This year marks the end of my second decade in teaching. The wonder and the frustration of this job is that the learning never ends. Every year has been full of surprises, from the moments of sheer joy to the maddening reminders of what doesn’t work.
This time last year, I was finishing off my first draft of How to Survive in Teaching. Chock full of words of wisdom and experience from hundreds of teachers. Surely, I thought, all bases must be covered. But no - there is always more and the book itself is not the end, but a contribution to an endless process of conversation and reflection about how we balance teaching with life; how we balance an acknowledgement of the significant challenges in the profession with a celebration of a truly wonderful job.
As we limp to the end of this final term, here are some of my own lessons learned (or re-learned) in my middle leadership role this year.
1. Own your decisions
I took on an awful lot this year. Three Year 11 classes, two departments and regular writing and speaking commitments. Work-life balance is something that always needs to be kept in check for me, and there were parts of the year during which I’d hit Friday night barely able to string a sentence together, I was so exhausted. Nobody forced me to do all this - and I’m honestly not sure I would have done it any differently. To work so intensively with 70 students in their final year at the school has been demanding but the most fulfilling thing ever. I have met so many inspirational people at events, and my practice has been better for it.
2. If you ask people what they think, be prepared for them to tell you
Despite putting into print tons of useful advice, I’m human too and am better at some elements of my job than others. I don’t always remember to say thank you every time I should. Sometimes I feel the pressure and it shows in my communication with others. I can be annoyingly full-on at times. Attention to detail and organisation skills are not natural strengths of mine - I have to work hard at them. I know these things about myself, but it still stings when people point them out.
It’s important to me that my department feels their voices are heard, so each year, I put out a survey at the end of the year to ask them for their honest opinions so we can build and learn in the year ahead (happy to share the questions with anyone who’d like them). I admit needing to make sure I’m in a good and strong place before I open the results. Resilience is something that also needs to be kept in check and sometimes it’s necessary to dig deep. But I’d rather keep communication open and feel stung occasionally than not know what people are really thinking.
3. Don’t perpetuate the ‘us and them’
It’s the easiest thing in the world, as a middle leader, to declare in a meeting that ‘we’re doing this because they have asked us to’. They, of course, are the senior leadership team and the bosses.
To generalise unashamedly, many teachers loathe change. And my goodness, the changes in recent years in the profession have been dizzying. So delivering messages around change, especially when the idea has come from beyond the department, is really difficult. I suppose that, again, this is about ownership. Yes, we have to do it. No, we haven’t got a choice. But we’ll make sure we make it work for us and our students. We’ll do this by identifying the things we can control and doing them as well as we can. Change can actually be a fantastic opportunity, quite literally, for a clear-out, for reminding ourselves of the fundamental things we know how to do well, and for a reminder of our common purpose: to improve the life chances of our young people
4. Celebrate more
As teachers, we’re dab hands at post-mortems - at picking over the wreckage of a disappointing set of results or an ill-informed decision. The thing we often forget to do is to take the time to stop and focus on what we got right - and ensure we keep doing it. In a climate of tighter budgets for schools, the biting reality of the importance of student bums on seats is more urgent than ever, so making plenty of positive noise about my department and my school and trying to use my writing to benefit the wonderful place where I work.
5. Never imagine one part of the year is going to be ‘easier’ than another
There will be people reading this to whom I have promised conversations or emails in recent weeks whom I haven’t yet managed to contact. I have lost count of the number of times I used the phrase ‘after Year 11 leave’ in the run-up to the final exams. Rookie error. If anything, school got busier and more demanding as we focused on our other 1,000 students and prepared for another year ahead. There is no sitting still in teaching. Each term is demanding in its unique way, from the shortening days of the long Autumn term to the fierce intensity of the Spring term.
6. Assumptions are at the root of the majority of mistakes
I put my hand up to offering the dreaded, ‘but I thought you were aware…’ ‘I assumed you’d’ be told…’ ‘I thought you were putting that data in…’ more than once this year. If I analyse my myriad mistakes in my career, I’d estimate that around 90 per cent of them find their basis in assumption. Assuming nothing will be my constant note-to-self in the year ahead.
7. Middle leadership: the toughest gig of all?
Finally more controversial one. Middle leadership is really, really demanding and on many levels more so than SLT roles I have held. My fellow middle leaders have been my source of strength and much needed laugh-or-cry moments this year. A headteacher of mine once described middle leadership as the heart and lungs of a school. Sometimes it feels more like the middle of the sandwich, unable to please anyone, but it’s a role I am deeply proud to hold.
And now, let us limp to the end and allow ourselves a hugely well-earned break. We may not have changed the world yet, but we will have had an impact on many young lives. Long may our impact continue. Happy holidays.
