Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’

Our How I Lead series asks education leaders to reflect on their career, experience and leadership philosophy. This month, we talk to Baroness Anne Longfield
14th January 2025, 5:00am
Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’

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Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’

https://www.tes.com/magazine/leadership/tips-techniques/how-i-lead-baroness-anne-longfield

Baroness Anne Longfield is executive chair and founder of the Centre for Young Lives. She was formerly the children’s commissioner for England, ran a national children’s charity and worked on the delivery of Sure Start for the government. She writes:

You can get stuck as a leader in this sector into thinking everything needs a big solution, big ideas. But what has stuck with me throughout my career is that people in difficult situations can often do so much with just a little help. They are doing amazing things already - what they need is you to just make things easier, to make brilliant things more possible.

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I grew up on my grandparents’ farm. They were both blind, and my mum and dad and I lived with them on these hills outside of town. I didn’t have kids around me that much. I spent so much time looking at how other people lived their lives because all I wanted was that normal house, with a concrete path, with a normal car. I had this desire to be part of a community and so where I have ended up in my career, it’s not a surprise.

Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’


I was campaigning for childcare reform when no one cared about childcare. I was a woman talking about what was deemed a women’s issue. That period of the 1980s taught me a huge amount about how you get things done: it’s about relationships, relentlessness and knowing your stuff better than anyone else.

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People think that if you get the process - the “machine” - right, then outcomes follow. So you get this obsession with process. This is really dangerous - the focus needs to be on purpose. If you look at mental health, for instance, obviously we need loads more money into the specialist services going to help kids that are in a very difficult place at the moment, but our ambition can’t just be that we get fancier and cleverer speciality services to treat the problem. That’s not what we are trying to achieve. Our ambition has to be that we help kids live well. If we start with that, we fit the process to that aim, not look at process on its own.

Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’


Part of forcing change is people realising you aren’t going to go away. I have had several politicians in the past agree to things because they realised if they didn’t, I would keep coming back.

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Accept that you won’t agree with people, that you will need to be able to build a relationship with someone with ideas that are opposed to your own. It should never be about you. It’s about the cause. If someone’s got a position of influence, if you ignore them because you don’t like them or what they stand for, then you are letting that cause down.

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I wasn’t that loud as a child. I was quite shy. For some reason, I found my mojo at university. And then when I got into community work, I got this sense of mission, I found this part of me that could lead change.

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I am demanding. But that comes out in different ways when you lead. If you have an organisation of 1,000 people, then really it is the structures that demand things of people, you can’t influence directly. In smaller organisations of, say, 10 people, then yes you are driving it through your own personality.

Baroness Anne Longfield: ‘I felt a responsibility to be brave’


I love delegating. You have to delegate. But you have to keep something for yourself that you are passionate about, too. It can’t be all about the running of the organisation, you need to have something where you are into it deeply.

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I always try to turn disappointment into positivity and optimism. People look to you for that. They need to see you looking for solutions, new options, believing it is possible. In private, yes you swear and feel sorry for yourself, but you breathe and just accept that it is going to take a little longer to be where you want to be.

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My dad died when I was 20. He was an engineer and he loved novelty. He so desperately wanted to be part of the future and I always thought it was so sad he never got to achieve that. With people who’ve lost parents quite early, they either kind of sink or they get this drive to do it for their parents. For me, I just had the drive to do it for him, to make change and seize the moment to bring that change. I felt a responsibility to be brave.

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