Nobody talks about Fight Club. And nobody talks about middle leader training - unless it is to bemoan the fact that no matter how excellent they are as practitioners, they often receive little adequate management training.
So perhaps Brad Pitt’s secret club was on my mind when in 2019 I named our new middle leaders’ programme FEiT Club: Fostering Excellence in Teams.
The idea was to create our own in-house leadership course to give our middle leaders the skills they needed to thrive.
In the past we had used external speakers for much of this, but we realised that it was too ad hoc and the energy they brought evaporated once the daily grind returned.
I wanted something more integrated and structured to truly benefit middle leaders, and so now we offer every new middle leader access to a series of eight workshops a year covering everything from how to have difficult conversations to career progression planning.
Of course, creating our own management programme was no small task - but we have been successfully running this for four years now and have seen over 50 staff go through the process. Here are some of the steps we took towards developing a home-grown middle leaders’ scheme.
Creating an in-house school middle leaders’ programme
1. Planning the content
The first task was to work out what middle leaders needed to learn, making sure we catered for all of our middle managers, including academic, pastoral and support.
Using my own management experience and researching the subject through books such as Kim Scott’s Radical Candor, I devised an eight-unit course.
I wanted to structure the skills logically over the year, so began with a session on self-care (boundaries being a particularly crucial topic for middle leaders), then tackled how to build trust and share values, and moved on to the central units on asking for and giving frequent feedback.
By the final term we would get to grips with improvement planning and delegation skills, finishing with a Q&A session with members of SLT, who would share their perspectives on both management skills and career progression.
2. Time to deliver
The next challenge was to find time to deliver the material. To begin with, we timetabled short, 40-minute sessions in lunchtime or after school, with at least a fortnight in between for participants to put their skills into practice.
For example, after our session on establishing shared values through one-to-ones, participants were expected to conduct at least one, and feed back on how it went in the following meeting.
All this ensures that new skills are embedded in everyday work, and that FEiT Club members are continually evaluating the effectiveness of their practice.
With the credibility created by the first cohort, recruitment became easier, and I found myself running two groups in order to cater for demand from teaching, pastoral and support staff.
In turn, this led to the school providing some off-timetable slots for the sessions, and to enhancing my role in order to manage the increased demand.
3. Feedback and impact
From the start, I ensured that feedback and development were key to the programme - including even asking someone who was sceptical about the programme to sign up so I got honest, direct feedback.
From this, developments such as using more colleagues to deliver sessions, offering access to more materials online and adding an additional topic to the units all took place.
Furthermore, to measure the impact of the course, in the autumn I sent out a survey to members of the teams that our participants managed. FEiT participants agree not to see the raw scores, but rather to be made aware of tendencies (two stars and a wish effectively) at both the beginning and end of the year-long scheme.
This provided some relevant focus points for them at the beginning, and enabled them to see progress made by the end. In addition, I kept the participants’ line managers informed, sending them an update after every session, so that they could discuss more confidential issues in their regular meetings.
Candour and the integration of skills learned into everyday life in school are core values of the course, so this feedback and constant communication “up” and “down” has been a key element.
4. Accreditation
The fourth iteration of FEiT Club has involved considering accreditation. Once the course was established, we investigated accreditation as part of a university-based MPA (master of public administration) or a lower-key accreditation procedure with the CPD Accreditation Service.
In the end we opted for the Institute of Leadership and Management, which makes the course more portable and required little reworking of the content.
As well as accreditation being helpful for recruiting on to the course and for our own staff’s CVs, we hope it will make it easier for us to offer the content to other schools within our network.
Furthermore, we can recommend this scheme to potential new recruits, underlining the value we place on the impact of training.
5. Celebrating success
It’s a simple step but for the past year we added a celebration of staff achievements to our end-of-term staff event, acknowledging any significant qualifications and awards, ranging from machinery-operating certificates to MAs.
As part of this event, getting all our FEiT graduates to stand for a round of applause was a great recognition of their commitment throughout the year - and it was pleasing for me, as well, to recognise the impact the course has had on staff across the school.
Indeed, the best part of creating these modules has been the feedback from colleagues about the effectiveness of what we work on, as an e-mail from the head of a large department who went through the training underlines: “Holy cow - it works! I was not expecting to be able to use it so quickly!”
This sort of feedback is why I am most definitely keen to talk about FEiT Club.
Gail Haythorne is assistant head at Woldingham School in Surrey
