Until recently, being a head meant always being on the move. From the moment I arrived in school to the end of the day, I was walking the school corridors, rushing between my office and those of our senior leaders.

Back and forth I went - often carrying files, tablets, pieces of paper - trying to help resolve all the problems that our senior leadership team tackled over the course of a school day. This is what it took for us to work together effectively as an SLT.

But it was becoming apparent from my step count alone that this might not be the most efficient way to run our school; I was losing valuable time every day just seeking out those I needed to consult with.

Not only that, but there were many occasions when problems were left unresolved and unanswered for too long because I had been wrangling with the issue on my own instead of trying to resolve it as part of a team.

Yet, despite noticing the inefficiency of how we were working, and feeling dissatisfied with it, I didn’t take any steps to change things. After all, we had a school to run and other issues always took precedence.

It wasn’t until Covid hit - and everything we have ever known about working in a school had to be reinvented - that it occurred to me that it would make sense to rethink the configuration of our back-office space.

We hit upon the idea of replacing the small, disparate offices that my senior leadership team inhabited with one larger, open-plan office space for the whole team to share.

How did we make this work? There were several steps to the process.

1. Assess every inch of space

Have we ever been more aware of what two metres looks like? The need to socially distance has forced us to look at our classrooms and office spaces with new eyes. We no longer see just rooms for learning and working but also potential inches to reclaim.

As a leadership team, we tried to maximise every square metre of the school and, in doing so, we began to rethink how the rooms were used. Cupboards became sensory rooms, playgrounds became meeting rooms. Together, we raked over our floor plans to ensure nothing was wasted.

2. Consider the returns of your current set-up

In retail, it’s common to question your revenue per square metre. In a large shop, you would want to know what return you were getting on your outlay. Although a school won’t ever be able to give you those hard figures, adopting that mentality made us look at the way we were using space in a different way.

If you have many smaller offices but the people working in them constantly have to leave and go elsewhere, this is a sign that the current arrangement isn’t working well. Once we scrutinised what we were doing, we began to see that in fact, my headteacher’s office was giving us a very poor return.

3. Reconfigure

If we replaced the previous workspaces with one larger office space, we would eradicate the need to jump in and out of offices. I asked myself: who did I need with me in this shared space? We looked at where existing offices already were and identified the people whom I worked with most closely.

The leadership team were not the only ones who stood to gain from the potential new arrangement. By repurposing the now surplus offices, we could create space for small group work and therapy rooms.

But where should the new SLT office be? It was important to us that we didn’t take any space that could be better used for a different purpose - that return per square metre wouldn’t add up if we just replaced one problem with another.

We walked through the school and found an area that had been used as a thoroughfare and storage space. It was the “dumping ground” for redundant ICT equipment, and was home to a small soundproof booth that had once been used by the school’s radio station. It seemed perfect to become a multi-use shared office.

4. Kit it out

The office is now unrecognisable from what it was before. Not only does it look great, it’s also a lovely place to work. What’s more, it didn’t cost much to kit out because so much was just repurposed from our existing offices. We needed a screen to use for presentations, but the desks and chairs we had already.

Interior decoration isn’t my forte but small details made it so much more comfortable. The lamps, for example, give us lighting that is more like a living room than a school office. Somehow, it makes a massive difference to the mood in the room. It’s genuinely a nice place to work.

5. Make space for privacy

However, it’s important to note that this way of working might not be for everyone. For us, an environment where you have constant interruptions isn’t a problem - in fact, it fits with my preferred way of working. But not everyone feels the same and you must be sensitive to the needs of your team.

For example, our deputy headteacher prefers the sanctuary of his own office, where he can close the door and concentrate. To ensure he is able to work in his preferred environment, he has kept his own working space, and then joins us for meetings - and this adaptation works really well for us.

Privacy can also be an issue. As you would expect, there are times when we need to have confidential conversations and, at those times, a shared office becomes problematic. But remember that radio room? We now use that space for parent meetings and private discussions. The fact that it is already soundproofed is a huge bonus.

All our wishes for a more collegiate and collaborative space have come true. Now I am able to glean the advice and expertise of my leadership team simply by calling across the room.

In this new world of responsive leadership, where guidance updates are implemented only to be replaced weeks later, this kind of set-up allows us to react more decisively.

Whatever set-up you choose for your leadership team, what matters most is that you don’t continue working in an inefficient way out of a misplaced obligation or because “that’s just how it’s always been”.

We have now found a new way of working that suits us - what alternatives could your school spaces offer you?

Dave McPartlin is headteacher of Flakefleet Primary School in Fleetwood

This article originally appeared in the 15 January 2021 issue under the headline “Room at the top”