I haven’t written a blog since I don’t know when. At the time of stepping away, I claimed it was because I had said pretty much everything I had wanted to say about education, being a headteacher, school leadership, curriculum, policy, blah blah blah… There really wasn’t anything else I felt I could add to the conversation that hadn’t already been said. And by ‘conversation’, I mean the usual discourse about corridors and well-being. When scrolling through my Twitter timeline, I would occasionally get the itch and consider wading back into the mud via a meticulously crafted, or hastily tossed off, blog. But seriously, what would be the point? Especially as my school doesn’t actually have any corridors and, as my staff can attest to, I really don’t care about well-being.
But some people doubted my reasons for stepping away. Some people said I simply wasn’t prepared to move with the times. Everything was changing, you see. Blogs were no longer in vogue. You gotta write a book, man. They would shout at me. Define your brand. Get a hook. Get a hook and write a book!
I tried. Some of the early drafts were titled… leading from the heart… leading from the head… leading from the kidneys… the long-distance leader… the brit-pop leader… SOS leadership… from RI to RI in three miserable years…101 lessons my leadership can teach you although be warned some of them I only made up for the word count and most of them you definitely won’t need… but none of them made the final edit.
People said I should go more social media. Try filming cutesy but GDPR questionable videos inside my own school to build up a following on Instagram or TikTok. But in trying to reset the filter that made me look like a yawning cat I accidently deleted my account. I tried my hand at podcasts. I did that. Each episode took approximately twenty-seven hours to create and was listened to by three people and two of them were me on different devices.
Just leave me be, I said. Let me fade away into the background. I’m a scroller not a tweeter. Anyway, pretty soon this place will be called X and you won’t be able to find my (or anybody else’s) posts amongst the swamp of extreme rhetoric, clickbait and adverts for potato peelers which are also scarves.
But you’re @theprimaryhead they screamed. You’re somebody. You’ve attended meetings with the DfE, Ofsted… Liz Truss for god’s sake! All because of the things you tweeted and the blogs you wrote. One of your ECTs even said that you had been mentioned in one of their PGCE lectures about how headteachers were harnessing the power of social media. You’re the original, the best. You’re going places, man. Don’t you want to ride that wave all the way in?
All those amazing things you say online, they don’t just have to be ‘your’ truth, you know. They could be the truth. Look, you might not have read the Ofsted framework for a while, but a school’s overall effectiveness is now measured by the headteacher’s social media output.
Forget the actual quality of teaching in the classrooms, just look at the unhinged levels of fun on people’s faces and the sheer volume of noise during the assembly videos you post. Ignore the negative staff surveys about what it is like to work in your school, just look at that photo you posted of the staff night out – they’re having fun, right? Pay no attention to the ParentView comments about how they can never arrange a meeting with you and just look at the handwritten cards you share on Instagram from genuine pupils that definitely still attend the school that say how great you were are. Don’t concern yourself about the dip in SATs results, just remember to add your newsletter – the one with the inspirational comments you found online about what real achievement looks like – to your Facebook feed for everyone to see. And remember, don’t let anyone read that AI generated school development plan you just made, just show them the selfie of you waving a copy of it around the place whilst listening to vinyl in the garden. Oh, and don’t forget to post the video of your pupils attending the Queen’s funeral on TikTok and make sure people share it because that took 15 attempts before the kids looked solemn enough.
Man, wouldn’t that beat working for a living? And perhaps, if you really dedicate your time to posting funny, moving, inspiring things that almost, sort of, never actually happen unless you manufacture them, one of those big flashy CEOs on X will notice you and DM you a job offer. And remember, if the phone rings and it’s GB News, put on your populist hat – the one you would never actually consider wearing in the real world – and answer the call.
Pretty soon you’ll really start to believe your own hype and then you’ll be unstoppable. You’ll probably get outstanding from Ofsted. You’ll probably win loads of awards – although you will have to remember to nominate yourself for them first – and then everyone in school will think you’re really cool especially that new NQT. And then you can ask her out by sending her hundreds of unsolicited messages online. Of course, then you’ll get arrested which will take forever because you’ll just fall to the floor and shriek about George Floyd and then you’ll go to court and be found guilty of harassment and of abusing your power and then you’ll probably go to prison and never be allowed in the classroom again which is really unfair especially as you used to be really big on Twitter.
I put my finger on their lips: Sshhhhhh. And I tell them that I’m not interested. I tell them that, like children generally, a headteacher online should be seen and not heard. I tell them that the job is too important for me to be wasting my time online. They look sceptical. I rephrase. The job is too exhausting for me to be wasting my time online. They look even more sceptical. I dig deep.
Look, I used to say that I quit blogging and faded away on Twitter because I had concluded that not only had I run out of things to say but also that none of it mattered. It was all self-censored nonsense with a dash of presumed wisdom here, a sprinkle of humour there and all served with a pinch of contrived humility and, let’s be candid, an occasional whiff of narcissism. Hopefully people would see that it was designed to entertain more than it was to educate. Anything written or shared online certainly shouldn’t be taken more seriously than your conduct and performance at work.
But somewhere along the way, a line got crossed. And a few people began to think that a high-profile online presence was the key to success. There is nothing sadder and more pathetic than someone who believes their own hype or who distorts their reality and posts it online in the hope that relative strangers buy into it.
I used to say that none of it matters. But, as we have seen with a lot of online behaviour and rhetoric recently, of course it matters. It matters to the school community when a leader spends more time curating an online profile than tending to their real-life school. It matters to the staff when they see their leader presenting an alternative version of life in school to the one that they live every day. It matters to other leaders when they can see their own profession being brought into disrepute by click baiting headteachers desperately trying to bag a headline. And it matters to any individual who has to suffer the unwarranted attention and harassment of a self-deluded leader abusing their power whilst tweeting in plain sight.
Hmmmm…
Still sceptical? OK, I’ll leave you with this.
The greatest trick the headteacher on Twitter ever pulled was convincing the world that they mattered.
And like that… I was gone.
the primary head's blog 