School leaders are facing greater challenges today than ever before. Schools need to attract, retain, and motivate the best teachers, compete for students in an increasingly competitive market, and provide extraordinary learning within today’s budget realities. Furthermore, all of this needs to be achieved whilst empowering students to shape their own learning journey, preparing them for success in the modern digital world and keeping their parents updated on their progress and challenges. Schools need to juggle all of these issues while, above all, ensuring that each student reaches their full potential.

“At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child's success is the positive involvement of parents.” - Jane D. Hull

The Open Doors programme is a cultural change we affected here at The Kindergarten Starters, with an aim to embrace the wider community and allow learning to flow in and out of our classrooms.

Although the government would argue differently, those of us on the education front-line know that there has been a sustained and systematic marginalisation of creative arts subjects in Secondary schools. The introduction of the EBacc in 2010 forced school leaders to focus their diminishing budgets on the subjects that the then minister for education deemed worthy. According to the 2015 Warwick Commission report this has, in part, contributed to a 50% drop in GCSE numbers for Design and Technology.

Throughout the world, movements are emerging to ensure excellent practices are being embedded into whole-school approaches to teaching and learning, so that holistic, whole-child development is promoted, enabling every young person to build confidence in their abilities and flourish.

Innovate My School, sector leader in providing schools across the UK with the latest education resources, are inviting school leaders to the Innovate My School LIVE roadshow. This newly-announced series of events will bring the organisation’s pioneering speed dates to innovative schools across the UK from July 2017. Each will focus on how schools today are doing more with less, as well as how they can continue to innovate in spite of squeezed budgets. During each Innovate My School LIVE event, leaders from each region will be introduced to 10 of the most exciting innovators in the education sector.

Homewood is a large Secondary academy in rural Kent. The new post of teacher researcher was first created here in 2013, as a part time role, in conjunction with my existing role as Science teacher and PhD student. It has the full support of my principal, Sally Lees, who has a vision of Homewood as a school that has evidence based practice as its foundation, and practitioner led research embedded in its staff development. This article explores the use of methodology and philosophical worldview in shaping the tasks and responsibilities of a teacher researcher.