Talking about school improvement in the middle of a pandemic might seem foolhardy when, for most school leaders, just trying to give children any sort of education is hard enough, let alone thinking about how to improve the entire system. But last week’s UCL Institute of Education-Tes debate on the subject proved the opposite; it was both a welcome diversion and pertinent to our times.

For any leader, periods of great pressures and stress are the most testing - and can be the most creative. Leadership at any time requires a great many qualities, but in a time of Covid-19, the great Sir Tim Brighouse reminded us of five for school leaders: unwarranted optimism (with the emphasis on the unwarranted); comfortable with crisis being the norm and finding complexity fun; a bottomless well of intellectual curiosity; a complete absence of paranoia and self-pity; and, the most intriguing of all, an ability to spot gaps in hedges.

The concept of spotting gaps in hedges comes from Harry Rée, an educationalist and former headteacher who’d been in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. It was what you had to do to survive: spot the gaps so you could scramble through them. And he brought that same idea to education, of thinking the impossible and trying things out. It’s what Brighouse would like to see school leaders do during the pandemic: trying things out and then sharing their experiences with others.

It’s a good reminder that, despite feelings to the contrary, no leader is alone in what they are dealing with. If a problem shared is a problem halved, then a solution shared is a solution doubled.

Of course, leadership qualities and spotting gaps in hedges can come from the unlikeliest of places. Who would have thought it would be a 23-year-old professional footballer who would find a creative way through the toxic political battle for holiday-time free school meals during this pandemic?

Marcus Rashford, a former recipient of free school meals, has shamed the government for their ludicrous stance on the issue by using his Twitter account to encourage and promote businesses and councils to offer free food to deprived children over this half term.

There’s a strange disconnect in the behaviour of ministers. On one hand, they argue that children, particularly those growing up in economic deprivation, are at greater risk of a disruption to their education and everything should be done to support them. Then, on the other hand, they refuse to feed them, saying it is not their responsibility to do so. There is a failure to understand that children cannot learn if they are hungry. They promise to give out laptops for distance learning but fail to recognise that these children also need a wi-fi connection and even, more egregiously, cut schools’ allocations on the evening of the last day before half term. It looks very much as if there’s a distinct lack of leadership there.

However, it is important to recognise that leadership is not generic, as Stuart Lock, CEO of Advantage Schools, argues. It is domain specific. “Leading a school is not the same as leading a business or a sports team. When we approach leadership as a concept that is separate from that which is being led, discussions can become abstract and overly generic; the guidance can be unfocused and unhelpful,” Lock points out (see pages 38-39).

This why Sir Tim Brighouse’s five qualities for school leaders are so important. What other job requires such optimism, an ability to remain unfazed by constant crisis, such intellectual curiosity, an absence of self-pity, and spotting gaps in hedges? So go out and find those gaps but, unlike government, never hedge your bets: there’s too much at stake.

@AnnMroz