PBL isn’t always the easy route. It’s an off-road journey - hard at times but the experience and skills make it worthwhile.
Bohunt Education Trust (BET) – a group of ten schools across the South of England – has grown steadily over the past decade We have a strong team that prioritises coaching and line management. We’ve also worked hard to attract smart leaders who are fiercely ambitious for our children. Early on, we knew we wanted to avoid unnecessary bureaucracy and focused our attention on learning and teaching through the appointment of Trust-wide Subject Directors who co-create curricula with individual department heads. But we’ve needed greater clarity as we’ve grown, leading to us codifying our whole approach.
Codifying our improvement approach began by asking how we work and what we stand for. Headteachers came together to define trust-wide principles. What are we? What do we want to be? Eventually, we settled on key concepts, including ‘aligned agency’ – essentially having shared goals but freedom in how each school in our Trust meets them. One principle we agreed upon was ‘every minute in school counts’. Punctuality matters. This is non-negotiable, but each school can embed it in their own way. If a school struggles, they’ll visit others, share what’s working, and solve it together. That’s collaboration – and it’s our superpower. Codifying our approach has given us a shared language and identity, defining who we are and what we do. The next challenge was applying the same thinking to our leadership.
We were already building structures and investing in people, but we wanted to define what it meant to be a BET leader. This involved visiting other organisations, bringing in external facilitators, and asking ourselves tough questions about our culture. This led to our Leadership Circle, a framework that combines feedback with development tools that link beliefs to behaviours. We now live by these principles every day. BET’s three pillars of transformation are cultural change, communication, and relationships. They show up in many ways. For instance, our Directors lead subject networks to help design curricula and raise standards. Mixed-role groups that tackle priority topics like AI – anyone can get involved, regardless of their title or seniority. We’ve also flipped our support on its head. Each school identifies three areas where they need help. This might be a behavioural audit, a safeguarding review or curriculum coaching. Not everything is possible, and we’re honest about that. This means putting the greatest resources where the greatest need exists – even if that means stepping back from work that could benefit more people at scale. For instance, if a Subject Director is needed to teach a class in a struggling department, that’s where they’ll go, because supporting the most disadvantaged matters more than working on a Trust-wide strategy.
All this work is most visible at Bohunt Farnborough. When the school joined our Trust in January 2024, it was Hampshire’s lowest-performing secondary. But we saw their potential and knew we could help. Our executive headteacher worked alongside their new head. I joined the school regularly to support systems-level change. For a year, our improvement and development lead spent a day a week at the school, mentoring them on teaching and learning. We drove home our principles and approach and worked hard to dispel misconceptions and reconnect teachers with their purpose. Whether at Farnborough or elsewhere, we always focus on four sequential priorities: safeguarding, leadership, behaviour, and finally curriculum and pedagogy.
One year on, Bohunt Farnborough is now in the top 4% nationally for progress improvement. Parental recommendation rose from 28% to 81%, and staff confidence in leadership from 22% to 94%.
Those outcomes came directly from flooding the school with support rather than issuing directives. We like to think of BET as one school across ten campuses. That’s the alignment we’re aiming for – unity without uniformity. School improvement is driven by our culture and approach to collaboration and relationships. Ultimately, it isn’t that complex: know your schools well, focus on what matters, and work together to improve. But codifying this has been essential to that journey. It’s all about consistency, doing the right work and doing it with the right people. That’s how real school improvement happens.
Written by
Gary Green, Director of Improvement at Bohunt Education Trust