For the last 3 years the school has worked with the London Challenge and City Challenge to support schools in challenging circumstances. As a result of this work, Tidemill has now been been awarded National Teaching School status.
Additionally, Mark Elms has become one of only 75 headteachers across the country to be appointed in the latest recruitment round by the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services to the prestigious role of National Leader of Education (NLE). It also means the school is now designated a National Support School (NSS).

NLEs use their success as school leaders, along with the staff in their school – designated a National Support School – to provide additional leadership capacity in struggling schools. The deployment is tailor made to suit the needs of each school in challenging circumstances. The type of support provided is flexible and can involve NLEs becoming acting executive headteacher of the client school or schools. They also have responsibility for helping to grow the next generation of NLEs and National Support Schools.

Tony Salt, Deputy Chief Executive of the National College, said “I am so proud that outstanding school leaders are being honoured in this way. This scheme is about great headteachers and their teams helping others and making a big difference. Many of the schools in the scheme see improvements in exam results at both the support school and client schools with progress achieved in excess of these improvements nationally. This is thanks to the hard work and dedication of all those involved”.

Professional Development for Teachers
We are delivering an accredited professional development for teachers – the “Improving Teacher Programme” and the “Outstanding Teacher Programme”. Teachers from Lewisham and neighbouring local authorities are currently benefiting from this work.
We also work specifically with the Croydon Challenge programme supporting “Keys to Success” (K2S) schools, which are schools in challenging circumstances who are either in Ofsted category and/or have KS2 results which are below Government floor targets.