What went well
The main development this week was meeting with the Cheney School headteacher, which gave us far more clarity on the school itself and — critically — on the data landscape we're working with. We now know we can access pupil premium data and the stakeholder survey, which gives us something concrete to anchor to rather than relying purely on interview accounts. This matters because it partially offsets the access constraints I flagged last week: even if direct relational accounts remain hard to get, we now have at least two structured datasets that speak to disadvantage and stakeholder perception, which we can triangulate against whatever interview material we do secure.
What could have gone differently
Rob was fairly direct that there's limited scope for our research to actually help the school in a practical sense. That's a disappointing thing to sit with, partly because it cuts against the framing we've been building — that this is applied, school-facing research rather than a purely academic exercise. It's worth being honest that this doesn't necessarily undermine the research validity of what we're doing, but it does raise a question about impact and about how we frame the "so what" of the project when we write it up, and possibly about how much buy-in we can expect from the school in later stages (access to more data, willingness to facilitate further contact, etc.).
Reflection and sense-making
Sitting with this week's meeting, the tension I keep coming back to is between data availability and data relevance. Pupil premium and stakeholder survey data are real and accessible, but they're proxies — they tell us about outcomes and stated perceptions, not about the relational mechanisms (trust-building moments, communication patterns, the "how" of trust) that we want to actually explain. There's a risk of the project reshaping itself around what's measurable rather than what's central, simply because the measurable data is what's on offer. Rob's comment about limited scope for impact is worth reading alongside this: it may be less that the research can't help the school, and more that the kind of help it can offer (analytical insight into relational dynamics) doesn't map neatly onto what a headteacher considers useful or actionable in the short term.
Adjustment and development for next week
Behavioural adjustment: when a school contact raises a limitation (data access, scope for impact) in a meeting, I'll ask a direct follow-up question in the room about what would make the research more useful to them, rather than treating the comment as a closed statement to reflect on afterwards — this gives us a chance to recover some of that "so what" framing collaboratively rather than guessing at it later.
Action for next week: I'll draft a short note mapping the pupil premium and stakeholder survey data onto our question sub-questions specifically, so we can see exactly where the proxy data supports (or fails to support) the relational trust argument — and flag any remaining gaps before they become a problem at write-up stage.