leadership

Be the light

theprimaryhead3 Comments

SpotlightTeaching is a tough job. I don’t care which way you cut it, teaching is hard. Anyone that says otherwise is wrong. If they’re outside education they don’t know what they’re talking about. If they’re in education, well, they probably aren’t doing it right.

And yet…

Schools are happy places. Corridors and classrooms are bright and brimming with life learning, positivity and possibility. Teachers are enablers. They are driven by the knowledge that they are making a difference. Yes, teaching is hard but it’s worth it.

And yet…

Doing the job, day in and day out, can make you forget. Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees – or in the case of teaching, you can’t see the difference you’re making for all the planning, marking, targets, assessment deadlines and meetings.

So…

Enter the Headteacher.

For we are the keepers of peace in a world of chaos. We are the bastions of sanity in a landscape carved out by the insane. We are the shepherds tending our flock of bruised and battered sheep. We are the moral compass, the heartbeat of the community. We are the guiding light.

And yet…

Sometimes teachers find themselves in the dark. And lurking in the shadows are whispers of discontent. The tired will cry, the bruised will vent, and the vulnerable will seek help. Good Heads will respond. Good Heads will listen and reflect. Good Heads will feel the pain that, under their watch, good teachers may be suffering. Good Heads will be big enough to make changes. Good Heads will provide the light.

But…

Some teachers seek out the darkness. They prefer to undermine, resist change, hide from accountability. Challenge is something to be avoided: to some teachers ‘digging deep’ is staying at work until 4pm. These teachers prefer not to empathise with the difficult children in their class but view them as unacceptable performance management targets. These teachers seek unwarranted asylum from their own job description. They do not seek the light.

And…

Good Heads will feel the pain when anyone isn’t happy. Good Heads will ask themselves, again and again, is there something more that they could do. Good Heads will doubt themselves and wonder if they are to blame. Good Heads will secretly hope that someone else will come along and fix it.

But…

Deep down they know. Good Heads understand that self-selecting darkness is bad for business. So good Heads will always find the torch. To do anything else would be unfair and disloyal to the hardworking, and then, well, even the best Head in the world would have a big problem.

So…

Teaching may be hard but so is Headship. Being fair and firm is never an easy task. Maintaining your moral compass whilst making sure your staff aren’t working themselves into early retirement is tricky – but then again, if you find Headship easy, you’re probably not doing it right.

Pass it on…keep it simple, stupid

theprimaryhead5 Comments

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I am not sure what prompted @HeyMissSmith to tweet:

I am coming to the conclusion the more complicated people try to make teaching the worse it gets.

But I am inclined to agree. In fact I would go further. The more complicated people try to make ‘the entire world of education’ the worse it gets. It is a deceptively tricky thing to manage however. Education is a tangled mass of issues (chopped and divided up into sub-issues each with their own mind-map of interconnecting categories, reference points and progress measures) that impact on the day to day practitioner who is just trying to make it to the school bell with their sanity intact. One can often be forgiven that education is essentially about: teaching children stuff.

It sounds so simple don’t it?

Children don’t know things…We do…Pass it on.

The problem, I think, is that somewhere along the line we began to worry that it was too simple a premise. You know when you ask a child a question that you know they know the answer to and they really struggle with it. Then they eventually, squint up at you and slowly vocalize the answer (remembering to cleverly lilt their voice upwards at the end as if to suggest it was ‘only a question’ should they get it wrong) and you say ‘Yes, that is the answer, it’s easy isn’t it! I think you were expecting it to be harder but there, you see, you did know it.’ That’s what education is like. It is as simple as you think it is.

But lots of people haven’t been satisfied with this and they’ve slightly tweaked the formula:

Children don’t know things…We do…Pass it on…In a special way that only I know about…Here, I’ll write it down for you.

Suddenly we are swamped with everyone’s simple way of passing it on that couldn’t possibly fail. And that would be fine. But education is a broad church. There are lots of subjects. And each one comes with expert opinion on how to pass it on the best. Before you know it, you are carrying around multiple approaches for multiple subjects and, due to the fact that they each consider themselves to be the most important thing to pass on, you become overwhelmed as you try and compress all of them into a single day of lessons. Not to mention the other areas of education that soon became passed on by the experts: behaviour, teaching styles, assessment strategies, feedback strategies, etc.

Multiple ideas for every facet of education have wormed their way into school culture. None of them necessarily bad, when explored on an individual basis, but when viewed collectively, they muddy the water, like some weird educational homeopathy.

It is, or course, the job of leaders to ensure that teachers are not forced to work in a complicated mess. But it is often these school leaders who zealously create over-complicated blue-prints that must be obeyed, distorting the formula thus:

Professionals don’t know things…we do…follow this plan.

At best, leaders are enablers: defining a vision and supporting individual teachers to be effective for their individual class. At worst, they are short-sighted architects: building their empire upon quicksand and distorting ideas for improvements into self-serving goals.

We need to reclaim the simplicity and subtlety of education.

So, in an extraordinary display of arrogance that seemingly feeds into everything I claim is wrong with education, let me present you with my own formula that will help you:

You know what is needed…Keep it simple…Make it work.

This can be applied to every stratum in every school. What’s more, I’ll prove it to you in less than one
two, okay, three sentences.

Governors

Know the school, the people in it and what needs to be done. Don’t just know the school through meetings and minutes: visit, observe, listen and learn, in short: add value. Support and challenge because you’re behind the school and you know the context.

Senior Leaders

Don’t have any long-winded or stupid ideas that are more work for everyone else than for you. Be clear about the school’s goals and allow everyone to care as much as you. Be respectful and loyal to your team and help people become better.

Middle Leaders

Know what else is going on in the school to help put your priorities in perspective. Listen to people and, if necessary, adapt your every-day expectations whilst keeping your overall expectations and your chin up. Help other leaders secure their goals – it’s not a competition.

Teachers

Understand that many facets of teaching (marking, planning, data analysis) are tactics that you can use to help children learn more effectively than if you don’t use them. You can always get better so let those around you help you. Most of all, keep it simple: kids don’t know stuff…you do…pass it on.

Support staff

Believe that you can make a difference to a teacher’s effectiveness by the role you play in their lives – look out for them and they’ll look out for you. Remember that your role is to support learning, not prop it up. You deserve to be invested in too, so, if you haven’t been on training for years or if all you do on insets is take down displays, make some noise.

Heads

The whole school is in your hands but remember, you’re a head teacher; you’re not God or Chuck Norris, so tread carefully, be nice and know it’s not really all down to you. And try teaching once in a while. All of the above and oh, stop writing bloody blogs.

So there you are…pass it on.

Now leaving from runway number 3

theprimaryhead3 Comments

You know that feeling when you’re flying on a plane at that height somewhere in between the land and the clouds, and you look out of your window (or you lean silently over the sleeping man to the side of you in order to look out of the window) and you see the earth all peaceful below you. Maybe you’re close enough to see little cars, moving like ants, or houses all nestled in neat little rows. The organisation of it all seems so well structured, even the irregular fields seem to have a sense of order. As you look down, trying to ignore the snoring of the sleeping man, you bask in the serenity of it all. Everything is peaceful. Everything seems right with the world. None of the arguments, fights, wars or politics that cause so much stress, pain and heartache for so many people are evident. You wonder why the world doesn’t seem so peaceful when you’re actually on it, you wonder why people can’t appreciate the beauty of life on earth and just get along with everyone else. For such a big place, the little creatures that inhabit it sure do cause a lot of chaos.

At this point on the flight I usually recline back on my chair, often at the exact time the man has awoken, gasped and said ‘Excuse me, do you mind?’, and I think about my own life back on the ground. When I think about school I think of the messy, loud, chaotic place that I spend most of my life thinking and worrying about. It is a lovely place to be but it is not a serene place of calm. If you read my SEF you would be forgiven for thinking that it is a Buddhist temple – a mecca for learning and positivity that exudes a zen-like calm.

This is not what my school is like.

Don’t get me wrong. My SEF isn’t fictional. It’s just written from a distance. It is written from the luxury of 15,000 feet above playground level. It documents the school from a distance rather than from the runway. If you spent time in my school and then read my SEF you would see the correlation between the document and the building. If, however, you read the SEF during home time, or whilst you were on duty during wet play, or while you were trying to get a class on a coach about to go to the zoo, you would probably beg to differ. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even have the luxury of time to read it, which is a good thing, if I caught you reading something when you should be helping children alight a coach I’d bring you in for a disciplinary.

The SEF is a school’s tourist information centre that seeks to give valuable bits of information to the visitor. They are the air-travel equivalent of the captain announcing over the radio that, as long as the wind speed continues, the plane should make good progress and they may even arrive ahead of schedule. The problem of course is that a SEF immediately puts the school, as written on paper, in suspended animation. It is no longer representative of a living breathing organisation. As soon as the words of the SEF are written, they are trapped by their own static existence on the page.

For too long though, the only people interested in reading the SEF have been external visitors to schools. School tourists are mainly Ofsted inspectors, HMI and the local authority. And, just as holiday destinations will cater for the needs of the people that most commonly descend upon them during holiday season, so do school SEFs try to meet the wishes of their readers.

For example, an Ofsted inspector understands what words like ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’ mean when they read them on a SEF. What’s ‘more an Ofsted inspector likes to read these words, we know they do. Ofsted inspectors are the equivalent of English tourists who upon going to Spain find the pub that serves Carling and shows episodes of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ on the telly. They find it comforting, they know where they stand and with any luck, everyone speaks the same language.

However, these words are rather limiting. If you’re not careful you can become enslaved by your SEF as a result of trying to crowbar in these ‘judgements’ at every turn. Heads become akin to frustrated sous chefs desperate to be let loose on an a la carte menu only to be told by the Head Chef that it’s a fixe prix menu or nothing. As soon as you type any of these words onto your SEF, you set in stone a judgement and you falsely elevate your school into the clouds – where everything is peaceful and life is not quite as we know it.

Well, I say no more.

I no longer want my SEF to be a view of my school from above. I want it to be a down and dirty vision of my school, as it is on the ground. I want my SEF to reflect what we actually do and what we want to do better. I am not concerned with using vocabulary that an external person can latch onto just so they can say ‘Yes I agree’ or ‘I wouldn’t use that word if I were you’. I want to go beyond the two sacred words that apparently mean everything’s ok (for now). I want to stretch the possibilities beyond outstanding and I want to tackle issues that are important to us rather than ones that are high ranking in the inspection framework. In short: I want my SEF to be more.

Real life is gritty and everyone has their own lives to lead and problems to overcome. Well so does my school. And so will my SEF. Judge me if you want, when you’re flying over my school and looking down from the clouds. But I’m changing flight paths. Because my school isn’t all neat and tidy. I’m refusing to read the safety instructions and I’ll be dammed if I’m helping you with your oxygen mask.

I’m going bigger. I’m getting messier. And I bet I’ll do better.