leadership

Come on Mr Mayor…don’t just plant a tree, sow the seeds of change!

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Bristol has a Mayor. This is fine, I have nothing against Bristol having a Mayor; in fact I imagine it could be quite exciting, shake things up a bit. Bristol’s Mayor is a man called George Ferguson. So far there are three things that I know about him:

  1. He wears red trousers a lot.
  2. He played a significant and important role in the redevelopment of Bedminster’s Tobacco Factory.
  3. He wants every child in Bristol to plant a tree.

Of these three statements one impresses me and causes me to think all is not lost; one has made me confine the wearing of my own pair of red trousers to when I’m gardening; and one of these statements really, really annoys me. I think it should be clear to most people that the red trousers issue is taken care of; I think the Tobacco Factory is great so that leaves us with statement three: he wants every child in Bristol to plant a tree.

It was a couple of days after his election victory that Mr Ferguson addressed a room full of Head Teachers at the University of the West of England. Poor bugger, he was probably still hung over from celebrating but his PA had obviously said ‘Get on that stage Mr Mayor, this is an opportunity’. So he came on and I remember two feelings: slight surprise because close up his red trousers were actually tartan, but more than that I remember feeling a bit sorry for him. He seemed a bit flustered and who could blame him? He hadn’t talked that much about education before and suddenly here he was talking to a load of Head Teachers, I mean what was he meant to say? Turned out he did some crowd pleasing material on us all being heroes and then, in what I imagined was a stream of consciousness, he said that he wanted every child in Bristol to plant a tree.

I quite naturally ignored this as did most people on my table. It was just a bit of fluff and nonsense designed to sound inspirational in a ‘children are the future of this planet and so are trees’ kind of way. It didn’t carry any weight, no we would forget about this idea. Put it at the back of the cupboard with the other ‘big’ ideas like building a solar powered snow plough and running a competition to find Bristol’s favourite soup.

So imagine my surprise when I received an email asking me to sign up for the Mayor’s big scheme of getting every child in Bristol to plant a tree. Why? Will it make Bristol a green city? Will it provide a safe canopy for our children to walk under on their way to school? I don’t think it will. It might make Bristol a better shaded city in the summer months and it may encourage more tree climbing therein creating a more risk taking generation which could be a good thing but…I think that might be it.

No, what really annoys me about this idea is that it is in danger of being really small minded and for a man who displayed such vision when saving such a culturally significant building as the beloved Tobacco Factory and who proudly wears red tartan trousers in public, this paper thin initiative is a massive disappointment. Education at this precise moment in time is not in the best of places and I would have thought that the proposed National Curriculum, which seems to be unifying all educators through their hatred of it, would be seen as the golden egg squeezed out from Gove’s massive egghole (urgh) to be picked up and capitalised on.

Imagine a whole city turning its back on a badly formatted and politically engineered curriculum and instead creating something truly inspiring and meaningful for its children. A City Curriculum with local and global dimensions agreed upon by all educators and pushed forward by the city’s Mayor. A newly elected Mayor should seize this opportunity to engage with school leaders and play a part in developing something far greater than the sum of its parts. A city curriculum could truly lay the foundations that would allow an entire city becoming ‘outstanding’ based on any set of criteria from anybody’s score-book. Schools may not be able to do it on their own, they carry with them too much baggage, but with a leader or a figurehead to help facilitate the journey we could do it. The Mayor is in the correct neutral position to at least give it a try. Or…we could plant a tree and then get on with teaching 7 year olds about the house of Plantagenet. Your call Mr Mayor.

Aspiration Nation – or History Repeating?

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imagesIn a jolly, rousing, preaching to the converted, sound bite crowbarring, broad and unsurprisingly unbalanced address to his brethren during yesterday’s Conservative Spring Conference, David Cameron made clear his attitudes towards education.

I can only imagine the late night pacing up and down inside some swanky Manchester hotel bedroom as Cameron and his speech writers furiously outlined the key messages for education that had to be covered.  Insulting the profession obviously had to be there, that’s a given. Twisting an idea so that it sort-of-but-doesn’t-really-when-you-scrutinise-it-for-more-than-a-second fit into this ‘aspiration nation’ gubbins should probably make an appearance. Putting out an ideology so beyond the realms of sanity that every Head Teacher decides it’s probably best to cash in their chips and lie low until the next general election could be good for a laugh for in the bar afterwards.

So it was with these main points scrawled on the back of his hand that Cameron began talking about education and schools.  Firstly he gleefully dismissed the past decade of educational development as stemming from “a left-wing establishment that had bargain-basement expectations of millions of children”. Then he boasted that the new curriculum was centred around ensuring the youngest children in our system would, if nothing else, know the history of our islands as if their life depended on it. Finally he put forward his dream that schools would be run by Leaders who aspired “to be like the pushiest, most sharp-elbowed, ambitious parent there is”.

Where shall we start?

Bargain basement expectations? I can only imagine that sometime after he almost won the general election Cameron went online and clicked on the DfE website to see what teachers actually did and was horrified that there was nothing there! He must have been furious. Where was the curriculum? Where was the guidance? Where were the expectations? What have they been doing for the last decade? In the background Gove must have been gulping like a wonky frog wondering if he should explain to his leader that his first job as education secretary had been to delete everything leaving schools with nothing or should he just let Dave go along thinking it was the last guy’s fault. Obviously he went for the latter.

Despite clearly loving the history of this county it’s a shame Cameron didn’t bother looking back over the recent history of education standards. If he had then he may have noticed that in 1996 the percentage of pupils leaving primary schools achieving Level 4 in English & Maths were below 60% whereas in 2009 this had risen to nearer 80% and is continuing to rise. It is also a shame that he didn’t take an interest in the NFER yearly testing programmes from 1999-2002 focussed on pupils in Years 3, 4 and 5 that aimed to provide a detailed picture of changes in standards and progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2. The results of this programme was reported by Ofsted in 2002 and showed that there had been significant improvements in the performance of pupils throughout primary schools. This is also backed up by statistics collated by the ATL that showed in 1996 the proportion of good or better teaching in primary schools was less than 50%, this rose considerably by 2002 to just under 80%.

Now I know we can debate the difference between ‘performance’ and ‘standards’ but can it really be argued that standards and expectations stagnated or fell between the years Cameron is talking about? We all know that benchmarks change as targets get achieved and although this can be frustrating as it feels like goalposts are always changing –  the flip side to this is that as we get better our expectations of what we can do next must also rise. The increase in rigour in school’s assessment and the development of pedagogy through the Literacy and Numeracy framework strategies during Labour’s time in government highlight quite significantly that the judgement that schools were operating under ‘bargain basement expectations’ is not only insulting but is an example of political showboating that Cameron should feel ashamed of and be made to apologise for.

Now what about operating schools like ‘pushy parents.’ On the one hand what a clever analogy for illustrating to schools how much they should want the children in their care to achieve. On the other hand: what a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to say-for two reasons. Firstly the thought that schools don’t do everything they can to capitalise opportunities for their pupils to support their educational development shows an innate lack of understanding of how schools operate. Secondly, it actually doesn’t work as the Free Schools are showing us. The Free School movement which gave those pushy parents who thought they could set up a school the chance to do so has been rather embarrassed recently thanks to Michael Wilshaw’s exacting standards. The first three of nine have been judged ‘not good enough’ by Ofsted-not a great start is it? Who appointed those Head Teachers? Who set the expectations for these schools so low? Maybe the individualistic mind-set of a pushy parent is not the best way to strategically lead an entire organisation but who am I to judge…I’m just a professional.

Finally, the proposed national curriculum. I am not going to repeat things I have said about what I think about the new curriculum. Instead I will share a critique of the 1988 Conservative government’s first national curriculum:

The National Curriculum was written by a government quango: teachers had virtually no say in its design or construction. It was almost entirely content-based. Dennis Lawton, of the University of London Institute of Education, described it as the reincarnation of the 1904 Secondary Regulations.

It was huge and therefore unmanageable, especially at the primary level, and its introduction resulted in a significant drop in reading standards. It divided the curriculum up into discrete subjects, making integrated ‘topic’ and ‘project’ work difficult if not impossible. But perhaps the most damaging outcome of it was that it prevented teachers and schools from being curriculum innovators and demoted them to curriculum ‘deliverers’.

(educatoinengland.org.uk/history/chapter8)

It seems incredible that the parallels are so striking and yet numbingly inevitable. The lack of insight, perspective and educational input seems to fly in the face of ‘aspiration nation’ and shows it up for the hollow phraseology it is. For a government that seems to place a lot of significance on knowing the history of this country it seems rather pitiful that with their own short-sighted views of education they are clearly in danger of repeating it.

The Squeezed Middle

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imagesTeachers become Head Teachers because they have the vision and capacity to enable a school to improve. It’s a simple role and if time slowed down and days were twice as long every Head Teacher worth their salt could achieve everything on their own. Sadly, the Earth’s position in relation to the sun refuses to change and every Head must rely on the team around them to get the job done and this is often where things go wrong-or more accurately, this is where things grind to a halt.

I once heard another Head Teacher say that the problem with the leadership within any organisation is that it runs the risk of being populated with people who have reached their zenith and who aren’t talented enough to progress any further in their career. This seems rather mean-spirited but there can be a grain of truth in it. For the purposes of this post let’s assume we are not talking about the good ones. To all those dedicated Phase Leaders and Assistant Heads reading this, I am not talking about you, you are great. I am talking about that other lot and you all know who I mean: The Middle Leaders or to put it more clearly those people that would actually refer to themselves as a Middle Leader.

Middle-Leadership. I hate that term. It sounds so un-aspiring .It may as well be Not-Quite -Leadership or A-Bit-Of-Leadership or I’ll-Run-One-Staff-Meeting-A-Year-In-Order-To-Justify-My-TLR-Leadership.  Leadership is not about being in the middle: if you want to lead you have to be out in front.  You have to be visible and model the right attitude and behaviour to everyone else at all times. This is often where Middle-Leaders fall short.

To those newly in post I can’t blame them. Many middle-leaders start off with a reluctance to put themselves out there as an example to others especially if they were promoted internally. It is very difficult to start as a member of staff, on the same level as everyone else, and then suddenly find yourself in a position where you get to tell your peers how to improve. If anything, it can make Friday evenings in the pub awkward.

‘Anyone fancy a drink?’

‘Yes please, mine’s a gin & tonic.’

‘Piss off; you said my display was crap.’

However, given the right coaching and with the right member of staff however, this can be addressed quite easily. They will quickly develop, move on and start leading effectively without upsetting their peers.

But what about those long-standing Middle Leaders, the ones that have been there for as long as you can remember?  Blissfully unaware that they are not mentioned in your SEF or are not invited to any serious SLT meeting. During performance management it becomes apparent that they have no desire to move forward in their career and while I do not judge people solely on their long term career expectations, they are so lacking in whole school perspective or desire to go above and beyond they end up becoming a significant drag on school improvement.

These members of staff have somehow managed to get on the post-threshold pay spine but when you ask them to run an assembly at short notice they come out in a rash and are speed-dialling the unions before you have time to check the conditions of their contract. When you ask if anyone could monitor the lunch hall because you’re short staffed they always manage to raise their hand just after the NQT jumps up and says they would love to do it. They are ‘comfortable’ and in the ever changing world of school improvement they are as effective as woolly gloves on an i-pad.

School improvement needs everyone to see the big picture and understand not only how being effective in their role will impact upon school improvement but how their role may evolve. Sadly, it is often the ‘secure and safe’ middle leaders who find this so difficult to achieve. They are uncomfortable working out of their well-established comfort zone and unwilling to shift their goal-posts. They are so used to judging their success using the narrowest of parameters that when they start to feel the squeeze, they buckle and their insecurity and ineffectiveness oozes out of them for all to see.

What do you do? Send them on another Middle-Leadership course? Coach them? Hope they leave? Most of the time you know it would be easier to cut them out of the loop entirely and leave school improvement to the professionals but this in turn would most likely cause resentment from everybody else. Whatever you choose, it is likely it will be a compromise between leaving them to quietly have no impact hoping no one notices and squeezing them so hard they split.

I saw a documentary about the American school system. One idea that intrigued me was their approach to staffing. Each year all the Head Teachers within each state would meet at a convention and they would take with them a list of all their least effective staff. In the American system any teacher can be relocated to any school within the state at any time. Bearing in mind some states are larger than the UK you can imagine the connotations this brings with it. The Head Teachers call this system ‘shuffling the shit’. Each Head hopes that they return from the visit with slightly better ineffective teachers than they went with. I’m not saying I approve of this system but I bet any Head reading this knows whose name they would take to that convention.

Maybe, with groups of schools working together as academy groups, this model may come into practice. Not to ‘shuffle the shit’ but to think how to really develop and deploy effective leadership across a group of schools or a city or even the country. Strong leaders could be shared, weaker leaders could be placed in less challenging areas or more challenging areas in order for them to develop at a more effective pace.  Schools would be working in real partnerships with staff harnessing their skills to impact not just a single school but a city-wide/country-wide cohort. (Obviously this system could be abused: teachers living in fear, heads abusing their power, staff members becoming black listed from working in a particular city…but let’s ignore that notion for now and let me dream.)

The fact is schools cannot succeed due to one lone Head Teacher doing everything. A school’s success lies in the culture of collective and visible leadership that is promoted and demonstrated. Middle Leaders should be out in front. Not every leader needs to aspire to be a Head but they should feel that they are developing the skills so that they could step up if required. If that sounds like your cup of tea then you will be an effective leader at any level. If that sounds unrealistic and not what you came into education for, please don’t apply for a job at my school. If you’re already in my school then you’re on my list!