Streetly Academy in Walsall are an outstanding school with a very successful approach to improving behaviour and developing pupils’ personal and social skills.  In 2011 they introduced PRIDE, based on the Olympic values; each year since, more pupils and more values are recognised by staff.  Headteacher Billy Downie, explains the thinking behind PRIDE and its impact on pupil outcomes.

“Our approach to minimising poor behaviour is to have real clarity of expectation of the students and what sort of person we want them to be.   We want them to exhibit certain values: personal excellence, respect, friendship, inspiration, determination, courage and equality.  Those are our PRIDE values and they are  delivered via Sleuth.

“Sleuth monitors our expectations so, as school leaders, we are able to have a positive impact on behaviour which leads to better outcomes for students.  Students know what we want, in terms of what we don’t want them to do, but also what we do want them to do and they know that we’re keeping track of it.

“When Ofsted inspectors spoke with our students the students said, “We know all about PRIDE and the PRIDE awards and how amazing it is.  We all know about the positive Sleuths.  We know how you get them and what sort of behaviour is necessary.”

Throughout the school day staff recognise and record the PRIDE values for pupils, in tutor time, lessons and extra-curricular activities.  Every PRIDE value has an associated points score and hence pupils accumulate points over a period of time.  Tutors can review real-time progress in Sleuth for their tutees and use tutor time to celebrate success and coach pupils in the PRIDE values.  Point scores lead to opportunities throughout the year to go on trips and determine who gets invitations to the end of year PRIDE Awards, a black-tie event hosted at Villa Park where awards are presented for each PRIDE category to individual pupils, tutor groups and teams in each year group.

Meetings and conversations between staff colleagues, with students and with their parents are all informed by the information from Sleuth.  Tutors in particularly play a key role at Streetly,

“We empower form tutors to be a more effective in their role by giving them the information they need to know what’s going on so conversations with tutees are evidence based.  They can be very specific, “I’ve noticed you’ve missed another homework in maths. What are you doing about that?”.  As a form tutor they need know what’s going on and to be able to influence.

“That applies to all roles in school.  We want everyone within the school to be accountable for their role.  If you’re a head of year, you’re accountable for driving forward the achievement, accountable for managing, monitoring and improving behaviour.  Sleuth is the tool for that, it’s made them much more effective.  That’s the biggest change for us since we’ve been using Sleuth; we’ve empowered middle leaders by providing the tools to analyse the impact of their work, it empowers them to actually make a difference.”