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I got the job as headteacher of St Joseph’s in 2006, when I was 33 years old and full of aspiration. I spent the weeks leading up to my start date fantasising about the impact I was going to have and the lives I would change.

But it wasn’t long before I felt quite overwhelmed and totally out of my depth.

In those early days, building trust with families was crucial. These people faced every challenge imaginable, and trust did not come easily to many of them.

As a staff we made ourselves visible and accessible every day. Senior staff were on the school gates every morning, and this soon turned into our daily litmus test: after 10 minutes on those gates, we were well-informed about the physical and mental health of the children in our care that day. We were able to give classroom staff the heads-up as to who had had a tricky night, who had not had breakfast, whose pet had died, whose dad was back in jail…

Over time, the trust and respect started to grow. With that trust came more responsibility. The more we learned about our families’ lives, the more we felt we needed to do to support them.

School supporting a community

We learned that adult literacy levels were exceptionally low - many of our parents were totally illiterate. Imagine how much courage it takes for a mum to admit to their child’s headteacher that they cannot read or write.

I began to realise that I had inherited something far greater than a failing school; I had been given a community that needed our help. What was the point of me trying to improve our (horrendous) Sats results when my children were walking through our doors hungry, scared, tired and sad? These children were so far behind the starting line that we needed a different approach. We needed to make sure that our children were ready to learn.

The local authority was supportive. It asked me what I needed (twenty grand) and gave me more than I had hoped for (fifty grand). With that money I made my first meaningful change. I created a nurture group.

This was led by an existing class teacher and supported by one of our teaching assistants, and in it we placed eight children with significant behavioural challenges. The benefits were greater than anticipated.

The children’s individual needs were well met by the bespoke curriculum offered. But an added bonus was the impact across the other classrooms. Thanks to us creating our own little oasis of alternative provision within the school, these children’s behaviours were not negatively impacting the learning of others. Everyone was getting more of what they needed.

Eighteen years later and we still have a variation of this first nurture group. It adapts to meet the current needs of the school, but it has remained as a non-negotiable part of our core offer.

Effects of isolation

Over the years, I’ve learned that living in poverty has an array of consequences. One of those is isolation.

Isolation takes many forms; being an illiterate adult automatically casts you adrift from almost everything most of us take for granted. Employment for starters. But it is so much more than that.

I understood that very few of my children ever went on holiday. However, I didn’t realise the extent of my pupils’ isolation until one of my teachers did a geography lesson on the first day back at school after the summer holidays.

The teacher had pinned two large maps to her display board. One of these was a map of the world, the other a map of the British Isles. She gave all the children a coloured pin and their task was to think about the furthest place they had travelled to in the six weeks of holiday and put their pin on the map.

It did not go well. Not one child had left England and most had not left their town. But the statistic that really shocked me was that half the class had not once left the estate, in six weeks. And some had not even left their street.

The effects of this isolation are far-reaching. For example, I remember my Year 6s completing a Sats writing task, in which they were asked to write a description of “a busy place”. All but three wrote about the busiest place they had ever experienced: the school playground. The other three wrote about going to the supermarket.

How could my pupils write about other places with authenticity if they never left their estate? It dawned on me at that moment that this isolation was something else I would need to tackle, if I was ever going to get Sats scores to rise.

What does it take to turn around a struggling school?

I soon realised that there were no shortcuts. This was always going to be a marathon and not a sprint. But there were a few quick wins. In teaching, I’ve always subscribed to the idea that you can’t do the Bloom stuff until you take care of the Maslow stuff.

In other words, hungry, tired and scared children are simply not ready to learn. Breakfast clubs and a weekly food bank helped to keep empty bellies full. It also built trust and appreciation from our families. Getting the right rewards and sanction systems in place soon stabilised behaviour. Pupil voice was integral.

But recruitment and retention is the real key to building the right culture. Despite our school being in the top 1 per cent of the most deprived in the country, with pupils facing every imaginable barrier to learning, the average length of service for my current staff is over 13 years.

What makes them stay? What makes them turn up day after day? I’m not sure - you’d need to ask them.

What I suspect they would say is that we managed to create a family. There was little hierarchy and no room for egos. TAs were highly valued, and paid to attend all training and weekly staff meetings. Inset days, which were often held off-site at places such as the seaside or local forest, included all staff - cooks, teachers, office staff, midday supervisors, senior leadership.

So, my top tip for turning around a struggling school in an impoverished neighbourhood? Fill your school with like-minded people. You need people who wholeheartedly subscribe to the vision that a school needs to build community, tackle isolation and truly make the school every family’s trusted partner in raising their children. Then, and only then, can you productively start to focus on improving teaching and learning.

Lottie Bloom is a former primary headteacher and the author of Telling Tales Out Of School: secret diaries of a primary head, from which this article is an edited extract.

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