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.

Welcome back!

theprimaryhead3 Comments

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The top five things that probably happened to you this week

Week one done. We did it. A full week. Well done everyone. We all managed to somehow set our alarm, get up, squeeze into some now ill-fitting item of clothing (because we never got round to buying a new work wardrobe) and dragged ourselves, blinking into the early morning light as we did so, into work.

Now whether you were dreading it or whether you were in fact a little bit excited about the prospect of returning to work I guarantee that one, if not all, of the following things happened to you during your first week back at school.

Number one: Your password has expired

Full of fresh ideas and invigorated by the summer you simply can’t wait to get going. You rock up to the school gates and suddenly realise that you’ve forgotten your security key. Damn it. Still you’re not alone, there’s an NQT waiting anxiously to be let it and the Head is trying to scale the fence rather than admit defeat. Finally someone comes along who is at least half-awake and you’re in. This progress however is short lived. For some reason you forgot to turn your PC off last summer and you’ve been locked out and try as you might you simply can’t remember your password. You try all the combinations it could possibly be but to no avail – luckily you wrote it in pencil underneath your desk in case of emergency – success! However once you are logged on you are immediately told to change it. Someone comes in and tells you to check your email as the inset agenda has just been sent around – something about inspiring a creative masterful mind-set within a de-radicalised society – you click on outlook only to be told that your password has expired, please re-enter your old one and then choose a new one. Sod that, you’ll just photocopy a paper version. As you join the back of the line you ask the person in front what’s taking so long? The reply: no one can remember their code for the photocopier. It’s going to be a long day.

Number two: I don’t want to know what you did last summer.

In between the inspirational inset talks, the blue sky thinking focus groups, the queues for coffee and the tussles over the laminator, people tend to chat about their summer. There’s always one though isn’t there. In between all the happy tales of sunburn, duty free and idyllic island retreats, there’s always one. One person who has had the worst holiday ever…Your passport had expired, the car wouldn’t start, the plane was delayed, the hotel wasn’t booked, the hotel was filthy, you hadn’t realised it was a hostel, the kids got shingles on the first day, the food was terrible, someone stole your travellers cheques, the sea was full of sewage, it wasn’t all inclusive, it rained, it was too hot, you were called back early, you missed your flight, you’d left the bathroom light on, squatters had moved in, you’re more tired now than when you left…well, thank goodness I asked.

Number three: The first lunch

After six weeks of brunches, liquid lunches and late night suppers, being back in school is quite a shock to the system. At about 10:00am your stomach, confused as to why it’s been active for the last four hours, begins to send your brain some very clear messages. Animal, vegetable or mineral, it doesn’t matter: just fill me. By 10:30am you can’t think of anything else. You need some food. You excuse yourself and make your way to the staff room where a host of ‘back to term treats’ had been spread out, alas, there is nothing left but crumbs. You hoover up the crumbs but it’s not enough. By 10:45am you realise that there is nothing else to do but open your lunch. Anyone looking at you tear open your sandwiches, eating yoghurt with your fingers and licking the inside of the crisp packet would be forgiven for thinking you had just relapsed after going cold turkey….sshhh, did someone say turkey?

Number four: The not so deep clean

Now, you seem to remember being told, at the end of last term, to make sure that you moved everything into the centre of the room, in preparation for the deep clean. Well you did that and every week through the holidays you popped back into school, just to see if the cleaners had been, so you could organise your classroom again before September. But each time, based on the layers of dust that had settled around the central island of book-corners and plastic drawer units, you had assumed that they still hadn’t been. By the last week, it was pretty evident that they weren’t coming, so you quickly sorted out your room and put up your new displays, smugly posting pictures of your tidy room on Instagram and Pinterest for the world to see #RaringToGo! Imagine your dismay when you walk into your classroom on Monday to find all your carefully organised pencil pots, book trays and personalised resources piled up in the middle of the carpet, your carefully negotiated tables all randomly scattered around the place and worst still, streaks of dried bleach spray running down your new maths mastery display. The caretaker wryly saying ‘Well I did warn you’ does not help, nor does the fact that every time you close the classroom door a snowstorm of dust falls on top of your head. Deep clean indeed!

Number five: Work in progress

‘We have lots of exciting developments going on over the summer’ boasted the last newsletter of the summer term. Tales of new ICT suites, adventure playgrounds, cookery stations, sports hall floors, woodland areas, additional classrooms, kitchens…left everyone feeling excited about the new lease of life that would be given to the school in September. The Head is absent for most of the inset and can occasionally be heard screaming down the phone such sentiments as ‘There’s a hole in my bloody playground the size of Gove’s ego, how exactly does that represent a service level agreement?’ On the first real day of school, all the children are ushered in via a side gate and playtimes are restricted to one class at a time because there aren’t enough hard-hats to go around. On Friday, the first newsletter ends: ‘We look forward to the new wing of our school being completed in the October half term, in the meantime our Year 6 children are really enjoying themselves taking turn sharing seats with Reception.’

Number six: Ofsted calls

Only joking. Right?

(For Kath)