leadership

In the looper

theprimaryhead3 Comments

I’m all about freedom.

 

One of the reasons I became a Head was because I am a control freak. Don’t worry I’m not a megalomaniac; in fact, when I started teaching I thought that I’d never want to be Head. When I was a young and a slightly less tired human being, I was all about the classroom and the kids. The idea of going into management sickened me. If the young me could see me now he would have no problem standing in a field with a shotgun waiting for the current me to materialise, out of thin air, all bound up in a bag, to pull the trigger and end the pathetic existence of this useless head teacher. Then again, the young me was a bit of a tit and we’ve never been able to aim properly.

 

Anyway, I digress. The point is, as I furthered my career, I began to enjoy the influence (not the power) but the influence my ideas, hard work and willingness to support others could have on more than just the thirty children in my class. Then it got to a point where I felt that my ideas could influence a whole school full of children and I enjoy that a lot. The idea that what goes on during a school day is to some extent shaped by what I believe to be important in improving children’s lives motivates me more than anything else. And when it actually works…when you see children ‘improve’ as a result of your ideas, well, that’s a pretty good feeling.

 

Where I am still very similar to the young me (still waiting in that field the idiot, he’s no idea I swapped bags, it’s @oldprimaryhead in there now) is that I tend to ignore some of what we’re told we ‘have’ to do. I prefer to put in place what I believe will have an impact and have the ability to ruthlessly prioritise to help children in whichever way they most need – and if that means not doing guided reading for two terms whilst I concentrate on times tables then that’s something I’ll do and I just won’t tell the Literacy leader about it (I did make the mistake of telling my Deputy Head at the time as she was giving me a lift home – she practically stopped the car and kicked me out). I felt vindicated though, the children still made progress in their mental maths and of course I made sure that they made progress in their reading too.

 

I’ve always been about the freedoms.

 

I behave in a similar way as a Head. There are certain things that I either just don’t understand or believe in. So I don’t do them. I assume that everything will be fine; even when the SIO asks me ‘What percentage of your Year 1 pupils have achieved the phonic screening pass score so far?’ and the answer in my head is ‘I don’t know, I haven’t even asked if my Year 1 teachers are rehearsing for it.’ I don’t let it bother me. I know, it will be fine because I believe in what we have in place down there.

 

All these freedoms are making me nervous.

 

So why then, if I’m so cool and running the school like I’m Shaft, am I so worried about these freedoms the government keeps banging on about? I should love it, right?

 

Well, the big difference between me now and the young me (the pathetic moob) is that I’m a Head. This means that I am not just responsible for the children (that bit’s fine) but I am also responsible for the school. And there is a difference. A school is all the children inside it plus about a million other complexities and issues. What’s more, a school is now increasingly judged on these other things and deemed successful or otherwise as a result of the head’s leadership and management of them.

 

Now, this wasn’t a surprise to me when I became a Head. I didn’t suddenly become aware that staffing, performance management, pupil premium, finance, governors, parents, children in need, children in care, looked after children and loads more stuff besides came with the job, it’s just…there’s a lot there and it’s getting added to all the time. Not just getting added to but levels of expectations on how the school should perform on these areas are being put out there as well.

 

Again, this is ok. If we’re being asked to do something we might as well get told how well we’re doing it. But my problem, the reason why at times I wish I had kept myself in the bag that is now hurtling through time and space towards my younger self, is because guidance and suggested ways of checking to see how I’m doing are disappearing. All in the name of ‘greater freedoms for Heads’. I may know what’s best for children but I struggle with knowing what will be judged best for the school when judgement day comes along.

 

What’s more, I don’t like the sneaking suspicion I have that the judges still know what they’re looking for and know how they’re going to arrive at their judgements but now they’re choosing not to tell me and disguising this as a freedom. They’re letting me fumble around for myself. It’s like they know how reckless I’ve been creating freedoms of my own during my career and now they’re punishing me for it. ‘’Come on, you say you know what’s best…well come on then: You tell me…

  • if that teacher should get a pay rise;
  • how to judge progress throughout Key Stage 2 without levels;
  • what’s a good way of spending pupil premium;
  • why PE is supposedly better now we’ve given you some cash;
  • how parents know where their child is in relation to every other child in the land;
  • what makes your approach to the national curriculum so good;

oh, well your answers aren’t the same as the ones I’ve got in my little golden envelope. Turns out you couldn’t cope with freedoms after all. Come on then, climb into this bag, you’re going on an awfully big adventure.’’

 

Man, these freedoms are killing me. looper

When we was Phab!

Link theprimaryhead1 Comment

It’s good to get away. Not just to get away from the hustle and bustle from your own environment but also to have an opportunity to meet other like-minded (or not) people from your profession. At a time in the academic of year where the promises of Autumn seem to be at their most fragile and you feel success is balanced on a knife’s edge, it’s good to get away and realise that…you are not alone.

It was the annual Phab (that’s Primary Heads Association of Bristol to you) conference in Chepstow. A day and a half of Heads and Deputies talking, laughing, eating, drinking, singing (partly due to the drinking) thinking, supporting each other, reflecting and looking forward.

Listening and talking to other Heads about their schools, achievements and struggles. Not only do you realise that there are situations that are way more challenging than yours but more importantly you find yourself able to offer support and advice. This in turn is reciprocated and suddenly you have an idea you can take back and a person you can go to after the conference to ask for help. I believe they call this ‘networking’. I prefer to call it ‘chatting with a purpose’ and is a good example of why I love being Phab.

Our highly esteemed Chair @overton66 had started the main proceedings on Friday with the statement: ‘I know we seem to say this every year but it really does feel like we are living in uncertain and exciting times in education’. He’s not wrong. The landscape of education is changing more rapidly than Phab’s resident in-house band’s set list. (Current name: ‘The 4Heads’ although I’m leaning towards ‘The Phab 4’.)

The big movers and shakers of Bristol LA have changed, there are many different school models across the city, and partnerships are popping up here there and everywhere; all this against a backdrop of a never endingly changing national picture of expectations from Whitehall. The goal posts are not so much as changing, as more disappearing leaving schools to put down their own jumpers for goalposts and hope for the best.

How awful!

But as Gus Hedges, the smooth talking Chief Executive of GlobeLink from ‘Drop The Dead Donkey’, always said: ‘’Problems are just the pregnant mothers of solutions.’’

Our new LA leaders were also there at the start and made it very clear to us that as the redefining of what it means to be a school in Bristol gets underway, it will be done with us not to us. If that’s not an incentive to get involved then I don’t know what is as I genuinely think they meant it.

Then, to get us inspired, we had the pleasure of working with Mick Waters. In just over an hour he had gone through:

  • What was important in a child’s experience of schooling.

  • The danger of PISA.

  • The damaging role politics has played in education.

  • The shifting sands of assessment data.

  • The false prophets behind Gove’s ‘freedoms’.

  • What the new national curriculum has left out.

  • The rich educational, cross curricular, mind expanding opportunities of a 6 minute video of a man dancing with people around the globe.

I think it is also safe to say that pretty much everyone in the room agreed with his every word. I did. This did occasionally lead me to think ‘Oh goodness, I have become conditioned by Ofsted? – Do I only care about data and things that can be measured? Am I ruining the lives of my children?’ (Luckily, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t, I don’t, and I’m not.) But I recognised that as a city we have a chance to address all those issues and build a stronger and richer experience for our children.

Then it all got terribly exciting. I mean we started thinking about where Bristol could go. How we, as an educational city, could write its own mandate for what we will give the children that grow up under our watch. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? I think we’ll do it, I genuinely do. But for it to work we are going to need an almost Herculean effort from the LA. Because after we’d all decided what it was we were going to put in place so our children could succeed and be fully prepared for a life of contributing to their world fuelled by a love of learning and life; we would have to have a guarantee that no one could come and dismantle it. It would be a bit like a fixed mortgage. We would need the LA to buffer any national changes or additional crazy expectations that came from Whitehall in order to win votes or to be seen to be addressing society’s ills in the eyes of the media/public – they would have to stand up to national government and say: ‘No, we can’t do that at the moment, we’re busy.’

Imagine that?

Imagine working in a world where you were in control of the goalposts. Imagine a whole city working together to give the same experiences and entitlements for every single child. Imagine raising standards in every single area of the widest curriculum? Imagine being able to do this and know you were making a difference? Imagine that the best ideas, the ones that the professionals deemed to be important, were valued and respected and given the time and freedom to succeed.

That is what it should mean to be in education.

Having the chance to instigate it?

That is what it means to be Phab.

How the mighty have fallen

theprimaryhead8 Comments

It happens to the best of us I suppose. You reach a point where if you allow yourself to stop, take a breath and reflect on the situation you’re in, you immediately feel like climbing under a table, breathing into a brown paper bag and perhaps, should the urge take you, quietly vomiting into a shoe. This is why you shouldn’t stop of course. Just keep on going. Just relentlessly chug away like a demented robot who has overridden its self-destruct button happily busying itself unaware of course that it’s about to burn out.

But, because I am not a robot and neither are you, we all occasionally stop and that can often seem like a huge mistake.

Today, I read a reference someone had written for me, about me, for when I applied for my current job. Now, before you start to worry, I don’t make it a habit of reading my own references. I don’t take them home on a Friday, pour myself a glass of wine and regale myself with how great I am. (That would be madness and besides, I have a blog for that.) No, I had in fact been asked to provide a reference for an old colleague and I thought before I start, I should read a successful one (well I got the job didn’t I?) to look at the basic structure of the thing and steal some sentence openers otherwise I was in danger of starting every line with the words ‘And another thing they do well…’

As I read my own reference two feelings began to emerge. One was that I appeared to be the most amazing Deputy the world has ever seen and the second was that I sort of remembered who this person was but felt it certainly wasn’t the current ‘me’.

Again, don’t worry: I know I wasn’t the most amazing Deputy in the world. But I was pretty good. And reading back this distillation of my four year stint I kept thinking: ‘Wow, I did a lot and I did it well.’ Then, thinking about my current job and everything that I’m in the middle of doing I couldn’t help but think: ‘What the hell happened to me?’

How did this cool, calm and collected leader who went from one success to another turn into this husk who seems to be staggering to life raft to life raft narrowly missing open mouthed sharks, sea snakes and floating pieces of excrement?

I do not know.

Then I read my reference again. And as a little treat, I read it again. Then it began to dawn on me. Reading back all of my achievements I began thinking back to those times and how I felt when I was actually there doing it. In retrospect, it all went so smoothly; at the time though, well that’s a different tale.

I remembered all the frustrations and challenges that were part and parcel of success. I remembered the feelings of self doubt on the journeys home, the conversations with the Head saying: ‘What the hell are we doing? Nothing’s working, I mean nothing we are doing is bloody working!’ Because when you’re in the thick of it the dream you had that started the ball rolling, always seems far, far away. Like when you dream you’re running a race and the closer you get to the finishing line the further away it gets. (I’ve never actually had that dream, but I’m sure more sporty people have and the metaphor sort of fits so I’ll ‘run’ with it.)

When you look back though, the success that you achieved for your school tower over the stress and torment it took to get there. So, I realised I hadn’t changed, I hadn’t gone from hero to zero: I’m just doing what everyone else is doing: fighting on. And sometimes it is a fight and sometimes it feels like you’re losing. But we all know it’s going to be worth it – whatever it is you’re personally fighting for, whatever it is that is keeping you from sleeping, you know that your hard work, determination and belief will win in the end. And when the next person writes your reference they’ll focus on everything you achieved and the way in which you refused to be ground down when it got tough.  Hopefully they’ll miss out the bit where they found you underneath the table being sick into a shoe and jabbering on about sea snakes otherwise you’re really stuffed.

So keep going and when you do stop and it feels like it’s all too much, just remember: this ain’t the first time and if you keep doing your job, it won’t be the last.