It’s DOUBLE GOLD at @RiverAcReading this week with students living our values of #Determination and #Excellence. Their engagement with @SparxMaths and @SparxReader is phenomenal and we are very proud of their hard work. #WorkHardPlayHard

Two weeks in to our @SparxReader launch and students have amassed over 530 hours of careful reading. We are very proud of how they have risen to the challenge! #WorkHardPlayHard #Determination #Excellence

If you are local to Reading there’s lots of exciting roles at @RiverAcReading as we move into year 2 of our journey. ✨ Teachers of Science, English, Maths Geography and Technology ✨ Head of MFL ✨ Resource Base teacher Please share!

School Spotlight on River Academy — A School on the Rise⭐️ River Academy is expanding with modern facilities, a focus on student success, and plans for the future. Join our Year 6 Open Morning on Feb 5th to see the school in action! Full Spotlight:

I had a great visit to @RiverAcReading and was pleased to see pupils who were well-behaved, polite, and committed to their learning. It was good to see booklets being used consistently in lessons to support direct instruction. I also enjoyed hearing the pupils recite Invictus during lineup. Thank you to @mrs_billingham and the entire staff body for accommodating my visit. I truly appreciated everyone's generosity with their time and the very warm welcome.

This is absolutely worth doing if you are making choices about secondary schools. I had the opportunity to see the school in action this morning and it is great to see how their ideas and values work in the classroom. #Thames #Rdg

🚨A brilliant opportunity for a #geographyteacher to join the Humanities department @RiverAcReading 🚨 Real scope to contribute & develop our #Geography curriculum, fantastic students & colleagues, great CPD internally & @MaidenErleghTru Feel free to DM!

Lovely afternoon at the Berkshire Schools Cross Country this afternoon. It was great to see our big team of boys getting out there and giving their best. Huge thanks to Mr Clare for giving up his time and congratulations to Nabil for being our top performer. #TeamRiver

Two weeks in to our Manners and Oracy launch and students have really stepped up to the challenge. River students are truly a delight, but explicit character education means our expectations are clear, and students benefit from a taught, modelled approach. #TheRiverWay

Without the necessary preconditions for success, most teachers will never be able to teach like this, no matter how much training, messaging, or how many lesson observations they undergo. It is the leader's responsibility to create a school ecosystem that enables teachers to thrive and deliver this style of teaching. However, while the importance of culture creation is often discussed and analysed, few truly understand how to achieve it—especially in turnaround schools. This is why I struggle to understand leaders who visit schools, cherry-pick certain ideas, and attempt to implement them in their own schools. These initiatives almost always fail, and the blame is typically placed on the idea itself or its implementation. What these leaders rarely do is critically examine how the initiative fits into the broader puzzle of culture creation. By neglecting the other essential elements (the preconditions for success), they set their initiatives up for failure from the start.