Senior leadership teams are the standard bearers for any school.

Getting the team right can make all the difference to the whether the school is a positive place in which to work for both staff and students.  

It is not simply about attracting individuals who have the right experience and capability to deliver the specific tasks of leadership and management, it is also about the right energy and engagement for the particular moment in the school’s development.  

Schools are innately hierarchical and the senior leadership team train, support and therefore influence the middle leaders and their teams.

A strong team with consistent approaches that they genuinely believe in can be one of the most important influences on student progress, wellbeing and future success.

Conversely, staff and students can be equally discouraged by a dissonant team or a cynical appointee.

So, how do you get the balance right?

1. Look for someone who can lead by example

Staff entering a senior leadership post are always going to be visible and approachable, out and about as a positive presence around the school, reaffirming key messages about behaviour and building relationships with all staff and pupils - they are a very real manifestation of what the school stands for.

The aim of a senior leader is not only to model what the school stands for, but also take a team of other staff with them.

These staff are the ones who are responsible for the delivery on the ground, so getting their buy-in is vital.

The trope of a senior leader who can talk the talk but does little in the way of action or inspiration is a fairly common one.

2. Look for those who see care holistically   

Good systems are as necessary as good relationships. In fact, the absence of good systems can put an almost unbearable strain on positive relationships.

While it’s important to have leaders who care, those who can turn their care into an institutional approach, rather than simply an individual one, are a definite commodity.

A good senior leader will see a school as a finely engineered piece of human clockwork that needs careful tuning and occasional overhaul.

A carefully constructed timetable or thoughtfully worked-through pastoral system supports staff wellbeing as much as a caring cup of tea for a tearful NQT, or a considerate thank you card.  

And, of course, we are always after those who accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, not naïve optimists.

Simply put, individuals who have the resilience and determination to see opportunity and benefit in difficult situations, who can draw on reserves of hope and can, therefore, bring out the positives in others also.

3. Look at the skills you already have

I could write pages on the range of skills and aptitudes we are sometimes looking for when we recruit, as school contexts are very different and senior leaders work in teams.  

An accomplished professional who is in the wrong context for their skill set can be unhelpful.

That is why careful appraisal of the role you’re recruiting to and the balance of individuals already in the team, is so important.

It is also vital to keep focused on the ethos of the school and the development challenges it might be facing. We have come to enjoy the process of analysing character types within our existing team.

This can be done as part of an SLT training or team building with an expert. However, even simple online tests will give teams a sense of the balance of character types represented.

This may be all the more important if the team has become used to working together and complements each other without noticing.

It may require a bit of external help to point out that the team needs more risk-taking, or is ready to consolidate more and this may influence the person spec.

The job description has to be carefully constructed to match immediate needs and be future-proofed as much as possible in case those needs change.  

I have, in my enthusiasm for bringing in new blood, produced job descriptions that were as dense and challenging as a rainforest expedition. Well-intentioned but unconquerable.

While this may attract an aspirational candidate, it may also be setting you up for a fall in the long term.

4. Look to implement top-down diversity

And finally, of course, there are issues of representation, diversity and unconscious bias.

Thinking hard about who you want, what tasks they are to perform and what personality traits they will show can lead us into the territory of replicating what we have experienced previously rather than being prepared to welcome a different approach.

Of all of the attractions that probably brought us into the profession, nurturing and releasing the potential of others must be up there.

While we start in our careers by focusing on the students, many of us end our careers appreciating the adult human resource that is the most precious asset in a school and we gain great satisfaction from cultivating this, as recruitment is only the first step.

7 additional things that you should include in your recruitment process

• See every senior vacancy as an opportunity to review (the team’s strengths/the school’s challenges/the current structure).
• Try to future-proof the job description - be clear about the needs of the here and now but also how this may change.
• Take the long view on the budget - can this be afforded in the longer term? Is there any re-purposing/re-imagining within current arrangements that could happen to make better use of resources?
• Take care with the person spec so that non-negotiable characteristics can be weighed against desirables.
• Consider the training and support that it is going to be possible to offer - appointments to SLT are often not the finished product.
• Consider succession planning - what future changes do you envisage/what risks might you be trying to mitigate against?
• Have a plan B! Better not to appoint than appoint the wrong person and regret it later. Being ready with a short-term fix can give time for re-advertisement/re-thinking

Dame Alice Hudson is executive headteacher of Twyford CofE Academies Trust