What it means to be a pastoral leader is changing.

Instead of job advertisements seeking traditional pastoral leader roles like head of year, there has recently been an increase in schools using flashier titles for pastoral roles: “director of learning”, “progress leader” or even “achievement leader”.

I believe this reflects a change in perception about the purpose of pastoral leadership.

Whereas pastoral roles were once assigned to the practitioners who were considered relationship-building gurus, or those who could strike fear into the hearts of even the most challenging students, pastoral leadership is now seen as something more academically inclined.

Don’t get me wrong; no matter what title it is disguised with, the role of pastoral leader is still one of the most important jobs in education. But gone are the days where the role is solely dependent on gut instinct and “being good with the tough kids”.

To be a great pastoral leader, you now need to back up your pastoral charisma with an effective understanding of clear curriculum mapping, the impact of cognitive load theory and how to embed Barak Rosenshine’s “principles of instruction” into your pastoral programmes.

It’s a shift that goes hand in hand with education’s push towards becoming more evidence-informed. Pastoral leaders such as myself must be ready to adapt or risk the impact of our roles being diminished.

But it’s not only leaders who need to understand how evidence feeds into pastoral care - every teacher should have a basic understanding of it, too.

So, whether you’re looking to develop your year group vision or manage behaviour, here are five ways to make your pastoral practice more evidence-informed.

1. Look to Rosenshine

Rosenshine is known for his work exploring teacher instruction and identifying the strategies that are features of the most successful teachers’ practice.

Although some have questioned Rosenshine’s work, the key points of his 2010 article on the “principles of instruction” have become deeply embedded in schools.

Although there are officially 17 principles, the most notable are the following:

You might be wondering how these principles could possibly be implemented from a pastoral perspective. However, at my school, these tenets helped to form the basis for our entire pastoral curriculum, which is designed to support everyone in school in understanding our routines, expectations and shared values.

For example, we start each tutor-time session with a review of content from the most recent pastoral assembly. And when we present new rules or expectations, we do so in small steps to avoid overloading pupils.

Although there are plenty of “organic” moments in pastoral care, it’s important to understand that there are also elements that need to be planned and structured, in the same way you would plan subject learning.

Rosenshine’s principles provide clear guidelines to help you build a pastoral curriculum that is accessible, engaging and focused on constantly reviewing content.

2. Design messaging with cognitive load in mind

Academic Dylan Wiliam once stated that the educational psychologist John Sweller’s cognitive load theory “is the single most important thing for teachers to know”.

Sweller’s theory attempts to explain how students use their cognitive architecture to learn.

As the teacher and researcher Michael Hobbiss has previously explained in Tes, the nature of load theory is complex. In a nutshell, it calls on teachers to carefully manage the amount and complexity of information that is distributed to students in order to maximise learning. If students receive too little information, their attention will wander. But if they receive too much, their working memories will become overloaded.

In other words, if we want students to remember as much as possible, we need to make sure we don’t deliver too much information in a short amount of time.

Another major component of this theory is the importance of delivering information in a way that helps students make connections to prior knowledge. Whether it is through retrieval practice or making use of psychologist Jean Piaget’s schema theory, we must support pupils to revisit previously taught content.

It’s obvious how this can help in the classroom, but how can Sweller’s work be used from a pastoral perspective?

Consider the traditional manner in which pupils are reminded about a school’s expected behaviours and routines. These are usually covered at the start of the year, perhaps during an assembly, and then forgotten about until the next time a major “behaviour reset” is required.

Rather than waiting for behaviour to decline, pastoral leaders who want to implement long-term change should regularly revisit expectations during assemblies and tutor time, and even create content that pupils can engage with.

If pupils are constantly being reminded about the behaviour norms of a school, and if this information is delivered in manageable chunks, Sweller’s work suggests that they are less likely to forget it.

3. Amplify approval

One of the most important parts of being a pastoral leader is creating a sense of community within your cohort. A vital part of doing this is ensuring that pupils buy into your overall message and that your expectations become the assumed norms.

As a pastoral leader, you have plenty of opportunities to promote your message, including assemblies, weekly bulletins, one-to-one conversations and year-group line-ups. But how do we make the most of these opportunities?

Understanding the value of amplifying approval can be really powerful here.

As Peps Mccrea explains in his book, Motivated Teaching: “Approval can be signalled by teachers - what we permit, we promote. But it is much more powerful when it comes from peers.”

Here, Mccrea touches on two important points. First, that drawing attention to positive behaviour matters. In amplifying what we approve of, we reinforce that behaviour as the “norm” for the group.

Teachers therefore need to focus more on the behaviours we want to happen rather than those we don’t. If we are only ever drawing attention to unwanted behaviour, this is the behaviour that will look like the norm.

So, rather than chastising your entire year group when things go wrong, it makes more sense to publicly highlight those pupils who are successfully following expectations.

Second, Mccrea notes that approval is more powerful when it is supported by the so-called peer effect - the way in which human behaviour is affected by the behaviour of the people around us.

Facilitating ways for pupils to publicly draw attention to the positive behaviour of their peers - through informal “shout-outs”, for instance - can be particularly effective.

4. Focus on habits

One major misconception about being a pastoral leader is that the role mostly involves dealing with behaviour and incidents. This is completely untrue.

As a pastoral leader, you are also responsible for supporting the personal development of your designated cohort - and this means helping them to form effective, lifelong habits.

Strategies drawn from behavioural science can help us with this task.

As Teacher Tapp’s Harry Fletcher-Wood explains in a 2022 article for Tes, “We tend to see behaviour as intentional...But behaviour isn’t just driven by intention.”

In fact, he says, “a huge proportion of our behaviour is habitual”.

A habit forms, Fletcher-Wood adds, “when someone responds to a prompt in the same way for long enough that the prompt begins to cue the action”.

He gives the example of a student who has fallen into the habit of chatting to their neighbour any time they get stuck on their work. To change this behaviour, he says, we need to create a new habit - and behavioural science provides some ways to do this.

“We can work with students to choose prompts, we can practise valuable actions and we can encourage them to keep going until the habit sticks,” suggests Fletcher-Wood.

It’s important that pastoral leaders consider all the habits they are encouraging and try to nudge students towards the ones that will serve them best.

5. Follow the data

There has long been an acceptance that pastoral roles must primarily be reactive rather than proactive. Instead of anticipating problems, we were just expected to deal with them when they inevitably occurred.

However, as technology advances and data takes on a more pivotal role in schools, the most effective pastoral leaders are starting to identify patterns and trends in a bid to put a stop to issues before they begin.

One way that I have used this strategy throughout my career is to closely analyse the behaviour data from the previous academic year, before a new year starts.

Although each academic year is different and comes with its unique challenges, some trends stand the test of time. For example, the first term is notorious for pupils struggling with uniform issues and finding it hard to settle back into effective learning routines. Similarly, the final term of the year is characterised by pupils beginning to feel disengaged and uniform standards slipping once again.

If we know this in advance, we can head these trends off at the pass by planning to explicitly revisit our expectations - about, for example, uniform - in a timely way.

Data itself is useless unless we can harness it to identify patterns. But if you take the time to comb through it for trends in specific lessons or with certain key pupils, I promise you won’t regret it.

Whether you’re supporting a frightened Year 7 seeking comfort, or a disengaged Year 11 who needs that final motivational push, pastoral leaders can have a profound impact on pupils’ academic journeys.

Pastoral leaders are still the embodiment of in loco parentis, and there will always be a place in schools for the traditional qualities that these roles have relied on, like relationship building and being the authoritative voice who can step in where needed.

But, as the educational playing field becomes increasingly guided by academic research, there is no reason why pastoral leaders can’t keep pace and look to the evidence to make what we do even more impactful.

Mohamed Ibrahim is a pastoral leader in an international school in the Middle East

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