Founded 2010 Official languages English | Headquarters London, United Kingdom Website high-performance.org | |
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Founders Alex Hill and Ben Laker | ||
The Centre for High Performance (informally The Centre) is a research group of senior faculty at Oxford and Kingston Universities, London Business School and Duke CE that specialises in organisational performance and works with British Boxing, Eton College, John Lewis, NASA, the New Zealand All-Blacks, the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal Shakespeare Company among others. Founded by Alex Hill, Associate Professor at Kingston University and Ben Laker, Lecturer at Kingston University, contributions are made from Liz Mellon, Executive Director at Duke Corporate Education; Jules Goddard, Fellow at London Business School; Richard Cuthbertson, Senior Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University and Terry Hill, Emeritus Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford University.
Contents
Findings from the Centre have been published by Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Economist, The Huffington Post, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Spectator, presented to the 2016 Global Education and Skills Forum conference in Dubai and featured on BBC Newsnight.
Turnaround Research
Between 2010 - 2015 The Centre observed progress made by 160 academy schools after they were put into special measures by OfSTED. The collected data was shared with Andrew Day, Executive Director (CEO) of The Northumberland Church of England Academy; Carolyn Robson CBE, Executive Principal of Rushey Mead Academy; David Bateson OBE, Chair of EMLC Academy Trust Strategic Board; George Gyte, Adviser to the Department for Education and Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit; Professor Sir George Berwick, CEO of Challenge Partners; Dame Sally Coates, Director of Academies for United Learning and Laura McInerney, Guardian columnist and Editor of Schools Week who described it as “some of the most powerful and engaging ever seen in education research”.
The preliminary findings were presented to the 2016 Global Education and Skills Forum conference in Dubai and published the following day by The Times, the Daily Telegraph,The Oxford Mail and the Yorkshire Post. The full findings were sent to The Department for Education as an SSRN academic paper and published by The Independent. The UK government responded by launching an inquiry into the performance, accountability and governance of academy schools. The Department for Education subsequently released a white paper and created the 'Education for All Bill' to "stamp out the practice of academies that exclude pupils to skew their results and claim rapid improvements after The Centre for High Performance revealed some trusts excluded pupils to change the profile of their intake and boost results."
Following this policy change the Centre released 'How to Turn Around a Failing School' the first study of academy schools to be published by Harvard Business Review, who lauded this influential work as "research gold" after it became the seminal study of UK and US school improvement. Three days later The Centre published an article in Duke CE's Dialogue Journal titled 'Why English schools hold secret to high business performance' suggesting "organisations cannot be turned around with one simple idea or single action."
Leadership Research
In 2016 The Centre investigated the impact of different types of leaders on performance, beginning with the so-called "superhead" system of executive head teachers.The findings of this study were published by Schools Week and The Times. Hill concluded “when a school emerges from a period with a superhead, you’ve lost three years, sometimes longer, and you’ve spent a load of money you didn’t need to. You are now behind where you could have been both in terms of the impact on students but also on your community.”