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 Working at Outwood - Simon Baddeley

Hi, I am Simon Baddeley, an English Teacher at Outwood Academy Freeston.

I have worked at Freeston since 2015 under a previous Trust and we have been part of the Outwood Family since 2018 when we became Outwood Academy Freeston.

What do you find most rewarding about working for Outwood?

Definitely seeing our young people grow and flourish over time with us. Every single system, policy and structure we have in place puts Students First with the common goal of improving the life chances of our young people.

Some of our students join us in Year 7 from the most disadvantaged areas of the UK and don’t always join us with the complete toolkit of strategies that they need to learn and behave in social situations effectively.

Seeing those same young people arrive to open their results in the summer of their Year 11 and witnessing the well rounded, well mannered and well qualified young people they have become is one of the most rewarding parts of working in an Outwood school.

What CPD opportunities have you been involved with so far?

There are so many opportunities for CPD across Outwood, thanks to the brilliant work of the Outwood Institute of Education, Senior/Executive Leaders and that of the subject Director teams.

I was invited to become one of the founding members of the Outwood Research Group and attended the National ResearchEd Conference in London which was a brilliant experience and allowed me to learn from colleagues across both the Trust and the whole country.

We have weekly subject specific training sessions delivered by our Director teams and these are recorded as videos to allow us to access them as and when required. There is a rich catalogue of subject specific CPD available centrally for any English teacher to draw from at any time to develop their own subject and pedagogical skills.

What is one of the highlights of your time with Outwood?

One of the highlights of my time with Outwood has been around some research work I did connected to our 5 Pillars of Learning. I wanted to develop a practical toolkit of strategies that would help me, and other colleagues, embed the 5 Pillars more solidly into my daily practice so I mapped out how the strategies in Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like A Champion” fit into Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.

When I had finished I mapped them all against our 5 Pillars of Learning and created myself a handy poster that I could have up in my classroom to draw ideas from as I planned.

It has now been shared hundreds of times across the Trust, used at the most senior level in training and CPD sessions and is on display in offices hundreds of miles away from my classroom. That is one of the best things about working as part of the Outwood Family: we share openly and freely across the entire Trust because when one of us succeeds, we all succeed.