So you’re new to senior leadership? Congratulations! I’m sure you have many grand plans.
Perhaps you’ll revamp your school’s approach to professional development. Perhaps you’ll launch a new rewards system. Or maybe you’re planning a huge move to a centralised online system for storing information about special educational needs and disabilities.
If you’ve got the headteacher’s ear, a budget allocation and some time on your timetable, the possibilities feel endless...
Leadership: Schools doing less, better
Not so fast. Those new to senior leadership are often keen to act but sometimes they quickly burn themselves or their colleagues out.
This is a particular risk with large senior leadership teams in which there are multiple remits. When everyone is leading something different, though, how might this feel for teachers on the ground?
I recently learned of a school that, in the 2010s, had every member of SLT teaching for at least 20 hours a week. Clearly leaders had precious little “leadership” time; the corollary, however, was that, firstly, they were well placed to understand the impact of any initiatives on main scale teachers.
Secondly, it meant they did not have time to implement grand new plans - they were too busy teaching. Their focus was naturally on teaching great lessons, and making small tweaks to the school to ensure that others could do the same.
This is an extreme example but it illustrates the point that schools probably need to do less, better. We are very good at starting new things; we are less good at stopping old things.
This is partly down to some of the fuzziness of education: in a world where we can’t ever be completely sure which of the million things we do actually leads to great results, we can be reluctant to let go of anything lest it turn out to be the silver bullet.
Making Room for Impact: a de-implementation guide for educators by Dylan Wiliam, John Hattie and Arran Hamilton suggests that leaders look to four possibilities to make time for new initiatives: remove a practice entirely, reduce its frequency, re-engineer the practice so that it takes up less time or replace it with something more efficient or more effective.
I spoke to one head of a turnaround primary school recently who said that behaviour at the school, when she took over, was “out of control”. The temptation for many of us would have been to implement a new policy, but this head resisted.
Instead, she focused on ensuring that the existing policy was implemented consistently. This proved less of an overload for teachers and pupils, it felt less of an upheaval and, ultimately, it led to behaviour being praised in the school’s subsequent Ofsted inspection.
Cutting work that has no impact
Others in large trusts have spoken of the benefits of moving from three to two assessment points in an academic year, resulting in less time being spent on assessing the data and more time being spent on acting on it in the form of more teaching - ultimately leading to more learning for pupils.
If you, as a leader, are in doubt about what to drop, you could always ask your teachers what they think can go - as long as you’re prepared to listen to their answers.
One head I worked for asked teachers every year in a survey to list any work they thought had no impact and could be cut.
She did this for seven years and by the end of that period there were slim pickings in terms of finding things to cut due to her having actioned the previous survey feedback so thoroughly.
Leaders could also try to mimic the “blank page” enjoyed by those who work at new schools by imagining what they would do if they were building things from the ground up and forgoing all the things that feel superfluous.
More does not always mean better
In the book The Teacher Gap Becky Allen makes the case for teachers experimenting by leaving work at 4pm and not taking work home, and afterwards asking themselves: what did not get done? And what suffered as a result?
Ultimately, while a core part of leadership is leading on new projects, it is important to always be mindful that new or more does not always equal better.
With a healthy work-life balance and a widespread appreciation of the purpose of the work that schools give to staff, you may well see staff satisfaction and retention rates rise - a legacy that any leader would be proud of.
Jo Facer is a former headteacher and the head of the national professional qualifications faculty at the National Institute of Teaching
