By their very nature, schools are focused on success.  

Whether this takes the form of “excellence” as determined by inspectors, increasingly positive attainment results year-on-year, meeting the needs of our most vulnerable pupils, or a strong reputation in the community…every school wants to be a success.  

Realistically, however, not everything in every school can be an unqualified success all of the time. 

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Failure is a natural part of life. In our classrooms, many teachers and pupils now readily acknowledge that failure is an accepted part of the learning process.  

In maths, for example, many pupils now understand that exploring a few unsuccessful methods of solving a problem can actually strengthen their understanding of how the problem can, ultimately, be solved.

Therefore, as school leaders, why do we still have an uncomfortable relationship with failure?

While it is widely acknowledged that new initiatives and approaches should be centred on a robust evidence base, there is no getting away from the fact that things do go wrong and not everything works out as intended. 

As school leaders, how should we deal with failures? I take an A, B, C approach.

Acknowledge

In order for “failures” to be properly addressed, we need to make sure that there is time and space to discuss them and that a culture exists where it’s normal and comfortable to do this.  

Perhaps most challenging of all, as leaders we need to openly acknowledge our role when things haven’t gone as planned. It is important that, when evaluating the latest initiative, we do not go looking only for success. We must have open minds.  

If we look only for success we may find something that justifies our hopes, but if we look with openness and honesty we will find the truth.

Build

A failure should never be seen as an end point. Instead, we should view it as an opportunity to build something better. Something more effective and impactful. 

If we focus only on maintaining and sustaining our successes, then we reduce ourselves to relying on happy accidents or the direction of others in order to find new ways of doing things.  

Only by looking to build on our failures can we hope to properly innovate.  A focus on why things did not go as planned will help ensure we can build something better for the future.  

Instead of saying that “Beth did not achieve good results with the reading recovery group”, we need to think: “It seems Beth may need more regular slots with the reading recovery group to achieve even stronger results.”

Celebrate

Time taken to celebrate the progress that is built upon perceived failures can do a great deal to promote a culture of honest and open self-evaluation.  This, ultimately, can lead to even greater successes in the future.

Perhaps it is time for us as school leaders to get excited about the potential that failure brings and to remember that it can be as easy as A, B, C.

Alan Shields is head of a local authority primary school in Glasgow

This was originally published on 3 January 2020.