The PROGRESS Programme gave a very specific focus to the voice of pupils and support staff. The fact that the survey results were taken away, distilled and then brought back enabled people to talk about their views and how they had been treated. It was powerful.

Doing the PROGRESS Programme enabled us to get to know the staff much better, so that we could support them. That has raised the quality of teaching, because people no longer think they are doing it ‘for management’. Also, the children’s behaviour has changed, as a result of getting the opportunity to think about themselves, where they would like the school to be, what they would like the school to do for them and how we could all move forward.

The value in the PROGRESS Programme lies in the way it moves everybody to think about the learning environment: how they can make it change and offer a much more worthwhile experience for everybody in the school community. It was a really friendly way of getting a fresh pair of eyes into the school to see our school and how it worked, then to show us how we could make it even better. It gave us the opportunity to dig deeper, to look into issues that were going well and issues that weren’t going so well. That empowered us to go a little bit further.

The PROGRESS Programme was brilliant, because it was an external person coming in, with no preconceived ideas about our work, and presenting us with a fresh approach to surveying our parents, pupils and staff. It happened without our having to be involved as a senior team at a frontline level. It was worth it and we are going in for a second year.