter for 5: Team Leadership
Leading a team for the first time can be exciting but nerve-wracking. Many of us are given such a role with little to no training simply because we were good at the core business of the organisation we work in. Usually, the role up until the point you become a leader has nothing to do with team leadership and requires a completely different set of skills. If you're a new team leader, the this is the blog post for you! One of the best things you can do as a team leader is reme
Aidan Severs
Dec 17, 20242 min read
How Do I Make The Most Of My Team Members' Expertise?
How Watership Down and a unique experience transformed my leadership Looking for leadership advice from a rabbit In the Richard Adam's children's classic 'Watership Down', the group of escaping rabbits are led by Hazel who proves himself to be an excellent leader; one rabbit comments to some others that ‘ he must be good or you'd all be dead’ . For rabbits whose main aim is to survive, Hazel is the perfect leader. But, as I read, I noticed something incredible. Look at t
Aidan Severs
Sep 10, 20244 min read
How Can I Support My Team in Maintaining a Healthy Work-Life Balance?
Actually I prefer the phrase life-work balance, and in reality I'm not sure there wisdom in framing it as a balance at all, but that's another blog post for another day. However, one of the key things we come up against as leaders of teams of people is that people are so different! Helping them all to do the same thing - in this instance manage their work-life balance - will never be achieved by having a common approach. So if people are so different, how can we help them to
Aidan Severs
Jul 30, 202411 min read
How Do I Get My Staff To Stick To Deadlines?
I love a deadline, and chances are if you're reading this you do too. It's how we get things done! When I say I like a deadline I mean that that's what motivates me. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'll work sensibly before said deadline but it does mean it'll be done when the deadline arrives (last-minuter here!). I need a deadline. But people like you and me can get very frustrated when people who we work with don't stick to deadlines. In fact, we find it very hard to fath
Aidan Severs
Jul 9, 20244 min read
What Can Go Wrong When Writing Your Own Curriculum?
I've seen first-hand what can go wrong in developing curricula, and the additional time and resources that are wasted as a result. Here are a few things to avoid: Forgetting to start with vision and values You have to start with something which is going to underpin all of your curriculum decision-making. Many schools these days have outlined their vision and values, but are not so far along the journey of actually embedding these into everything they do, which should include
Aidan Severs
Jul 2, 20243 min read
What is substantive knowledge?
Discover exactly what substantive knowledge is. Check out some examples of disciplinary knowledge.
Aidan Severs
May 23, 20242 min read
What is procedural knowledge?
Discover exactly what procedural knowledge is. Check out some examples of disciplinary knowledge.
Aidan Severs
May 23, 20242 min read
What is disciplinary knowledge?
Discover exactly what disciplinary knowledge is. Check out some examples of disciplinary knowledge.
Aidan Severs
May 23, 20242 min read
How To Write Good Curriculum Statements (And Why I'm Not Calling Them Objectives)
Learn how to craft effective curriculum statements and why they are more than just objectives.
Aidan Severs
May 13, 20244 min read
Curriculum Drivers and Disciplinary Knowledge - What's The Link?
Uncover the vital link between curriculum drivers and disciplinary knowledge.
Aidan Severs
May 7, 20244 min read
Wellbeing in Schools: A Framework
When one thinks of an empowered teacher, one does not call to mind the image often linked with that of a teacher; frazzled, harassed, clutching their umpteenth cup of coffee and making a mad dash to their next class, eventually settling down later at home to spend their evening beavering away at marking books, planning the next day's lessons, and all whilst drowning in a sea of that notorious 'paperwork'. And sadly, there are many teachers out there who fit that description,
Aidan Severs
Mar 5, 20248 min read
A SEND-First Approach... To Everything
Imagine a world where children with SEND really were the priority. What would that look like and what would the impact be on all children? That which we've explored in a couple of previous blog posts, Margaret Mullholland puts succinctly in a TES article: "...there’s now a feeling that schools should be structured for these pupils in the first place, rather than trying to adapt to their needs retrospectively." I read the above article whilst working on a SEND project for Oak
Aidan Severs
Feb 6, 20243 min read
Developing Teacher Subject Knowledge
It's no surprise if I say that in order to teach something well you need to know it well yourself. And in case my saying that isn't convincing enough, here we have it from the excellent and influential What Makes Great Teaching? report from the Sutton Trust: "The most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, and when teachers’ knowledge falls below a certain level it is a significant impediment to students’ learning." - What Makes Great Teaching? -
Aidan Severs
Dec 12, 20232 min read
How To Observe A Lesson
As I was putting together my 'Starter for 5: Monitoring and Evaluation' blog post I realised that, although I talk about lesson observation with leaders who I work with, I hadn't actually blogged about it. I thought I'd better change that (Edit: this post is now part of that post!). Professor Rob Coe's excellent blog post 'Classroom observation: it’s harder than you think' outlines several ways in which observing teachers teaching is quite difficult to do. In short, he outlin
Aidan Severs
Dec 4, 20236 min read
Starter for 5: Monitoring and Evaluation
1. Monitoring Your Subject 101 "Many new middle leaders are effectively thrown in at the deep end and are expected, at least until they are given training, to monitor and evaluate their subject. Often the only experience of monitoring and evaluating that these leaders have is what has been done to them... To try to provide some nutshell clarity I often share the following pointers for effective M&E." https://www.aidansevers.com/post/monitoring-your-subject-101 2. How To Obser
Aidan Severs
Nov 29, 20232 min read
Formal Assessments: Are You Trying To Make Them Do Too Much?
If you really interrogate what you are trying to get out of your formal assessments, I wonder what you'd find. The true purpose of a...
Aidan Severs
Oct 16, 20232 min read
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