education

The Squeezed Middle

theprimaryhead1 Comment

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!

Ofsted – it may have been tough but it made me realise how much I care

theprimaryhead2 Comments

images

Since becoming Head Teacher of a new school in September I felt I had a proportionately dispassionate view of the school. I had invested all of my energies so far in establishing what sort of school it was and working out the most effective way of making it my school. This meant re-establishing a school vision, ethos, set of expectations for standards and galvanizing the whole school community together. I had been pleased with how rapidly things got moving and as we entered 2013, after two terms, I felt that although it was becoming my school, my judgement of the school was still firmly rooted in the past. I believed that this was a luxury and I used it almost as a suit of armour: I could robustly challenge everything but with a safety net of it not being my fault. This also worked well with staff as I wasn’t necessarily judging or ‘blaming’ them but the systems under which they had been operating. This also allowed them the freedom to commit whole heartedly to my vision (or move on).

The pace of change since September had been rapid with numerous systems and structures being developed, invented, and implemented: all designed to improve standards across the school…at some point. I made the judgement call that the systems had to be in place first, in line with everyone’s commitment to them and then we could focus on using those systems to improve and monitor their effectiveness. So, I felt that I was in the ideal place for an early inspection and I hoped the school would get a challenging inspection judgement to help justify my changes. I was certain that I would be immune to any feelings of responsibility of past standards and that I would only feel fortified and reassured, ready to push on some more.

And then I got the phone call.

I was fine, I kept my cool and as I calmly told staff and reassured them that we knew what we had to do, I was certain that I could convince Ofsted that I was the right person, in the right school, doing the right job. As the first day continued, two rather unpleasant feelings began to run through me in successive waves: I was not doing the right job and I was letting everybody down.

I have never felt so inadequate in my life especially when trying to justify whole school trends over time after spending 22 weeks in the job. The ‘narrative’ of the school that I had been telling myself, my staff, my governors, my parents was falling on deaf ears. Suddenly the firm ground I had been standing on was crumbling from underneath me as the inspection began spiralling out of my control. I was terrified.

By late afternoon, I had concluded that my judgement on how to play the inspection had completely failed. I had planned to be incredibly positive. Positive about the inspection, positive about the judgement I knew we would get, positive about the size of the task in hand, positive about the abilities of everyone to get the job done. This evidently is not what the Ofsted team wanted to hear. Instead, they wanted to hear me say how awful I thought everything was and how when I had first arrived I had thought the school was a bloody disgrace to education. If they had heard that come from my lips, only then would they believe that the governors had backed a winner when they appointed me.

If at this point I was feeling inadequate as a leader, it was after the team had left that I began to feel even worse. Why? Because everyone was being so, well, nice. Teachers, support staff, governors and many parents began rallying around me saying incredibly supportive things to me. (Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t curled up on the floor weeping and declaring that the school might as well be taken out to the knacker’s yard and shot) but as I went around trying to support them, it was clear that they wanted to support me. It was then that I realised I wasn’t as detached to this school as I had tried to make myself believe. I also realised that my initial plan for improving the school had worked: everyone was united and behind me but sadly this just made me feel worse. On the outside I was trying very hard to put on a calm and brave face but inside all I was thinking was: ‘You’ve all put your faith in me…and all I’ve done is let you down.’ It was almost too much and that was the real surprise: I love my school!

Luckily, day two went better. The team seemed more willing to listen and they finally began to say the same things that I had been saying all throughout day one. By the end of the inspection they concluded that I did in fact know the issues of the school and I could be trusted to implement improvements. Was it frustrating to have them write areas to develop that were identical to the ones I had identified on my school development plan and school self-evaluation plan? Maybe.  Did they have to conduct day one with their ears blocked and eyes closed and unable to listen to my story? Maybe not. But, due to their uncompromising attitudes throughout that day they allowed me to see, for the first time, that I am leading a school community who trust me and want me to do my job to improve their school. They also made me realise that I am possibly, more attached to the school than anyone else and for that I suppose I should be grateful. So through slightly gritted teeth: ‘Thank you Ofsted.’

Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Mr Squeers.

theprimaryhead1 Comment

One of my largest gripes with the current government’s handling of primary education was the snatching away of (then) current frameworks and curriculum guidance with no replacement in sight for years. I know, I know! As a Head Teacher I could have quite easily mapped out a whole school framework for English & Maths based on a set of principles laid down in the renewed (old) framework for Literacy & Maths.  However that would mean messing around Google looking for the archive files, Gove’s online lair for banned practical and useful resources, like Indiana Jones’s less brave nephew.

But it wasn’t just the new (old) Literacy & Maths framework that had gone: the whole ruddy renewed (old) national curriculum had gone! The good one, which Rose had contributed to – that was almost but not totally the same as the current (old, old) national curriculum but with a bit more skills and the long sentences split into smaller ones. I know, I know! I could have bought into a corporate curriculum that ‘guaranteed’ to be in line with current government legislation and also ‘promised’ to be fun. (You could tell it was fun because one of the topics was called ‘Chocolate’. )

No it was far easier for me to sit back and wait for the new National Curriculum. And wait I did.  After a lot of waiting I could only think that this new curriculum was going to be amazing! I mean they were not doing a rushed job; they were really taking their time. And I waited, and waited and carried on waiting, even when the rumours starting flying around that it was just going to be about knowledge and content. ‘No!’ I said, standing on my chair batting older, more grumpy heads on the nose with a rolled up copy of Gove’s Bible, ‘Our Government are not taking this long to craft a national curriculum based on lists of stuff children should know and they are definitely not taking this long because they’ve nicked it from an American approach to education and they have to go through all 6000 pages changing ‘Math’ to ‘Maths’.  

So I carried on waiting until the day finally came and the proposed national curriculum arrived. I missed it actually, but luckily quite a few people were tweeting it about so I got me a copy. It’s getting a bit of flak but I think there are some good bits in it. Most commentators however are tooling up and blog-bashing Gove over the wider curriculum elements and History in particular is getting firmly happy-slapped.

Granted, it does appear to be rather long lists of historical facts that are to be learnt and this does beg the question did Mr Gove get his ideas on effective education from Mr Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby? ‘When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. That’s our system.’ But, I personally don’t mind the scope of historical study outlined in the document but then again, I like history. Actually, I’ll rephrase that: I like knowing about stuff that happened in the past.

My biggest problem (about me not the curriculum) is that while I enjoy each episode of ‘Simon Schama’s A History of Britain’ I cannot retain a single sustained fact about any of Schama’s lessons six weeks afterwards. My biggest problem (about the curriculum, not me) is that it is in danger of producing a system of education that will not enable any child to retain a single sustained fact about any teacher’s lesson six weeks afterwards.

Effective education…really effective education, in my mind, is about: acquiring knowledge through the application of skills.  Just giving away knowledge isn’t good enough. The joy of primary school education is teaching children facts by equipping them with skills and this can only be done through a broad and balanced curriculum that allows teachers to combine subject skills to create well-crafted topics. Topics that inspire, allow children to think critically about the information they receive and allow them to actively engage in finding out about the world around them. Only then will you get passionate learners who are then ready to consume knowledge at a more advanced level. As much as Gove wants, children are not going to leave Key Stage 2 with a complete knowledge (let alone understanding) of the British Isles based upon his mighty list alone.

I am sure that Gove is not expecting teachers to just churn out facts and get children to memorise Kings and Queens but his draft history curriculum does seems disproportionately weighted towards understanding historical events through knowing FACTS. The fact that you can get children to learn about historical events, personalities, bias, politics, and culture through, say, art seems to be lost.

This, as I see it is the biggest disappointment of the national curriculum: it’s just a list that he want children to know. At least the old (old, old) national curriculum had the dignity to suggest some interesting schemes of work that linked with other subjects. (Yes, I know they got a bit over-subscribed to but they were a start) Gove apparently has neither the time nor the inclination to attempt something as complex as joined up thinking across the subjects. The idea that some subject’s skills lend themselves well to learning about other subject’s content is less important it seems than promoting selfish, single minded subjects.  The idea that education is about developing true intelligence and nurturing talent is less important than being able to test an individual’s penchant for fact regurgitation at the end of each year.

This expectation for mass content knowledge coupled with a lack of thought on curriculum skills may, I fear, mean that topics as I know and love them will disappear. Lessons will be dis-jointed. Children will learn isolated facts. The concept of cross-referencing skills over a series of subjects linked by one over-arching topic will be lost. Pupils will be judged on memory. Our nation will become a nation of pub quiz bores. Sadly the battle between producing ‘historians’ or ‘Statisticians’ will have been won and the interested, well-rounded and skilled citizens of the future will lie dead, underneath a car park full of cars parked by knowledgeable but ultimately useless eggheads.