About a year ago I started to notice something when I met with leaders across schools. When I asked them about their role as a leader, the first thing they started to tell me about was often about their specific remit at school.
I lead the curriculum.
I’m the pastoral lead.
I look after personal development.
All important stuff, but I didn’t feel like that was what I’d asked for.
So, to start with, I thought it must just be the way I was asking the questions. Perhaps I was nudging them towards a remit-specific answer. But I usually ask questions like ‘what is your role as a leader in this school?’, or ‘what do you think is the most important role you play as a leader / Assistant Head / Deputy Head?’
The questions I ask intend to understand what leadership perceives as the most important aspects of its existence. The why behind what they do. The principles that underpin their systems and strategy. I also like to see if there is parity between leaders across the school, for obvious reasons.
The way I was trained to lead was extremely specific and deliberate. Nothing was left to chance. The children’s experience being first class is absolutely paramount, and to deliver that for every single one of them, we have to remove barriers for staff, and always help them grow.
As a fledgling middle leader, I was guided carefully so that I not only hit my targets, in this case raising outcomes and improving the curriculum in my English department, but also ensuring that I had a plan for everyone in my team to ensure that they developed. The biggest part of my role as a middle leader was to ensure everyone in my team got better every year. Not just at specific tasks, but holistically. To lead meant to grow others. Everything else was just the tasks I did.
Furthermore, I was expected to strategise with my line manager about the future direction of travel for those staff. Who would replace me? Who might become a leader within the department? Who might become a coach? Who might move into pastoral leadership? Who was specialising in certain expertise and who would continue to do so? Which CPD could we offer to help the team members with their journey?
We spent the most time in my line management meetings talking about how we could serve, support, and grow the staff in my team. And that was happening in every team.
This all drip-fed down from the headteacher. Every leader in the school had to be committed not just to their ‘role’ or ‘remit’, because let’s face it, they can change all the time, but to relentlessly pursue the growth and development of all staff.
Throughout my time with him, I always knew he was thinking of how I could improve and where my career might take me. But the amazing thing was that he was doing the same for everyone. When it came to the journeys that his staff would go on, nothing was left to chance. Everyone felt like the headteacher, and their line managers, had their best interests for them in mind, and a plan for how they could grow. It’s a special feeling.
This was a demanding work environment, because to lead meant ensuring all children and all staff always had what they needed to improve. It meant thinking ahead, mapping things out, and always having a consistent and deliberate approach to how we lead across the school.
The consequences of this approach were high outcomes, high staff retention, lots of internal promotion and vacancies filled, and very rarely a worry as the 31st of May arrived! But hopefully the biggest was the staff felt their capacity to teach and lead was growing every single year.
I’m not saying that the way I was trained to lead is the best way, or the only way, but it was very intentional and clear. I remember every single thing to this day and understand the why behind how we lead. But what prompted this blog was not necessarily seeing that as the norm across UK schools.
So, when I reflect on what my role is as a leader, the resounding answer is to ensure that all staff can work uninhibited and flourish holistically, and in their role.
Yes, I might be the pastoral deputy, and that is a specific, and important function that I am responsible for. But I’m the deputy head. I’m a leader in a school. My most important role is looking after, leading, and growing our staff.
So I suppose that’s why I have been a bit perplexed when I haven’t heard as many leaders talk about that. Perhaps I’m noticing a non-issue. Or perhaps what I am seeing is real, and it’s caused by factors like accountability measures and inspection frameworks. When we put leaders in charge of a certain area of a framework, can that potentially narrow their approach to leadership?
If you are a pastoral lead and you have behaviour and attendance under your remit, it’s likely that you’ve noticed that there are big chunks of the Ofsted framework matched up to your role. So, when you are getting royally stuck in to making sure these areas of school life are as good as possible, it’s possible that might mean taking your eye off the ball in other places. It’s not a criticism – it’s natural to be able to only do so much, and get more involved with the areas of your role.
Of course, it’s not the mere presence of accountability measures that are to blame, but what schools, trusts and leaders prioritise, and how they behave. Some teachers and leaders have told me they have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to meet in their appraisal, which is something I only thought I’d read in the Harvard Business Review.
Accountability is important, but if you go down the path of setting too many data-driven targets, it can lead staff to focus emphatically on those, and less so on areas that might be less easy to ‘prove’, such as teacher or staff growth.
We are a people business. We need to focus on how to grow them, and support them, first.
I don’t want to sound like a LinkedIn Keynote Speaker Guru here (you know, the ones who provide lots of optimism and not many strategies…), but when you invest in people and their development, the score does start to take care of itself, because you are being deliberate, strategic, and attentive to everyone improving.
So, without wanting to write too much, here are six simple methods to prioritise growth and to build capacity in others:
Investing in growth: staff need a comprehensive professional development programme at school, but they also need leaders who genuinely invest in their individual growth. This can be aided by appraisal processes that are very much framed with self reflection and how the staff member wants to improve, but genuine investment goes far beyond this. It means checking in throughout the year to ask how their development is going, seeing what they need to help them improve, and proactively finding opportunities and experiences for them to try that help them grow in the identified areas.
Question: as a team leader, do you know the areas that each of your team members wants or needs to develop in? How much time have you invested support them with this?
Succession planning and next steps: this doesn’t have to be about getting a promotion or nudging people to aspire to ‘climb the ladder’. It’s about understanding the goals of your staff and helping them to map out the necessary steps to achieve this. You want to become an Assistant Headteacher? Okay, let’s map out the skills, knowledge, experiences you’ll need to get there, and then we can get cracking. You want to specialise in A-Level teaching and lead that for the department? Okay great, let’s map it out. You want to shift direction and become a head of year? Perfect, let me set up some shadowing time with the Head of Year 9.
This means that staff have leaders who understand and invest in their goals and next steps, and teams and the school in general have an excellent understanding of the journeys of their staff, and which roles might be filled, and by whom, in the future.
Question: Do you know about your staff’s plans for the future? Do you proactively involve yourself and help to guide them in this journey? And who is doing this for you?
Clear leadership principles: the best schools have a clear set of principles that are lived by all. This is especially important for the school’s leaders, because they are the ones who need to articulate and prioritise these for the rest of the staff. What are some examples? One could be that all senior leaders informally check in with those they line manage a couple of times a week (outside of their normal meeting time), just to see how things are going and if they need anything. Another could be that we adopt a coaching approach when we talk to those we lead – we often don’t ‘tell’, but ask first (when possible). Another could be that we have a clear approach to how we use and interpret data, so that everyone understands what we expect and how we do this. If we haven’t agreed and spelt out how we lead others in the school, it will lack identity, cohesion, and then we have an accidental culture that will barely limp.
Question: how clearly do leaders in your school articulate what it means to lead? Do you know what your headteacher or other senior leaders believe in when it comes to leading others?
Consistency across leaders: of course, these principles are undermined by a lack of consistency. If I check in on those I lead every 3 days, adopt a coaching approach, and follow the school’s data processes, but the other deputy head is rarely seen, is always telling people what to do and gives them no room to make their own decisions, and has ignored data for the last 2 cycles, then we are ineffective.
One of the biggest issues I see in senior leadership teams is the lack of consistency regarding how they lead people. Your experience as a middle leader is completely dependent not on the whole school’s vision or principles, but on the style of leadership of your line manager. The best leaders sit together, talk about and evaluate how they are leading others, so nothing is left to chance. It’s not about people hiding their personalities, but leaders must have agreed upon approaches that they all follow, or consistency reigns, not to mention scrambling the cognitive resources of staff who don’t know what to expect from one leader to the next.
Question: think about you and the leaders you work with? Is there consistency in the way you lead? Where are the inconsistencies and what’s the impact?
Modelling and walking the walk: another one of our leadership principles might be the way we ALWAYS treat the children with love, respect, and curiosity, even when investigating, correcting, or sanctioning. We as leaders are the ones that need to model this all day every day. We get out of our offices and are visible at every opportunity, modelling how we interact with others in our school. This will lead to the behaviours and culture that we desire, but also gives us the credibility to speak with other staff about how and why we do this, and to support them with this approach.
But we must model all of the approaches and principles we want to see in others. This makes it much easier for staff to understand what’s important to the school, and to see how it’s done. In my experience, reducing ambiguity and modelling the how, means staff can grow.
Question: as a leader, are you happy with how far you and other leaders model what’s important to you? Where are the inconsistencies and what’s the impact?
Coaching approach: this one is important, regardless of whether you are a trained coach or not. The best leaders don’t constantly try to solve all the problems for those they lead. They coach them through a situation and offer support or advice where needed, in a collaborative manner. This blog post is all about helping people grow, to support them to become better at what they do. That doesn’t happen when they get told all the time. We need them to think hard and make decisions, and a coaching approach is the best method for this. Again, this must be consistent for impact. If every middle leader is coached effectively by a senior leader, they will understand the benefit to this approach, and will be able to do similar things with their teams, too.
Question: do leaders take a deliberate approach to the way they discuss, question, or problem solve with staff? Whether it’s coaching or not, is there intention behind helping others to grow during these conversations?
This blog post hasn’t necessarily offered anything earth shattering or brand new. But it does contain an important message or possibly a challenge: are you as leaders investing enough time in the growth of all the staff in your school and teams?
We’d all likely say yes to this instantly, because we are dedicated to the development of those that we work with. But are you really invested? Do your day-to-day actions match your ideals? Is there a chance that leadership has become task or function related, or dominated, without you realising?
Thanks for reading – I’m about to board a flight to Thailand for some holiday time and work in schools, but please get in touch to chat more!
Sam
Sam Crome 