Oasis Academy Enfield: Meet the Principal on an upward trajectory

Q: What is the ethos of the school?

A: The school has existed for 17 years, it’s one of the founder Oasis Trust schools, so it has a real legacy surrounding it. Its ethos and values are all built around being a true community school. Once you’re through our front doors it becomes immediately apparent just how wonderful Oasis Academy Enfield is in this regard, which sadly became lost in the ether of what people understood about Oasis Academy Enfield. We’re currently going back to the roots of what this school was always meant to be and making that vision thrive. We’ve always been committed to being an outstanding community school, and we are focused now on that being the reality for every student. 

The Oasis Trust character programme focuses on building nine habits that support both staff and students to become the best versions of themselves, they are being: compassionate, patient, humble, joyful, honest, hopeful, considerate, forgiving and self-controlled. All of our pastoral programs are about honing these character traits, we model with our students that you are always learning and can always improve yourself. The school’s mantra is: “To be the best you can be”, which compounds the Trust’s culture of self-improvement. Every moment is a learning moment at Oasis Academy Enfield, we never have raised voices or a ‘because I said so’ approach, we always offer explanations as to why. We have such high expectations and standards of our students.

We have the ‘Oasis Way’, our inclusion manual, to create an inclusive environment; all staff have been trained by the OCL Trust to work with students on a relational basis, everything is about restoration, reflection and creating a solid foundation for communication. A culture where mistakes being made is part of the learning, failure will take place, whether that’s academic or choice based, however, all of our work is around the take-aways from that: how do we learn from it, improve and, “be the best we can be”.

Q: What sets the school apart/makes it special?

A: What I believe makes this school truly stand out, and makes me absolutely love working here, is that we’re a truly inclusive community school. All of our staff are here to support each other to be the best that we can be, which is a message I get not just from the staff but also from the students. Once you join our community our fervent aim is to support you to be whatever you dream of becoming.

Our students being at the centre of everything we do is a key message that in other schools often gets lost in busy working days, but here at Oasis Academy Enfield our main priority is to have a relational, student-centric focus, that is something we never lose sight of. We work collaboratively with our students, if something will make a difference for them, we do it.

Q: Does the school offer a varied curriculum?  

A: Our curriculum is broad and balanced, ensuring that students expand their breadth and depth of knowledge; you can do every subject up to the end of year 9. We’ve been especially responsive to the challenge of teaching modern foreign languages, a lot of our students are fluent in Turkish, for example, but may struggle to read or write in the language, so Turkish is a GCSE we offer, one of our most successful too. Everything we do responds to the context of the students in front of us.

We have a celebration calendar, supporting our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, which celebrates all religious festivals as we have such a mixed community. We also celebrate various cultural events such as Black History Month, Pride and International Women’s Day so in every half term two or three inclusive events are celebrated, to help our students understand the world views that come with being a British Citizen. We also have a house system to celebrate competition between each other.

As a large proportion of our students have families that live outside of the UK, many spend most of their holidays in those countries and therefore have less of an opportunity to explore the world, so part of our job as educators is to explore it with them in school, so they understand how important education is, changing and challenging different world views.

Q: What extracurriculars are on offer?

A: We know that parents can struggle to enrol children in enrichment activities outside of school, so we are dedicated to our student’s personal development. We have a leadership programme embedded via our house system and compulsory enrichment for Years 7 and 8, extending the school day so they take part in six enrichments over the course of each year, these are either cultural, critical thinking or active.

They might do debating, chess and netball, for example. This means that by the end of those two years they will have experienced twelve different enrichment activities, with the aim that when they get to Year 9 some of those will have become real hobbies. We run lunchtime clubs that correspond with these, so if you do your six weeks of chess and fall in love with it, you can then join the lunchtime chess club.

We want to really entice our pupils to do more, via our holistic personal development we know that when they apply to university, they will be asked what they’ve done outside of academics.

Q: How do you address wellbeing and support?

A:  Our work around safeguarding is at the centre of what we do, we have a fantastic wellbeing package of counsellors, youth workers, family liaisons, pastoral heads of year, mentors and specific wellbeing spaces. Enfield as a borough has a high crime rate, and we are absolutely committed to breaking that cycle for our young people.

We invest a lot of time and resource into our family liaison work; we have a high population of EAL (English as an Additional Language) students and a large number of our parents don’t speak English as a first language, if at all, so it’s a challenge for them to communicate well with us. We have a team of interpreters who support parents to play an active role in Academy life. To combat this, we have family-liaison support officers in school, and we work with a community team of youth-workers, so, if a pupil is persistently absent or is presenting challenging behaviours, we can work with their family to support them; every aspect of the pupil’s life can be looked at. We collaborate to really engage the child and mirror our expectations of them, to their parent’s expectations; working with their parents so they are able to engage with the school and understand our ethos, values and curriculum. Because we work so closely with families, we’re also able to help the young person balance any pressure they might be under at home with the pressures of school.

We’ve recently received an ‘Enfield Trauma Informed Practice in Schools and Settings’ (E-TIPSS) bronze certificate, meaning staff are trained in trauma informed practice, so, when a student presents a challenging behaviour, we look beyond it to the ‘why’ of the behaviour, what might be underlying the behaviour, why are they acting in this manner? This is hugely beneficial to us as we are working to understand the child and their life journey so far.

Allowing students to reset is extremely important to me, it’s something I mentioned in my very first staff meeting; everybody is entitled to reset what their path looks like. It doesn’t matter what stage you’re at, you’re always able to reset your image of yourself, work on your character and keep learning. We also continuously learn about our students and how best to work with them, we don’t work with any student in the same way, we really personalise our behaviour and inclusion policies into practice.

Additionally, because of our relational work, our students talk to us all of the time, I’d like to say that all of our students have a staff member they can talk to about anything that they know will take immediate action, should that be necessary.

Q: How does the school prepare its students for their future?

A: We have high aspirations for our student’s futures, we’re intent on levelling the playing field for them no matter what their backgrounds, circumstances or disadvantages are. This comes with high standards and expectations, however how we enable everyone to meet those is an entirely individualised approach. We have had alumni events recently where I’ve been able to talk to past students who are really successful and proud of their school, which is something we are striving for, for every student.

If our young people don’t present with high aspirations for themselves, we support them in learning to value education as a means to success. Many students come from households that run local businesses; my aim is getting them to see that having your own GCSEs won’t just help a more academic path, but will also reap benefits when you’re working in, or running your own business. There is a link between your education and your success in the outside world.

Our curriculum supports the development of powerful knowledge: knowing more, remembering more, so that our students can truly hold their own in any circumstance. I’m always questioning if their world views and knowledge have been expanded enough in depth, so that when our pupils are at their next steps, whether that’s at university, an apprenticeship, or elsewhere, and they are sitting at tables with people that may have gone to private schools or are from a more privileged background, I know that they can hold their own.

Q: How does Oasis Academy Enfield integrate with the local community?

A: We are an undersubscribed school, historically our reputation in the area hasn’t been as good as some of the other Enfield schools, however in the time I’ve been here we’ve been doing a lot of work to develop our relationship with our community.

We’re very near a housing estate which many of our students walk through, so we have been working with the local residents to build positive relationships, raise our profile and ensure any amount of antisocial behaviour is eradicated, allowing our students to feel like part of that community as well. We’re building young people that can self-regulate, are self-aware and who care about the impact they have on their community and want that impact to be positive.

I’ve recently had members of the community at our open evenings, commenting on the conduct of our students and how that’s changed, they’ve noticed the impact of the work we’ve been doing with the students, so that has been lovely. At our most recent open evening I was approached by a parent who lives in the community, to tell me how different the school feels, how much calmer the pupils are when they leave the school, how much more self-aware they are of the impact they have. The pace of this change has been driven by the fact that our young people are fundamentally good humans, and that’s how they want to be seen. They understand that boundaries are necessary to being active and purposeful citizens and members of the community.

Q: How have you personally found your time at the school?

A: I’m a new Principal; I started in Easter, I really want to celebrate how far the school has come in those six months, which is such a short period of time.

These six months have been hugely enjoyable, I remember even in my first week my friends cooked me dinner and were asking how it was, assuming that the life of a Principal must be exhausting, only to be told that I’ve been absolutely loving it. It’s a tough job which comes with a huge amount of pressure and responsibility, but yes, I love it, particularly because the young people I’m working with are so engaging, considerate and lovely to be around.

 Q: Do you have any plans for the future?

A: The Academy is on a huge upward-trajectory, we are now really pushing for recognition that our work provides very good quality education. We’ve made astronomical progress in the last six months and that is only going to continue, if we continue at this pace, just imagine where we will be in a year’s time.

Our aim for this year, and over the next five, is to really develop a culture of learning so that students take pride in their education. My personal aims are for Oasis Academy Enfield is to be in the top 5% of secondary schools, have every student leave us with 9 good GCSEs and have 70% of our student body stay on with us to sixth form; I truly believe we are well on the way to achieving that.

The progress we have made thus far shows just how committed we are to ‘getting it right’ for our pupils, if the underlying desire to make a difference for young people didn’t exist in the entire staff body, I wouldn’t have been able to make such a difference in such a short period of time. We all want this to be the best school in the area and we’re not going to stop working toward that.

To learn more about Oasis Academy Enfield, visit their website today: www.oasisacademyenfield.org

Alternatively, get in contact via:

Tel: 01992 655400 

Email: info@oasisenfield.org 

Oasis Academy Enfield, 9 Kinetic Crescent, Innova Park, Mollison Avenue, Enfield, EN3 7XH