Lockdown has changed how we live in so many ways, from cutting our own hair to meeting friends through a laptop screen rather than across a pub table.

It has affected how we work, too. Although schools have been open throughout lockdown, many leaders have had to manage their teams from afar. This has, naturally, brought new and unexpected hurdles.

For Jeremy Iver, head of Stebon Primary School in East London, it has taken effort to maintain relationships with staff remotely. “It is much easier to make these investments when you see people in person,” he says. “My challenge has been to learn how to continue to invest in those big relationships at precisely the time when it is most difficult to do so.”

The need to ensure staff were offered the same level of professional support as before became a priority. “All of our meetings happen remotely, but they still happen,” he continues. “We have staff training, one-to-one line management and coaching sessions, and leadership team training. In the same way that we have taken care to normalise this new way of schooling for our pupils, so too have we [done so with] this new way of working with staff.”

In addition to formal meetings, Iver has tried to replicate the more personal conversations that take place when a leader crosses paths with a member of staff and checks in with them.

Covid: School leadership through lockdown

“I use the excuse of sharing messages or discussing the diary to let our colleagues know that we care for them,” he says. “And I’ve been writing letters to staff since the first lockdown. I have tried to write from my heart. I want my staff to know that we’ve got their backs, and I need to let them know that what they’re designing and delivering every day is inspirational.”

It’s a sentiment shared by senior leaders up and down the land. Kathleen McGillycuddy, headteacher of Broadoak Secondary School in the South West of England, says that it has never felt more important to communicate her sense of appreciation for her staff.

“There had to be a lot of delegation, very tight timelines and high-stakes discussions with my senior team about risk management, safeguarding, GCSEs and the safety of colleagues,” she says. “So, as a leader I relied on my team and the candour and faith we had developed in each other. They were phenomenal and their leadership was superpowered during this past year.”

Leanne Eyre, deputy headteacher at Elfed High School in North Wales, agrees that finding ways to maintain those links while supporting staff through the unfamiliar terrain of remote teaching has been crucial.

“One of the key challenges was to manage the varying digital skills,” she explains.

“Even our most innovative teachers have had to learn so much in a short space of time.”

It’s widely agreed that these hard-won gains in edtech are likely to become permanent features of the new educational landscape that’s ahead of us. But what other aspects of distance leadership will school leaders be hanging on to as schools reopen more fully?

Valuing flexibility

Iver says lockdown has taught him that a culture of flexibility is hugely beneficial.

“The way we have organised our timetabling, our staffing and our premises would not have seemed conceivable a year ago,” he says. “In a strange way, letting go of the need to do things in a certain way has been liberating.”

Being forced to redesign many of the school’s operational systems made him aware of just how far they had been shackled by a leadership attitude of “we do it this way because we have always done it this way”. Looking to the future, he says he is planning to hold on to his pandemic leadership lessons learned, based on a view that it is better “to start with a focus on what we want to achieve and not be bogged down with how we’ve always done things”.

Embracing technology

Technology has become an integral part of running a school, and - after a hyperspeed upskilling effort to get to this point - leaders agree that they don’t see it being rolled back any time soon. “The use of digital platforms such as Teams are so well embedded now,” Iver says. “I am sure that we will continue to use these approaches to enrich students’ learning experiences when we return to full face-to-face teaching. For example, we have been experimenting with online enrichment opportunities.”

McGillycuddy agrees. “The potential impact of asynchronous learning and remote technologies will open up possibilities for our children and for supporting colleagues that will be exciting to explore,” she says.

Championing pastoral care

The work of pastoral and support staff, which all too often went underappreciated before, has offered a lifeline for many families during the pandemic. “I have really learned to appreciate the huge contributions of our pastoral team and support staff,” Eyre says, adding that she is planning to make sure she always gives these members of staff the recognition they deserve once schools return.

Meanwhile, McGillycuddy says the pandemic has moved her to take a more community-minded approach to leadership in general: “The fragile financial existence of some of our families has laid bare critical weaknesses in our civic infrastructures. I see it as my duty to step into new and different spaces to advocate, perhaps a little more loudly than before, for our families and communities.”

Harnessing the ‘power of home’

If there were issues with your home-school communications before the pandemic, it’s likely that they will have been highlighted over the past year. Leaders have had to find new ways of engaging with parents, which has led many to re-examine their existing approaches. “Despite thinking we had made great strides in communicating with parents before the pandemic, we had really only scratched the surface,” Iver says. “[Communication has had to be] at once supportive and attritional. [We have been] calling, helping, explaining, calling again and again.”

McGillycuddy says she has had similar experiences and hopes to improve how her school communicates with parents going forward.

“The relationships with our parents and carers have been strengthened, and I want to carry on with this,” she says. “I don’t quite know how yet, but harnessing the power of school and home for the good of the child would be an amazing legacy of this most unusual time.”

Grainne Hallahan is the recruitment editor and senior content writer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 5 March 2021 issue under the headline “Leading from a distance: taking the long view”