Preventing a Silo Mentality at Wales International School

This article was featured in the BSME Newsletter 2024-25 | Edition 3

As part of our overall drive for more community-led events this year, we reviewed our systems for parental engagement and realised our timetable posed the biggest barrier as it led to a lot of best practice sitting in silos. This was due to multiple lesson times in different parts of the school, so during the day it was impossible to get teachers observing other phases, covering other phases, or combining phases for guest speakers and events. If your school has similar issues, then this will be of interest!

Unified Timetable

We reviewed the timing of lessons with staff, and created a timetable for this year which included the same lesson times for the whole school. This enabled us to use bells to manage lesson change over, and to easily run events for parts of the school as lesson times no longer overlapped so we could ensure the school could easily access the same shared spaces. Staff could also cover across the school now, which made hosting community events a lot easier, and we maximised the use of breaktime facilities by ensuring no overlap.

Our Lesson Structure is now:

The combination of 45, 30, and 60 minute periods (as periods 3+4 & 7+8 combine in Secondary) has enabled the school to function as one school.

This has enabled a variety of new initiatives such as:

Business Fair (run by Secondary Girls)

We held a three day event organised entirely by a group of Business students in Secondary, where they partnered with local businesses to sell products to our students and members of the local community. This was very successful as every class was easily assigned a period to attend.

ADNOC STEM Events (events run by Parents)

We had parents who are engineers from ADNOC come in to school to run a series of experiential learning opportunities for the children. This led to multiple sessions where the parents designed STEM activities for the children, and the timetable meant every child could benefit.

Peer Observations and Coaching

To facilitate peer observations across phases, we asked Secondary teachers to observe their primary colleagues throughout the day and provide feedback. This was then replicated by Primary, providing advice on implementing High-performance Learning into Secondary lessons. The whole-school collaboration was very useful, and we now intend to do this termly as part of the PRD process to create a culture of peer coaching.