John Holt REPORTER

The children started calling me ‘Sir Sir’ which, I suppose, is easy to remember, recalls Sir Mark Grundy of the week an envelope containing even better news than excellent exam results landed on his doormat.

“Receiving a knighthood is a very strange feeling and it came completely out of the blue. It’s very flattering but not a little embarrassing, too. They don’t tell you much about the honour but we run two schools and Shireland takes a leading role in terms of education technology nationally. We’re doing some unusual things here.”

The most significant advance at Shireland has been what Microsoft calls one of the most advanced learning gateways in the world, a webbased structure that enables students to log on to their own completely personalised learning environment.

“It doesn’t need any clever software on a workstation,” says Sir Mark. “Pupils can access it wherever they are; we’ve had some of them picking up assignments when they’re unwell and at home and others have used it when they are on extended holidays in India or Pakistan.

We can deliver online homework assignments for whole year groups. The work is marked and the results can be distributed to children, parents and staff. It saves hours and hours of valuable time.”

The gateway, which also plays host to some 70 other schools across the country, features a families portal that enables parents to access information about their children quickly and easily. This data ranges from what time the youngsters arrived at school, their target grades and what progress has been made towards achieving them along with merits and sanctions.

Families can also receive their own learning units from the Shireland gateway - mostly aimed at improving adult literacy and numeracy - along with additional services such as health advice and even job opportunities in the community.

“It’s pretty wide-ranging,” says Sir Mark. “Over the next two years, all schools in the country will have a platform like this. We just started ours a little earlier.”

Sir Mark has spent his entire teaching career in the Black Country and most of the schools he has worked in have served struggling communities.

“The reason I like technology so much is probably because it’s such a fabulous leveller. It enables us to give our students the support, resources and interventions that a lot of other children perhaps take for granted.

“Kids like technology but they just don’t see it as a separate entity; it’s just another tool to them. Adults, on the other hand, have an obsession with it. We say things like ‘e-learning’ which is actually bizarre when you think about it. Children have asked me why we use that term when it’s really just learning.

“We’re looking at ways of trying to use the knighthood to push things on further and more quickly and to open the kind of doors that might otherwise have been shut to us.” Sir Mark Grundy

“They’re right, of course. We didn’t call the old method pencil-and-paper learning, did we?” Another important strength of the system, says Sir Mark, is that the children can use it - and, subsequently, succeed or fail - completely in private.

“A lot of children are put off by succeeding if they have to do it in public. Using the gateway, they can work in their own environments and we can intervene as necessary which they are quite happy for us to do.

“For the sort of families we serve, this use of technology is an absolute godsend.”

Sir Mark always wanted to be a teacher and, after just a few years in the job, he knew he had a lot to offer as a head.

“Within three years of starting work at a secondary school in Walsall, the wonderful head there showed me how to carry out timetabling and told me why it was so important. But it wasn’t about the maths or drawing tables, it was all about the difference you could make to kids at school and their families.

“A few things have occasionally hijacked that throughout my career but I still think that - by and large - it’s still what it’s all about.”

Nationally, however, fewer and fewer people are stepping up to replace the large number of retiring headteachers. Many suitable candidates, it appears, are put off by the pressure, bureaucracy and a perceived work-life imbalance.

Sir Mark is, however, using his school partnership to encourage staff to think positively about leadership.

“A wonderful head called Mick Green works closely with me and runs George Salter School. He doesn’t have to worry about any of the toplevel strategic stuff that sometimes gets in the way and detracts from the job.

“As executive director, I look after all the organisational, financial and structural work for both campuses. Mick focuses on getting the best deal for the children and staff and making a difference in the community. The arrangement works well and, I think, is a model for the future of school leadership.

“A young headteacher or someone who feels they’re not quite ready for all the burdens of headship could enter into a similar arrangement and work with an executive director, gradually taking on more and more responsibilities. Surely this is better than putting someone off from the word go which seems to be happening a lot at the moment.

Sir Mark understand the concerns of teachers who turn down the chance to progress because they do not want to lose the contact with students that brought them into the profession in the first place.

“That’s why the new headship model is becoming increasingly appealing. Someone is there with you, providing the kind of financial and management skills you need to run an organisation the size of our secondary schools. We’re not particularly well trained to do that as heads. It can be mind-boggling.

“Luckily, I quite enjoy that side of the job but the accountability in terms of finance and personnel puts a lot of people off leadership; people who are otherwise incredibly good at unlocking the potential of children.”

Meanwhile, ‘Sir Sir’ continues to look for ways to improve the lives of everyone involved with both his schools and their communities.

“We’re looking at ways of trying to use the knighthood to push things on further and more quickly and to open the kind of doors that might otherwise have been shut to us. If we can use it to make an even greater difference to children at our - and other - schools, then it’s been worth every minute of my embarrassment.”