Reflections on school leadership

First published on The Future Leaders Trust Insights blog on 13 November 2015 (no longer available). Generation Culture , a new campaign to improve creative and cultural education for pupil premium children in London is asking schools to “do just one thing” to boost their cultural offer. I’m not convinced that doing “just one thing” is enough. The Chair of A New Direction (AND), Maggie Atkinson argues, “cultural education is a right not a privilege”; but what exactly is cultural education and why is it important?  The definition of cultural education proposed by Darren Henley, Chair of the Arts Council, is a shopping list covering everything from archives to the built environment to dance to museums to poetry to the visual arts (though missing food).  The definition I prefer was offered by Smita Bora of Westminster Academy, who suggested it should be about “generating a love of unfamiliar experiences” (which might be as much about introducing Eton boys to stree...

First published on The Future Leaders Trust Insights blog on 20 October 2015 (no longer available). Yesterday morning, Policy Exchange and ASCL conference hosted a conference on the future of the teaching workforce. I went along because we know from our network of nearly 150 heads and 450 senior leaders – as well as the CEOs we’re working with on our Executive Educators programme – that teacher supply is a huge issue. The shortage is a major disincentive to senior leaders considering headship, especially in rural and coastal areas and contributes to the other (perpetual) “crisis” in the school workforce around the supply of great heads. In our world of high-stakes accountability, a head’s job is dependent on the ability to hire quality teachers – so a shortage in their supply is one more disincentive to taking on headship. The reasons for the shortage of teachers were well-rehearsed at the conference. They include increasing demand from pupil numbers and curriculum change...

First published on The Future Leaders Trust Insights blog on 1 October 2015 (no longer available). In the 2014-15 academic year, 62% of Future Leaders securing primary headship were women, as were 50% of those appointed to secondary headship. Overall, 53% of teachers supported to headship by The Future Leaders Trust were women. This is the first time the proportion of female Future Leaders has been above even 40% and bucks a trend which has historically seen few women in headship positions in the UK. I talked to some of our 2015 Future Leaders female heads to find out how they did it and what advice they would offer to those hoping to follow in their footsteps. Some common themes emerged – around the importance of role models and coaches; adopting explicit confidence-building techniques; drawing on their moral purpose to keep going in the face of setbacks; and the need for a network of family and friends offering practical support with balancing work and family. ...

First published on TFLT Insights blog on 25 September 2015 (no longer available). Schools across the country face the challenge of student behaviour on a daily basis – yet we still hold on to old-fashioned preconceptions of who can manage the problems in our schools. I recently visited two Future Leaders who have just taken up headships in challenging secondary schools in the North East. In their first couple of weeks, both have focused on raising expectations around pupil behaviour. Neither has done anything revolutionary; they have chosen first to enforce the behaviour policies already in place. Rigorously and consistently. Every day. And they are already considering how to further raise expectations from there. The impact is already evident on pupils and staff alike. Both schools were calm and pupils clearly knew what was expected of them, even if they weren’t yet meeting some of those expectations without prodding. Staff were positive about the change of atmosphere, a pr...

First published on Staffrm as part of the #WomenEd #digimeet, 13 September 2015. At a recent Future Leaders Trust ‘women into headship’ day, I heard too many stories of aspiring female heads being held back and undermined by the very people who should be championing them – other women. So much for sisterhood! How could this be? Digging a little deeper, it wasn’t necessarily that women behave worse than men (though they sometimes do), but that women’s expectations of other women are higher. And rightly so! It’s bad enough that women are judged harder than men, without those judgements coming from other women. Women and men should be better than that. But as women leaders we have a duty to ourselves and each other to be exemplary in showing our male colleagues, husbands, boyfriends, male students and sons – not forgetting our female colleagues, wives, girlfriends, female students and daughters – the way. The world would be a better place if the conduct of the female party leader...

First published on The Future Leaders Trust's Insights blog on 8 September 2015 (no longer available). The relationship between a school CEO and their board is crucial to delivering successful outcomes for the children they serve. With the number of multi-academy trusts (MATs) increasing year on year – and the number of children in their care rising with it – it is vital that these relationships are well-managed to improve the life chances of every child. On 7 September Academy Ambassadors ran a development event for the business people (mostly business men , though there was a smattering of women) it has so far recruited to serve on MAT boards. I was invited to speak on a panel exploring the CEO-board relationship. My remarks drew on lessons from the pilot programme we ran in the spring for aspiring and current MAT CEOs – re-launched over the summer as Executive Educators , with the first cohort starting this month. Reassuringly the themes emerging from the course echoed ...

First published in Schools Week  on 4 July 2015. Figures suggest governors have a gender bias when they appoint headteachers. So what happens when they don’t have a say? I have written before about the apparent gender bias among some governing bodies that contributes to women being significantly under-represented in headship. So I was interested to see what would happen when we took governors out of the equation in recruiting headship-ready leaders for the Talented Leaders programme. The results were fascinating: 44.8 per cent of applicants were women and 45 per cent of those who were successful in the selection process were women. My conclusion is that there is much we can learn about female leaders’ ambitions and the likelihood of them being realised when governors’ preconceptions about who makes a good headteacher are eliminated. That women are almost as likely to apply to the programme as men challenges the notion that women aren’t up for headship. Although 44....