leadership

You want a piece of me?

theprimaryhead3 Comments

Serious question, asked @yorkshireht, how long do you think you can survive the pressure of headship over a career?

I love education. I absolutely adore it. It consumes me. It fills me up, right up until I’m fit to burst. Like a stick of Brighton rock, ‘education’ runs right through me.

And, believe me when I say that I love education in all its forms. I love the:

children, laughs, graft, pressure, data, policies, learning, breakthroughs, frustrations, changes, growth, teachers, playgrounds, trips, topics, behaviour, detentions, planning, marking, failures, ofsted, support staff, local authority, friends, colleagues, peers, social workers, therapists, parents, innovations, camaraderie, help, governors, arguments, struggles, budgets, office, safeguarding, displays, corridors, libraries, subjects, homework…

I could go on but I think you get the point. There is nothing I would rather spend my time doing than contributing to the legacy of education. It’s noble. It’s honest. It makes a difference. It’s a privilege.

You get me working in your school and, you might not get the best headteacher in the world, but you sure do get a devoted one.

I will be yours and I will act on your behalf at all times. No matter what stake you hold within the community, I have your best interests at heart and I will never give up the belief that we are going to make it, together.

Odd then that my response to @yorkshireht would be: not sure how long I can sustain my role in education.

Why is that? I’m not old. I’ve not been doing it for that long. Why on earth would I want to get out?

It’s not, despite where you think this could be going, the workload. I’m at my happiest when I’m busy. You know that manic feeling in Term 2, just between the assessment deadline and Christmas, I think that’s the most wonderful time of the year. I revel in firing on all cylinders. So when I hear about the endless changes coming our way from way up high, I don’t necessarily baulk. I may not embrace but I aim to embed. I enjoy the challenge of making it work and I’m proud that, as a profession, we constantly evolve.

It’s also not because demands have increased or goalposts have changed. Although yes, both of these facts are making my job quite tricksy. I’ve always been a pretty calm and collected frood, but even I can feel those stress-related behaviours seeping out of me as I try to improve upon the already improved-higher standards that are now expected to be higher than they were last time I blinked. But as I said earlier…I like change, so, no, it’s not because the demands are increasing.

So what is it, I hear no one ask.

I think what is slowly grinding me down is the growing perception that schools, Heads and teachers are public property. Now, I know we work on behalf of the public and I know that we should, quite rightly, be held accountable for anything written in our job descriptions. I understand this and accept it wholeheartedly. But over time this has become confused with being accountable for things that any individual just doesn’t happen to like. There is a growing public mind-set that if something is not liked, not only must it be expressed, but it should also, by virtue of having been communicated, change. This is also the case for individuals’ misunderstanding of national policy or educational headlines: we must respond to what they think and any attempt to ‘put them straight’ through use of our knowledge is smeared as subterfuge, back-peddling and uncaring unprofessionalism.

It cannot be a coincidence that I am feeling this during an era where the profession is on its knees begging for its professional stature to be handed back. When people are told that they can create their own schools with their own curriculums, why should the state maintained parent care what their local school has to say anymore? When schools can appoint unqualified teachers then why shouldn’t parents tell the qualified ones what to do too? If any school can be a coasting school – and no one really knows what the definition of ‘coasting’ means yet – then why should any parent feel satisfied? Why isn’t any gripe or individual’s whim worthy of whole school change?

You see, what starts out as the public, rightly, not settling for low aspirations or quality education, ends with the potential vilification of perfectly good schools and professionals, for the sake of matters of limited consequence. As this continues, so strengthens the belief that the professionals within the school are completely owned by the public, and every demand, no matter how contradictory to the last, must be enforced, or else, we are accused of apathy. The truth that schools are accountable for achievement and children’s well-being has morphed into the fallacy that we are accountable for everyone’s idea of everything else that is important as well.

As the Head, I feel this the most. I am the one expected to jump the highest whilst dancing to the largest number of tunes. Personal comments are expected to wash over me. People are allowed to judge me holistically without respecting my right to be a person and I must take it because I am a public servant. My ownership is up for grabs and every piece of me is on sale. A public servant I may be, but I feel as though my soul has become as accountable as my performance.

Something’s got to give. And I’m not sure I want it to be me.

Come back satisfactory, all is forgiven!

theprimaryhead7 Comments

EpicFail01The taking away of ‘satisfactory’ was meant to raise expectations. It was a canny move to signify that things had to get better. Teachers and schools could no longer rest on their laurels. From now on, if they weren’t good, then they weren’t good enough. You can see why, I mean would you be pleased if the answer to any of these questions was ‘it was satisfactory’?

  • How was the dinner I made you?
  • What did people say about the poem I read out at Gran’s funeral?
  • Was that just the best sex ever?

No, in all those cases, and in any other you probably care to mention, ‘satisfactory’ doesn’t quite hit the spot. So why, it was argued, should it be used to describe standards in education? More importantly, why would we be satisfied that children were getting a satisfactory education in our schools?

It was quite clear that something radical needed to happen to make us all buck up our ideas. We could have just raised the bar, turned the satisfactory dial up to 11, made it ‘one more’ harder to attain. We could have changed the interpretation of the word itself so that it was not seen as a ‘settling for’ judgement, but as an adequate description of getting the job done: no less, but certainly no more. But we went for something different: extinction.

Out of the ashes of satisfactory came a new judgement: Requires Improvement. This was a huge tonal shift in terms of what was, and what was not, now acceptable. After all, imagine receiving the response ‘I think if we’re honest, it required improvement’ to any of these questions:

  • How was the dinner I made you?
  • What did people say about the poem I read out at Gran’s funeral?
  • Was that just the best sex ever?

Suddenly, being satisfactory doesn’t seem quite so bad.

But hey, it’s all about the kids, and many of us agreed with the sentiment that satisfactory wasn’t good enough, so we rolled with it. A particularly shrewd move on the part of Ofsted was to not provide any descriptions for what being RI would look like. Instead, if it wasn’t good, it therefore required improvement. There were still guidelines for what inadequate provision looked like, to make sure that we knew the difference between ‘not good’ and ‘Christ alive man what are you doing?’

At the time I thought this was genius. Not because I thought more schools would now be judged to be requiring improvement (and therefore failing because being good was now the only acceptable status for a school) but because it would allow judgements to be tailored to the school. All schools are different and have their nuances; by not providing a one-size-fits-all-tick-list for things that are not yet quite right, I felt, would mean that an RI school would now have a carefully sculpted support plan that would fit their context.

We’ve lived without satisfactory since 2012 and, as a new government could be on the horizon, and as Ofsted itself is thinking about evolving, I’ve been evaluating the impact of life in the RI age. Whereas I still agree with the principle of satisfactory not being good enough and RI being individual to a school’s context I don’t think it has completely worked.

Firstly, politicians have not stayed out of it. Time after time schools have been told that there are more and more reasons why they are not good. The expectation that schools are responsible for solving all of society’s ills and challenges has allowed the apparently non-existent criteria for RI to grow exponentially.

Somebody decides that all infants should be able to read a list of words (some of them literally nonsense) in a test, if they can’t the school is not good. Someone thinks that schools should be teaching PE to a standard that will allow Team GB to win every gold medal at the next Olympics, if a school does not provide a medal winner they are not a good school. For some reason it is deemed important for schools to teach an un-agreed set of British Values, if they don’t (despite the fact that no one knows what these values actually are) they are not a good school. If the most vulnerable, damaged, and poorest children in our society do not make accelerated academic progress (it doesn’t matter about their emotional stability and well-being and how you are impacting upon that) the school is not good. If a school is not assessing pupils accurately (in a world where each school is now assessing pupils differently so who can say) then they are not a good school.

These are all areas that are highlighted in recent Ofsted reports. They are all reasons that can contribute to why a school is judged good or RI. But they weren’t in the rule book when we started the race. The world changes, I know. We have to adapt in order to meet the needs our children have in this rapidly changing world, I get it. But it’s not good enough to hang a school out to dry because at some point something either went wrong in one part of the country, or, something became a news story, and a politician decided that it was a school’s job to sort it all out. It is not fair that the lack of criteria within an RI judgement has become the stick by which to beat us with.

Secondly, the invention of RI and its misappropriation has damaged the psyche of education. It has allowed schools and teachers to become demonised too readily by politicians, the media and the public. Satisfactory may have been a dirty word behind closed doors but it had a level of acceptability to it as far as the public was concerned. In short, satisfactory schools were left alone to improve. Requires Improvement and its subsequent lack of clarity means that anyone can now get involved and lay claim to knowing why a particular school is failing. In reality this means that schools are sitting targets and anyone at any time can have a pop at them on whatever issue they’ve read in the papers that morning. Even the Prime Minister has encouraged parents to be ‘sharp elbowed’ and demand the best, not for all children, but for their children alone. This has undermined schools time and time again. The level of expectation for education is at an all-time high and yet respect for educators seems to be in the gutter. I can’t help but thinking it is partly because of this change in language coupled with a heightened sense that expectations – whatever they are – must be, should be, higher.

Finally, I have been reflecting on the use of RI in the classroom. I was talking to a Head on Friday night about making judgements in lessons. She pointed out that although no teacher was ever thrilled about being told their lesson was satisfactory, being satisfactory had never made a teacher cry. RI on the other hand…well let’s just say you better make sure tissues are in this year’s budget. Why is that? The Head I was talking to said that satisfactory was an important judgement to have in your arsenal as a supportive Head because it allowed you to take into account context. Even the best teachers go through rough patches for a myriad of different reasons, and quite often they’re personal. Yes non-teacher readers, teachers have lives and just like yours, lives are complicated, messy and sometimes painful. If a typically good teacher delivered a mediocre lesson you used to be able to use your discretion and say that it was satisfactory. Not great but no worries. If you were concerned you could go back in and observe again or you could casually drop in and see if things were ok – it was up to you – and nobody asked, as there were no great expectations to react to a satisfactory lesson observation. Now you judge it RI and what happens? Everyone wants to know what support plan you’re putting in place. Oh my God you’ve got an RI teacher what are you doing about it? Teachers know this. Teachers know that being judged RI has consequences. Without satisfactory it’s harder to enable the necessary subtleties needed to lead a school successfully, which, at times, means sensitively. I know we triangulate a range of evidence and that one RI lesson isn’t everything, but again, the emotional impact that being judged RI has on a teacher, I have to wonder, sometimes, is it worth it? As my colleague reflected on Friday, she was satisfactory for twelve years and never received the level of high risk scrutiny she would have done had the satisfactory been RI. Now she’s outstanding. Maybe she’d have been outstanding quicker? Maybe. Or maybe the pressure of RI would have finished her off along with half her teachers.

I still don’t have a problem with the concept of requiring improvement in itself. I just wonder if by removing the middle ground completely we were actually being set up to fail right from the start. It will be interesting to see how Ofsted develops and what our next government does to improve education and public perceptions of schools and teachers. I doubt satisfactory will ever resurface but there are times when I wish it had never gone away.

In it for the money

theprimaryhead4 Comments

I’m going to come right out and say it. I love my business manager. And, considering the changes that have occurred in headship over the years, that’s just as well. As leading a school has become just as much about running a business as it has about educating children, I can think of no other role that has risen in prominence as much as the school business manager.

When I first became a teacher I was aware that the school had a bursar. A man would turn up once a month and spend an afternoon in an office with the Head and an open laptop working out if the school had any money left. His role was to check the numbers and to do the books although his role had nothing to do with any of the books I was concerned with. I don’t think any of us, not even the Head, would have described him as a fully-fledged member of staff.

Many years later, when I became a Deputy, I worked closely with the school bursar who later became the school’s business manager, mainly because we shared an office but also because, as part of my NPQH, I had decided to do a course on ‘strategic financial management’. The very fact that I had chosen that course highlights the growing importance and accountability with which Heads had to think strategically with the cash that, even for local authority maintained schools, they were granted more ‘freedoms’ with. The main drive being: don’t end up with a deficit budget.

I learnt a lot from this person, in particular about the relationship between them and the Head/senior leadership team. These relationships although highly positive still had their frustrations. For a start we worked to different time scales. Try as she might, the business manager could not find a way of getting any member of the SLT to understand that the money ran out at the end of March and not the last day before the summer holidays. Stalemate conversations would occur all through April concerning the logical/illogical (depending on your point of view) reasons as to why it was literally impossible to buy any more glue sticks until the start of the new financial year.

There were also maddening conversations around setting predictive budgets for the next three years.

Business Manager: But you don’t understand, if you don’t cut back spending, not only will you have no money but you will owe the local authority 2.4 million pounds.

Head: Oh it will be fine.

Business Manager: No it won’t. Look at the formula for next year’s budget.

Head: Ok, let’s have a look. Hang on what’s this? You’ve just handed me a page and a half of nonsensical algebra equations, I asked for the budget formula damn it.

Business Manager: That is the formula and according to this your budget in three years’ time is fifteen shillings and sixpence.

Head: Oh….oh well it will be fine.

Somehow it always was. A combination of new and convoluted funding streams that, although weren’t part of the overall budget, came in at different times for different, often political, reasons; natural staffing changes; school incomes that never seemed to materialise until the day before your ‘deficit’ budget was about to get sent to governors and then suddenly you had a carry-forward of £34000; and sheer luck/skill on behalf of the Head (depending on your point of view) all made sure that the school was kept in the black.

School business managers were now fully accepted members of the staff team and, in my own experience as a Head, the school business manager is as vital as a good Deputy – and in many ways more so.

There is a delicious bluntness to a good business manager’s perspective. I am highly skilled at diplomacy and trying to get everything and everyone to move on, fit together and be effective. I like individuals to feel empowered and equal. When things are not going according to plan, rather than use performance related pay as a stick to beat the under-performer with until they submit, I prefer to invest in them because everyone deserves a chance to succeed. And then I’ll chat to my business manager who will point out that this ‘problem’ is costing me £20,000 more a year than the highly effective NQT down the corridor. Suddenly my liberal and supportive nature seems quite weak.

It’s akin to child protection. It is easier to try and ignore a potential safeguarding issue. You may have a hunch, there may be issues but you know it wouldn’t meet threshold levels so you could be tempted to shrink back and hope for the best. Then you remember that you are a Head and it is your duty to safeguard the children in your care so, even though it won’t cross social care’s threshold, it has crossed yours, so you act, you put support in place and a child is kept safe and secure. The easy road is not often the right one. Take a step back and look at the actual cost of a member of staff who is not delivering and you realise that you are not ensuring that the children are getting a good enough value for money deal on their education. That’s the perspective my business manager gives me.

It’s cold, I’ll grant you, but it’s a conversation no other member of my staff will have with me. That is not to say I no longer believe in staff support or development-as does my business manager for that matter- but it’s an important part of the equation when making strategic decisions that will impact on the education of the children. And it’s not just the cost of teachers that my business manager challenges me on, it’s everything. Resources, initiatives, schemes, programmes of study, consultants, agencies…the list is endless because nothing in this world is free. A good business manager knows the cost of everything. A good Head knows the educational impact of everything. But only when you put those two together can the impact on whole school improvement be judged.

That is partly why I love my business manager. They provide me with an insight that I still find it too easy to forget. Now, despite what you may currently be thinking, my business manager is not some cold hearted terminator who places balancing the books above everything else. They understand that their role is to make sure that the school is financially able to improve. As a valued member of SLT they too will scrutinise data and books and planning and, although they do not judge educational effectiveness, they are guided by the SLT members who do, and together, we evaluate overall effectiveness. Due to a better understanding of our educational aims, our business manager has sought out funding streams and presented us with ideas to help us raise standards in ways that no one else on SLT would ever have thought of. In terms of adding value to SLT therefore, our business manager has added a conservatory as well as a loft extension complete with en-suite and underfloor heating.

I still don’t understand budget formulas. I still get ‘that’ look from my business manager when I announce my next big idea, the look that says ‘and how are you intending to pay for that then?’ I still have to manage my business manager’s frustration when a year’s worth of ordering comes in on the 5th April because subject leaders still don’t understand how the financial year works. I still ask for the impossible when trying to squeeze every last penny out of my budget claiming that a carry-forward of twenty quid will be fine. I still have to occasionally say ‘it’s not all about the money though is it?’

Despite all of that, I can honestly say, that without my business manager, the school would be a poorer place – and I ain’t just talking about the wonga.