One of the main themes of the pandemic was how much it blurred our personal and professional lives as school and home became intertwined.

Since returning to school after various lockdowns have ended, remembering this has been important to recognise that staff, parents and children are not mere “actors” in our school but have real lives that will invariably impact how they are working, feeling and learning.

Of course, that is not to say that the personal life should not be kept private much of the time (many times I have had to remind younger staff to keep social media channels private), but a challenging personal life will affect how we perform and behave in school.

This is just as true for us as school leaders who will invariably find ourselves in positions where professional and personal duties will intersect and where we have to make difficult decisions about how we proceed.

An inspector calls 

This was something I discovered in late February and March of this year, when a confluence of events occurred that created both my biggest professional and personal challenges in my career to date.

At that time, I had just started as the new headteacher of an international school. I was only three months in post and the third headteacher in less than four years of opening.

As such, the notification of our inaugural school inspection in Dubai meant a lot of “backdating” preparation in the self-evaluation process to provide a true and accurate reflection of the school and ensure a positive outcome, which it proved to be.

Writing an 11,000-word self-evaluation in just over four days (and nights) had helped, but the process also allowed me to demonstrate an inner determination for collective success for the whole school community.

An inspection on its own is stressful enough - but more was to come.

The worst news

As an expat, we are always mindful of our family and loved ones in our country of origin and sadly, just before I had started my current role overseas, my father had suffered a serious stroke.

Around this time in mid-March, just a week after the previous inspection, I received a call that he had taken a turn for the worse and I was on the first flight back to London Heathrow.

However, upon arriving and reactivating my phone from flight mode, I received the devastating news from my older brother that our father had passed away four hours earlier (and my own guilt about what if I could have taken an earlier flight to have seen him in his last hours).

Yet alongside this message, I received a second text from the headteacher of the UK school for which I am the chair of governors, informing me that they “had the Ofsted phone call” and would be inspected tomorrow and the day after.

Navy gazing

What should I do?

What I did next will sound strange to some - perhaps indicative of how leadership can become all-consuming and that I should have put my personal life first.

But in that moment of receiving these two pieces of news, I recalled a conversation I had with a civil servant who worked with the Royal Navy.

He mentioned how a captain of a submarine has to “hold” all emotional and sensitive information for up to six months until “the boat” - as it is called in naval circles - resurfaces or re-docks at an intended port.

This could be holding onto the bereavement of a family member of a submariner, months after the death. It sounds bizarre still to write it now three months later, but I used the same strategy at this moment.

So, to avoid alarming the headteacher that my father had passed away, I told her that in my capacity as chair, I would visit in two days’ time - which would allow me enough time to bury my father in accordance with Islamic customs and beliefs within 24 hours.

Pushing on 

Ironically, upon arriving at the school, the headteacher asked me how my father was (as she knew about the stroke), to which I was able to say: “I’ll update you later.”

From there we hosted the HMI visit, which proved a success, before I headed back to the airport to fly home. It was only then that I informed the headteacher and the trust CEO of my father’s death 48 hours earlier.

They were kind and caring about the issue - but also cross with me for not telling them and for taking part in the inspection, noting that the vice-chair could have led instead of me and I would have had the time needed to look after myself.

But in the moment, my moral purpose of supporting a first-time headteacher and her community through that inspection superseded any sense of a need to be deputised.

Finally, I flew back to Dubai at the end of that week to face a BSO (British School Overseas) inspection the following week - again an inaugural inspection, but one that was much-needed to further validate our school to the wider audience outside of the UAE.

While this was a scheduled inspection, planned in the last week before the spring holiday, I was permitted to have extended personal leave given my personal circumstances.

However, I felt the professional need to reconnect with my SLT and colleagues. Steering the team through a very successful first time BSO inspection, the third inspection for me within four weeks, proved to be another professional success.

But after this week, I did return to England with my eight-year-old son and took the time I knew I needed to grieve, spend much-needed time with my mother, and focus on personal priorities - to release the emotions I had put on hold while I worked through the professional challenges in front of me.

Personal decisions in professional contexts

I fully recognise what I did will not be an approach that many would advocate, and I am not suggesting what I did was the right course any more than I would expect someone else to say it was wrong.

It was simply my choice to navigate this intensely difficult period in a way that made sense for me, my schools and my family circumstances.

The bigger lesson, though, is about how as leaders we will face difficult situations and we need to be ready for them.

We need to know how to remain resilient and steadfast, to be able to compartmentalise and be there for others when we need to - while also knowing we will need to take time for ourselves to recalibrate and heal to avoid the risk of emotional scarring and trauma.

Of course, no training can prepare you for that and until you do face such challenges and have to make stark choices, you won’t know how you will cope or what decision you will make - not least as everyone’s life beyond school is so individual.

But if we listen to ourselves and do what we believe is right, we will almost certainly emerge stronger and emboldened so we can tackle whatever further challenges await. 

Kausor Amin-Ali is a secondary school headteacher at GEMS Founders School Al Mizhar in Dubai. He is also the chair of governors at Robert Miles Infant School in Bingham, Nottinghamshire and the author of A-Z of School Leadership: A guide for new school leaders