When my decision to retire became public knowledge, it gained a lot of attention. Edu-Twitter was at its absolute best - I was flooded with lots of messages of support - and for a number of days my story was the second most read on the Tes website.
Occupying the top spot was another headteacher, who had called time on her career in education: Catherine Mee’s “Dear teaching, It’s not me, it’s you.” Catherine entered the profession pretty much at the same time as me. In her open letter to teaching, she explains how her work had changed over the years to become all encompassing. Work had become her life.
In my book, Liminal Leadership, I published three letters I had written to myself at various stages in my career. In each, the final paragraph was a reflection on family life. The final letter - to my 54-year-old self - told a story of my wife Catherine and I, out walking on Saturday morning. She told me about a book she was reading about a woman with a degenerative and ultimately terminal disease who admits to her workaholic husband that she wished that she had been his passion.
The message was simple and devastating. Many people I talk to feel the same - the job affects our relationships. We don’t spend as much time with our loved as we want to or should do.
Not everyone has the capacity to be as patient, accepting and forgiving as Cath has been about the demands of the job on my time. I’ve always struggled to switch off the worry that comes with being responsible for a school, or latter on, a multi-academy trust.
That myself and Catherine Mee are retiring - after careers which we seem to have both enjoyed and found fulfilling - may not be seismic to the profession or system.
But that’s not say that we shouldn’t take a long hard look at why so many talented headteachers and teachers are walking away before retirement. As Ed Dorrell quoted in his editorial in Friday’s Tes, 31 per cent of secondary heads have moved on less than three years after being appointed.
If even more teachers and school leaders make the same decision as Catherine Mee and I, the teacher shortages crisis will spiral out of control. Decades of practical wisdom are walking out of the school gates too soon - and the problem does not lie solely in how teachers are trained, supported and developed at the beginning of their careers.
A major factor, I believe, is accountability.
Many would cite excessive workload. But the workload epidemic can’t be addressed by simply looking at workload; it can’t be solved by a poster, working group or, most ironically, monitoring by Ofsted. As Desmond Tutu would say, you need to go upstream. Accountability has led to most of the current workload stupidity; that and insufficient funding. You can do less with less, but doing more means fewer people taking an ever increasing load.
Professor Becky Allen talks about an audit culture in which schools leaders try to ensure they capture evidence of teaching, learning and progress that is probably best left uncaptured. The evidence is aggregated and then fed up through the system to essentially satisfy a clif-edged, high-stakes 24 or 48 hour visit every three or four years.
Governors expect it; parents want to be told about it but Ofsted inspections actually do so little to improve schools. Too often it has the opposite effect. Too often, it harms them.
Every school has more than its fair share of challenges but working in the most deprived communities with the most disadvantaged pupils means you encounter a steroid driven and amplified accountability system.
“The soft bigotry of low expectations” is repeated as a mantra from those visiting these communities to those who are actually working within them. In our un-contextualised value added progress measures, the soft bigotry of low expectation works to the benefit of schools who cater for pupils from advantaged backgrounds, not those who are looked after, vulnerable or have special needs.
I don’t think when performance tables and Ofsted were created, the mess was foreseen.
But simply working harder at perfecting accountability systems won’t help us retain or recruit more teachers. The proposed new inspection framework is, overall, no better or worse than what has gone before. It’s different, yes, but perverse drivers and unforeseen workload outcomes will soon appear.
To paraphrase Desmond Tutu’s quote: we don’t need to get better at pulling people out of the river. We need to think about how we can stop them jumping or falling in in the first place.
It’s a different problem that requires different thinking and different solutions.
The school system badly needs regulation and a regulator; just not the ones we’ve got.
Stephen Tierney is CEO of BEBCMAT (soon to be retired), chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable, blogger (www.leadinglearner.me) and author of Liminal Leadership
