When a school leadership team faces a significant challenge, among the questions surrounding leadership competence and action planning, a deeper question often emerges, one that has its foundations in character, resilience and vision: are you still in?

The question is not limited to those who happen to have “leader” in their job title. It’s the same challenge faced by an NQT during their nightly planning and marking marathons, or a pastoral mentor who finds themselves acting as a permanent mental health backstop for children as local support services dwindle.

The character of the individual is revealed and refined in the crucible of the challenge.

Resilience is one of the most common education buzzwords of our time, and can be offered as a catch-all solution to many of the pressures we face - if only the children, teachers, or budget were more resilient. It’s a pervasive concept.

From Latin roots, we draw the old English verb “to resile” - meaning “to return to the same place”, to “spring back” and “return to normal”. However, the word itself can feel quite uninspiring - easily reduced to just determination, grit, hanging in there, getting through, or as one headteacher defined it to me rather sadly recently: “Resilience means coping until I retire.”

It’s obvious that we need to rethink the concept of resilience. It’s only when we do that the adults and children in our care will be able to flourish. 

While few leaders arrive at school hoping for something serious to go wrong that day that will give their teams an opportunity to grow, we do nonetheless grow the most when faced with our greatest challenges. And this means not simply returning to normal, but bouncing back stronger.

In his book, The Road to Character, David Brooks writes: “Most people shoot for happiness, but feel formed through suffering…Suffering, like love, shatters the illusion of self-mastery…[and] oddly teaches gratitude.”

This has parallels to the New Testament, where St Paul writes: “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

As we face and embrace our greatest challenges as teachers and leaders, hope emerges as the lifeblood of leadership.

Rethinking resilience offers a different lens to re-imagine our present situation. It can help us move beyond the idea of just getting through or coping. In the most difficult situations we face in school, it is primarily the formation of character (as opposed to technical competencies) that defines our response and shapes relationships.

Early in my first term of teaching I was really struggling with a particular Year 9 class, who despite my best efforts did not appear inclined to listen to much of what I said. There’s something personally bruising about enduring an hour of 30 14-year-olds ignoring you. I shared my experience over lunch with an older colleague. He said: “look round this staff room, you probably think all these teachers have got it all together, but if any of them said they hadn’t once had the exact experience you are having now, it would be a lie.” It was such helpful reframing.

While it can make us feel vulnerable, approaching challenges together helps not only to bring benefits to the group, but to the wider community. This resilience in relationships stands at the heart of great teams, and of course extends to the classroom - where students need to see the teacher learning too, not simply doing and repeating.

The challenge of learning something new stretches and grows students’ ability to get through - almost like a muscle tearing and repairing itself stronger through effective training. In many ways, it’s a key question for students too as the pressure grows: am I still in?

More than 150 leaders are part of the Church of England’s NPQH programme across five regions nationally. In a recent interview, one head explained what resilience meant to her: “I’m supposed to have it all together, all the time…to be everything to everyone, and sometimes it just doesn’t feel like I can do that - the headteacher’s chair can become a lonely one, where it seems like no one really gets the complexity of what you’re facing. But yet all the books I read seem to tell me I need to be this superhead, an unshakable leader who by sheer force of will and consistency of action drives improvement and turns things around effortlessly. It’s not like that. I need the courage to tell a more realistic story.”

The road we are called down as leaders is not without challenge, obstacle or pain. In fact, if it were, a leader wouldn’t be needed.

Yet it is during the most difficult journeys that we grow the most. As we reframe the concept of resilience to something much more realistic and hopeful, our darkest moments as leaders can become our most fertile periods if we are ready to allow them to be.

We do this not by swerving or avoiding the challenges, but as leaders seeking to promote the flourishing of adults and children through challenging circumstances, we can be confident that our character and credibility are refined by the difficulty, and our resilience is thus being grown through our ability to take the next step.

In this way, we can demonstrate to our teams through our words and actions that we are indeed still in, and encourage them all confidently to stay in too.

Andy Wolfe is deputy chief education officer (leadership development) for the Church of England, which provides 4700 schools nationally and oversees leadership development through the Church of England Foundation for Educational Leadership - www.cefel.org.uk