So much of the talk about leadership in schools is focused on the staff: is leadership of the school good? Is subject leadership up to standards? Is pastoral leadership making the right waves? We obsess about it - and for good reason.

But do we ever stop to consider how we are facilitating good leadership for the future, particularly when it comes to developing leaders among our pupils?

Schools are very aware of the investment we need to make now to ensure that our young people are as well equipped as possible for their futures. We devote long hours and an impressive range of eclectic resources to ensure our children are academically ready for life beyond school. We also provide significant and far-reaching pastoral support to ensure that they have the mental health resources to access every opportunity as an adult.

But I think preparation to be leaders in the future is an area often overlooked. Student leadership has remained largely tokenistic. Appointing a student leadership team is an excellent first step, but we have done little to take us beyond that.

Is it worth asking how much our student leaders progress, how they develop and what skills they leave school with as a result of their experiences? What leadership training do they receive? What is their exposure to servant leadership? Who at school is reading up on the most current research on leadership? Is there a values-based leadership system in place? What are schools doing to recognise and nurture quiet leaders?

It is with these questions in mind that I attended the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools annual conference in Los Angeles, California, last year. The conference, themed Dream Dare Do: Girls as Makers, Inventors, Engineers and Entrepreneurs, proved to be a vault of research, strategies and reflection when it comes to enriching the ethos and culture of schools. Unsurprisingly, student leadership featured heavily during the three-day programme.

Here are some of the most significant lessons I learned about truly developing leaders in our schools:

1. Don’t crush the pipe dreams

We need to talk more - and more comprehensively - to our students about their visions, in the short and long term. The Walt Disney Imagineering Team, working on the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge land at Walt Disney World Resort at the time, argued that advising our young people to be realistic is ineffective at best and damaging at worst. From aspirational goals, much good can be found along the way.

2. Encourage networking

Networking and connections are invaluable in all environments but in the context of all girls’ schools, they can be instrumental in promoting and empowering future leaders. We need to actively teach our students how to find, build and sustain valuable connections.

3. Familiarise pupils with failure

Privileging the journey over the result, many North American schools are now investing time in “failure”. This approach is hugely empowering and enabling. Creating a space that enables - and even celebrates - failure with a view to growing, developing and improving has served these schools and their young people very well indeed. For example, one maths department was trialling the process of journaling what had happened during the lesson in the last 10 minutes of class time. It reported that the process of deliberately recounting mistakes and lessons learned from them has had a dramatic positive effect on pupil confidence. The knock-on leadership benefits are clear.

4. Value the student voice

Promoting student agency by creating robust channels for the student voice - that really have impact - should mean that young people gain exposure to decision making and judicious cognitive thinking at an early stage in their lives. Not only does this make them real stakeholders in the schools’ big decisions but it equips them to manage challenging situations more competently in their futures.

5. Embrace risk taking

Improving our provision for education in leadership will undoubtedly involve redefining our relationship with risk taking and inviting our students to do the same. Perfectionism and aspirations to it are still plaguing our systems, and many renowned panellists reiterated the urgent need to talk to young people openly and frequently about the benefits of academic risk taking. It’s in those risks that innovation and creativity are found.

Gohar Khan is director of ethos at Ridgeway Education Trust

This article originally appeared in the 3 January 2020 issue under the headline “Shine a light on student leaders”