Leadership
Powering up routines and expectations!
Overview
Creating the conditions for pupils to thrive – the power of the environment in shaping learning, behaviour and belonging.
This short programme will fuse research with practice….
What happens before a pupil opens a book, answers a question, or attempts a challenging task is shaped by something less visible but enormously powerful – the environment in which they sit. A supportive classroom and pastoral culture is not a luxury; it is a prerequisite for learning. When pupils feel safe, known and respected, they take risks, persevere and engage. When they feel uncertain or unseen, they disengage – or act out.
“Interactions among students, especially in the classroom, must deliberately be orchestrated to build a sense of connection, belonging, and shared scholarly endeavour.”
― Doug Lemov, Reconnect (2022)
The Great Teaching Toolkit (Evidence Based Education) places Creating a Supportive Environment as one of its four core dimensions of great teaching – with a clear focus on positive relationships, high expectations, mutual trust and learner motivation. As Peps Mccrea argues in Motivated Teaching (2020), motivation is an upstream cause of behaviour: the environment we create either feeds or undermines a pupil’s willingness to attend, persist and learn. The EEF’s Improving Behaviour in Schools guidance reinforces this further, identifying the quality of teacher-pupil relationships and the consistency of a whole-school approach as among the most powerful levers available to any school leader.
This programme explores what all of this looks like in practice – for the classroom teacher and for those with pastoral leadership responsibility. Drawing on the best available evidence, we will examine how to build and sustain environments where every pupil feels they belong, and where the conditions for learning are deliberately and consistently in place.
Our Aims
To translate the research on supportive environments into confident, practical leadership and classroom practice:
- Explore GTT Dimension 2 – unpacking the evidence base around positive relationships, high expectations, mutual trust and learner motivation, and what these look like in the classroom.
- Engage with Mccrea’s five core drivers of motivation – Secure Success, Run Routines, Nudge Norms, Build Belonging and Boost Buy-in – and consider how each applies to pastoral and classroom contexts. We know the power of routines….
- Examine the EEF Improving Behaviour in Schools recommendations, including the Establish, Maintain, Restore framework, and what consistent, coherent approaches look like across a school.
- Workshops: collaborative discussion and case studies exploring real challenges faced by pastoral leaders and classroom teachers across primary and secondary phases.
- Demonstrations: model practical strategies for building relational trust, managing transitions and responding to behaviour consistently and calmly.
Course Leader
Roger Purdy
Lead Facilitator/Trainer for L4NE/BWCET
I have over 17 years of senior leadership experience and previous to that 7 years in the classroom as a history teacher. My senior leadership roles included Director of Sixth Form, Director of Teaching School and Deputy Head Teacher, responsible for all aspects of professional learning
Currently I am Lead Facilitator/Trainer for L4NE/BWCET – specialising in Teaching and Learning / NPQs. In terms of academic work, for the last three years I have lectured at Durham University on their MA programme – ‘Leading Change in Education Organisations’ with Dr Dong Nguyen.
I remain very interested and enthusiastic about educational research, and I like to think (and hope) I am a better teacher as a result.