1. Choose your teachers wisely:
It is not always your students who lack aspiration or drive to achieve, sadly sometimes those who are there to teach them lack belief in those they are teaching.
Ensure your recruitment processes have smart methods of discerning the “type” of teachers you bring in to ensure they complement and fit your school, its context, locality and mission.

2. Create diverse student development mechanisms:
You know what I think about mentoring, however I see mentoring as one support mechanism. You will need a team around the child approach and mentoring is great but is not a fix it all.
Consider a variety of support structures that are pertinent to your cohort of students to ensure areas academia and mentoring does not reach maybe counseling or boxing therapy will.

3. Build robust community links:
Whether you like the parents or not because they are not cooperating with your school’s mission you still need them! Especially if you want to be innovative as you may need parental consent.
Where possible make sure you can send positive correspondence home knowing you will have to communicate with them outside of the negative correspondence some may always receive.
Simple way to look at it is… make sure all news (for their child) is not bad news.

4. Quality mediation:
Stuff happens! And when it happens in school between a teacher and child, it is important to create dynamic avenues to restore peace and justice.
From my experience the student is not always wrong. For this reason, ensure you have staff and approaches that can bridge the gap quickly! So rifts can be resolved and not left to linger.

5. Focus on relationship:
For some this may be obvious and for some leaders it is obvious, as many of them have had to learn this skill along the journey… develop meaningful and effective working relationships.
Staff and schools that understand this enable students to thrive, as young people are relational. Let’s be honest Ofsted, SEF’s (obsolete now), SIP and category are not words that inspire performance from children. However, for school staff that stuff is a part of their motive.

So consider children are people first and students second, so if you get this right you can radically increase how engaged, aspirant and productive your students and teachers are.
As I have “now” learnt (and still learning) happy wife = happy life, so happy students can = happy school. It makes sense doesn’t it?

Happy mentoring