johntomsett

I have been a teacher for 31 years, a head teacher for 16 years and, at the age of 55, this much I know about the challenges for early career headteachers: coping with the loneliness.

I am in my seventeenth year as a state school secondary head teacher. Recently I was interviewed by an organisation exploring the biggest challenges for early career head teachers. I began the interview with the knotty question, “What do you mean by head teacher?” We settled on the traditional definition of the head teacher who runs the school with a significant level of autonomy, both challenged and supported by a traditional governing body in a critical friend role.

I identified eight major challenges for early career head teachers:

1. Forging your relationship with the chair of governors (CoG);
2. Managing the fact that the buck stops with you;
3. Understanding the finances;
4. Establishing your core purpose;
5. Being patient;
6. Establishing a position on teaching & learning;
7. Understanding change management;
8. Coping with the loneliness.

In this current series of short blog posts, I am addressing each of these challenges and providing some tips which might help early career head teachers to meet them. This final post explores, coping with the loneliness.

Coping with the loneliness

I had been exercised, early in my first headship, by a lad from the town who was known to dabble in drugs. He would loiter at the stile at the end of the school day, mixing with some of our most vulnerable students. One darkening November afternoon in my first term, I confronted him boldly, accusing him of being a drug dealer and directing him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from my students. He stood his ground. He wasn’t, by a matter of inches, on school property. And he had an audience of some of my most challenging charges.

As I walked away, back down the path into school, the sense of loneliness was palpable. He stood there, victorious. I could hear the laughter and the jeers. Things got worse when his parents complained to the governing body. I literally sunk to the floor in my office when that news came through, in complete despair. I had mucked up. A week later I faced his mum and dad in my office where I had to apologise to them for making unsubstantiated accusations about their son. I felt humiliated.

Kevin, our older, hugely experienced, burly assistant head teacher, reassured me. He frequented the local pubs. He knew the town. He was sure nothing would really come of it. In a week’s time it would be old news. And, of course, he was right.

Later that first year I made a terrifically difficult decision about an internal appointment. Two strong candidates for a senior post and I decided to appoint neither. That was tough. For what seemed an eternity, every time I walked into the staff room colleagues stopped talking. I thought about that issue day and night and all weekend. I went fishing with my mate Nick and it was all I could contemplate. Even when I caught a pike, I was wondering about how to sort the mess out at school. Nick knew something was wrong. He chatted it through with me. He was wise about it all. Of course, it would resolve itself. I just had to be patient. Like Kevin before him, he was spot on.

The loneliest moment of my career came in 2010, when our results dipped badly. On that damp August results Wednesday, I sat in my car as the rain pummelled down on the roof and wept and wept; I felt like the loneliest man on the entire planet. I finally rang my wife Louise who said to me, John, come home. We all love you. You can pack it in. It’s really not worth it. Her words were the balm I needed just at that moment. I was very close to quitting. Thanks to Louise, I didn’t.

The loneliness of the job comes, in the end, from a mixture of forces: the fact that the buck stops with you; having to have difficult conversations with other adults; the confidentiality of so much of what you have to deal with; the range and number of different people and organisations to whom you are accountable; the sheer vulnerability of the position and how you are more sackable than any other person in your school.

So, if you are new to headship and you are sitting in front of a screen this Sunday morning feeling distant from your family and worried about next week – if  you are feeling just  plain lonely – here are my top five tips for early career head teachers for coping with the loneliness:

1. Find someone you can talk to. The thread through my loneliness examples above is clear. All head teachers need someone they trust with whom they can share their insecurities. In January 2016 the BBC screened a programme entitled The Age of Loneliness. In a poignant documentary, which is affecting yet never mawkish, Sue Bourne interviews a range of people who talk about living in relative solitude. Loneliness, according to Bourne, is ‘the silent epidemic’. Bourne’s fundamental conclusion is that, ‘People of all ages missed someone to do nothing with. To chat idly. To sit next to.’ And that’s it, isn’t it? We all need, to a greater or lesser extent, someone with whom to share our lives. And why should head teachers be any different? If there is no-one at home to talk to, a good employer will provide you with an experienced leadership coach. Bottling up stuff will only increase the sense of loneliness.

2. Choose to be a stoic and control how you react to things. Shakespeare’s “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”, is rooted in Stoic philosophy. Accept that you can control how you react to life’s vagaries. You can choose how you think, and knowing this has helped keep me sane. It is worth reflecting upon the fact that here, now, as you read this and take a moment to look back on your life, all the things that have traumatised you, all the disasters which have befallen you, you have survived. Nothing has been as bad as it might have been. Nothing is ever that bad. As Karen Pierce, the UK’s Ambassador to the UN, pointed out in a recent interview, “It will be alright in the end and if it isn’t alright, you haven’t reached the end yet”. We can surely choose how we react to life’s vagaries. All events are neutral; how we interpret them determines whether they are good or bad and how we allow them to affect us. Imagine this…impossible as it might seem, everything that happens to you could be good if you chose to think that way.

3. Learn to compartmentalise. I have always argued that the work-life balance is a false dichotomy. I enjoy my job, I am proud to be a head teacher, my work is a central part of my life. For a long time I have preferred the work-home balance, which, combined, constitute my life. But now, much nearer the end of my career than the beginning, I am not sure that I wholly subscribe to my nuanced definition. I heard Cat Scutt speak at researchED Durham yesterday and some research she pointed to, made me think. A paper by Klusmann et al, on teacher wellbeing found that some of the most effective teachers maintained a ‘healthy detachment’ about their job and ‘conserved their personal resources’. What Cat said resonated with me and reminded me of Philip Gould. In his final interview before he died at the age of 61, Gould, Tony Blair’s close adviser, said this to Andrew Marr and I have had it pinned on my office wall ever since: ‘What would have been better for me would have been to have said, “I’ll do what I can do, which I do quite well” and then just push it back a little bit’. Gould’s insight came too late for him, but it isn’t too late for me or any early career head teacher. It. Is. Only. A. Job.

4. Expand your own mental health jam-jar (you need to read this post to understand this completely). I have a list of things I do which grow my capacity to cope with whatever life throws at me:

• Prioritise Louise, Joe and Olly
• Reading
• Writing
• Fishing
• Golf
• Exercise
• Breathing exercises
• Recondition old fishing rods

5. My most important tip for coping with the loneliness is an eternal truth. As Francis Bacon knew so well, the best antidote to loneliness is love. It is the only thing that really matters.

“But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”

Francis Bacon

I have been a teacher for 31 years, a head teacher for 16 years and, at the age of 55, this much I know about the challenges for early career headteachers: understanding change management.

I am in my seventeenth year as a state school secondary head teacher. Recently I was interviewed by an organisation exploring the biggest challenges for early career head teachers. I began the interview with the knotty question, “What do you mean by head teacher?” We settled on the traditional definition of the head teacher who runs the school with a significant level of autonomy, both challenged and supported by a traditional governing body in a critical friend role.

I identified eight major challenges for early career head teachers:

1. Forging your relationship with the chair of governors (CoG);
2. Managing the fact that the buck stops with you;
3. Understanding the finances;
4. Establishing your core purpose;
5. Being patient;
6. Establishing a position on teaching & learning;
7. Understanding change management;
8. Coping with the loneliness.

In this current series of short blog posts, I am addressing each of these challenges and providing some tips which might help early career head teachers to meet them. This post explores, understanding change management.

Understanding change management

I had little idea about how to conduct change when I began my first headship. I made a cataclysm of errors (my choice of collective noun) in the first few years of leading a school. Some of my mistakes related to change management have already been catalogued in previous posts. Certainly, the misguided sense that more is more was at the heart of my naive approach to enacting change.

The thing is, less is more, always. School Leaders invariably feel safe when we have lots of plans to demonstrate the efforts we are making to improve our schools. In the past I have been horribly guilty of thinking more is more!

My first School Development Plan as a head teacher was a beast, only portable by supermarket trolley. When I presented it to the Governing Body the meeting was on the first floor and my PA Rosie and I, with 20 copies of the thing to carry, had to take the lift. It had 38 development initiatives. I wasn’t interested in getting a few essential things right I wanted to get everything right straight away.

That Governing Body meeting where I presented my first plan (of course it was mine – I had to prove myself as a head teacher and there was no way anyone else was going to tell me what to do) lasted until 11.30 pm: not only did I circulate hard copies of my SDE (School Development Encyclopaedia) I had 127 Powerpoint slides (of largely text copied verbatim from the SDE itself) to help me tell Governors what we were going to do over the next year.

It was great. I loved it. I gained some odd satisfaction from the strain and pain of giving birth to the thing, the weekends spent typing the beast up whilst my wife and kids entertained themselves; an absent father in the next room. And I had no idea how I was going to measure whether what I had planned had worked.

Looking back now, it’s embarrassing to think of that first development plan. But the culture of fear breeds backside covering amongst early career head teachers. It’s really easy to implement extensive interventions in an attempt to raise headline results figures just so that you can point to how much you did to improve results when the results turn out to be disappointing in August. I know the results are rubbish, but we worked really hard – look at all the things we did…

And then there is the difficult challenge of realising just a single specific change. What I did not understand is just how difficult it is to enact what seemed to be even the simplest alteration to practice within a school. Teachers and schools are conservative places. Change is rarely greeted with enthusiasm. And if you have 112 teachers and 70 support staff in a school, like we do at Huntington, ensuring that a change to practice is implemented with 100% fidelity is a huge challenge.

So, if you are new to headship and are preparing to implement changes to the school you lead, here are my top five tips for early career head teachers for understanding the change process:

1. Know where you are on the Sigmoid curve. Whenever an organisation implements change there is a general pattern of development explained by Sigmoid Curve analysis, shown in this first diagram:

The key issue is when to introduce the next phase of change, explored in the second diagram:

You want to reach point Y on an upward, not downward, trajectory; but when can you tell that it’s time to jump off the first curve? Riding the first curve while cultivating the second is always the best option; clinging to the first and trying to prolong it is a pointless waste of energy. When all is well and you are at the top of your game, then it’s probably the time to plan your next curve.

I have recently asked our SLT where they think Huntington is on its Sigmoid curve. The numbers indicate how many of us think we are at those specific points on the curve.

2. Get a few essential things right. Sir Tim Brighouse’s The jigsaw of a successful school is sharp stuff and required reading for all early career headteachers; it embodies the principle of keeping things coherently simple. In his introduction makes the following observation about change and school improvement:

…whenever I’ve visited a school, which has recovered its sense of direction and pride after falling on hard times…I ask the (usually new) head teacher, “Well, what did you do?” The reply is always the same. Whatever the head teacher’s style, whether understated and calm, cool and determined or outrageously busy, the reply usually contains the phrase: “Well it’s not rocket science. We just concentrated on getting a few essential things right”. [1]

“…getting a few essential things right.” Just let that phrase sink in.

It depends where you are in the development cycle of a school, but wherever you find yourself on the development cycle, pare down your change priorities and do a small number of things really well. Easier to say than do, perhaps, but school improvement is not hard as long as you keep it simple and focused on what matters.

3. Learn about the change process. One book that helped which I read before I began was Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan. Another publication from the Canadian leadership guru, The Six Secrets of Change, I have found hugely useful. My leadership of change at two schools has taught me many things, most of which Fullan articulates in his book Leading in a Culture of Change.[2] His six secrets are not secrets any more – since he’s published them – and I’m not sure they ever were; I think they are common sense:

1. The goal is not to innovate the most.
2. It is not enough to have the best ideas.
3. Appreciate the implementation dip.
4. Redefine resistance.
5. Reculturing is the name of the game.
6. Never a checklist, always complexity.

So much of what Fullan says here I discovered the hard way, through first-hand experience; perhaps one has to live through professional strife before one can accept that Fullan-style wisdom is true.

4. Look to the commercial world. I have never desired to be a business man, but I do, however, learn from business practices. A few years ago I adopted what’s called Blue Ocean Strategy in order to have a structure for implementing change. We spend more time now thinking about how we implement change than what that change might be. Implementation is woven into our planning, not an afterthought. It works brilliantly and has helped us improve teaching and learning no end. The nub of our Blue Ocean Strategy implementation process is outlined in the slides available below and a Bill Bratton Tipping Point pdf.

5. Keep learning about implementing change. Most recently, Professor Jonathan Sharples authored an EEF guidance report on how to plan the implementation of your interventions entitled, Putting Evidence to Work – A School’s Guide to Implementation. It is essential reading for all school leaders, and I don’t say that lightly. It is a game-changer, as far as I am concerned. It introduced me to the concept of implementation activities; that is, activities which you detail in your planning which help ensure that the enacted change is as faithful as possibly to the change you planned. The idea is outlined here in a series of slides, where we identify the issue – in this case, a curriculum issue – then go to the desired outcome, then detail the change required, then identify the implementation activities in all their prosaic dullness, and then finally envisage the outcomes of the implementation activities. I promise you it works.

In January 2018 we used this approach to implement seven months of preparatory work on improving the progress of our most vulnerable learners. Eighteen months later, for the first time, our disadvantaged Year 11 students had a positive overall P8 score and their P8 score for Ebacc subjects was +0.22. Still not as good as we wanted, but in a school where 92% of our students are from a white British background, it is a respectable outcome.

And if I was allowed a sixth tip, before you implement, carry out a pre-mortem. I always anticipate what might go wrong. It’s safer that way, and I can only be pleasantly surprised when my pessimistic anticipations do not materialise.

At Huntington we have formalised such pessimistic thinking within the implementation of all important strategic developments we undertake. After we have completed our Blue Ocean Strategy analysis, and identified our implementation activities, we undertake a pre-mortem. Instead of working out what caused a development to fail after it has failed as we would in a post mortem, we assume it has already failed before we have begun and try to predict what would cause such failure. Once we have established what might cause our developments to run aground, we agree a list of actions to prevent such an eventuality.

Our pre-mortem idea derived from an article by psychologist Gary Klein.[3] He cites research by Mitchell, Russo and Pennington which found ‘that prospective hindsight – imagining that an event has already occurred – increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%’.[4] Klein devised his pre-mortem, the distinctive feature of which is the assumption by the team that the development has completely failed.

Psychologically, this assumption of total failure allows members of the team to speak more frankly than if they were merely thinking about why the development in question might not work. This sense of what has happened instead of what could happen helps the team visualise the assumed failure with greater clarity. The team gains a similar lucidity when hypothesising about why the failure happened.

We used the pre-mortem technique when implementing our new Pastoral structure. Our write up of our discussions began, ‘It’s July 2016 and the Pastoral Review has failed to deliver on any of its objectives’. We created a table on one side of A4 which had three headings:

Once established, the pre-mortem becomes a regular agenda item at the team’s implementation meetings.

[1] http://www.rm.com/timbrighouse/

[2] Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2001).

[3] Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem”, The Harvard Business Review, (HBR, September 2007), accessed 29 August 2016. Available at https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem

[4] D. J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and N. Pennington, “Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events”, in the Journal of Behavioural Decision Making, (Volume 2, Issue 1, January/March 1989), pp. 25–38

I have been a teacher for 31 years, a head teacher for 16 years and, at the age of 55, this much I know about the challenges for early career headteachers: being patient.

I am in my seventeenth year as a state school secondary head teacher. Recently I was interviewed by an organisation exploring the biggest challenges for early career head teachers. I began the interview with the knotty question, “What do you mean by head teacher?” We settled on the traditional definition of the head teacher who runs the school with a significant level of autonomy, both challenged and supported by a traditional governing body in a critical friend role.

I identified eight major challenges for early career head teachers:

1. Forging your relationship with the chair of governors (CoG);
2. Managing the fact that the buck stops with you;
3. Understanding the finances;
4. Establishing your core purpose;
5. Being patient;
6. Establishing a position on teaching & learning;
7. Understanding change management;
8. Coping with the loneliness.

In this current series of short blog posts, I am addressing each of these challenges and providing some tips which might help early career head teachers to meet them. This post explores, being patient.

Being patient

A new Headteacher usually assumes that s/he has to come into a school and make his/her mark. Schools are notoriously vulnerable in the wake of regime change. A new Headteacher can lead to a significant modification of the values and educational philosophy of a school. And perfectly good systems are suddenly abandoned for the new boss’ favoured alternatives, without a shred of evidence that in this new setting his or her old favourites will work. So, out goes setting, in comes mixed prior attainment; goodbye SIMS, hello BromCom; exit Year Groups, enter Houses. And the rest of the staff just have to suck it up and watch whilst what worked stops working…

The context of each headship is different and each requires a different leadership style. My guess is, however, that if you have been appointed to your first headship, you will have been appointed to a school which is in reasonable shape. If a school is in some turmoil, then the governing body will usually want a seasoned leader who can act decisively; conversely, a school which is bobbing along quite nicely is more likely to appoint a first time leader who can take their time in shaping the school.

The early career headteacher has lots of onlookers tracking their every move.  They have myriad voices trying to influence them, telling them several different versions of the school and how it works. They feel pressured to do something which changes the direction of the school. That pressure builds. As my opening paragraph made clear, they instinctively want to make their mark, which is understandable but misguided.

What many resort to is a change in the school uniform. Such a step requires a significant time investment and achieves little. The first day I stood on the main corridor as a headteacher I called over a girl called Sarah and told her politely that her tailored shirt, with three-quarter sleeves and no top button, would have to be changed. She also looked like she had just ram-raided Ratner’s the jewellers.

Sarah, in turn, politely pointed out that every other girl in the corridor was wearing the same style of shirt and was similarly bejewelled. There then ensued a six month process of uniform-change, during which I managed to upset the whole school community. And I also stopped Year 10 going into town for lunch. That made the front page of the local newspaper.

I felt confused but desperate to appear proactive. I didn’t know which battles to pick. I instigated a move to a Faculty system, solely on the recommendation of a Local Authority adviser. The Faculty system introduced another expensive tier of leadership – we retained subject leader posts within the Faculty structure(!?!) – without improving the quality of teaching at all. But I was doing things. I appeared incredibly busy. By the end of my first year I felt exhausted and isolated. I had upset people without moving the school on at all.

We had a full OFSTED inspection eight days into that first headship; sixteen inspectors for four days. It was a perfectly timed review of the school and gave me a blueprint for improvement. My fruitless activity-for-the-sake-of-it stopped early in my second year when we began focusing upon the quality of teaching, as the OFSTED report had suggested we should do. We also began tracking students’ progress more accurately. We refrained from doing things peripheral to improving what was going on in the classroom.

My four year long first headship saw the school move from 38^th out of 47 schools in North Yorkshire for KS2-KS4 progress, to 3^rd out of 47 schools. But I learnt the hard way; the whole process wore me thin. When I began my second headship, I was the epitome of patience. We drew up a ten year plan and, whilst we did not follow the plan to the letter, we hit every milestone at the right time; ten years later, OFSTED popped in, almost unannounced, and declared we were Outstanding.

Such long-term planning can seem impossible for the early career headteacher who feels the need to do things immediately. But if they can resist such pressure and be patient, it will turn out best for the school – and for them personally – over time. So, if you are appointed to lead a school for the first time and feel compelled to introduce blazers with gold braiding on the lapels, just to look like you are doing something, here are my top five tips for early career head teachers for being patient:

1. Explain to your Chair of Governors that you intend to be patient and that s/he should not expect significant change any time soon. Explain your timeline for change over the first three years.
2. Spend your first term getting to know the school. Speak to everyone. Be about the place. Question what everyone says. Analyse performance data. Triangulate. Then over the Christmas holidays, formulate your own version of the truth about the school, based on the most robust evidence. Then take a day with your senior team and go through a process with them to establish their truth about the school compared to yours, so that, by the end of the day, you agree as a whole team the current state of the school and the one or two things that need to be done, when and how, in order to improve the school.
3. Be careful what you say. When I had been appointed to my first headship, a York headteacher said to me, “Be careful of what you say because people will remember it and quote it back to you months, even years, down the line”. And he was dead right.
4. It is the best ideas for improvement that count most, not yours. Have the confidence to develop others in your team and give them the chance to accept responsibility and accountability for their improvement initiatives. Leadership is best measured in the leadership you develop in others.
5. Focus on teaching and learning. You have to build from the bottom up, starting in the classroom. Support your frontline staff. Have conversations about teaching with everyone who teaches in your school. And no matter how busy you might be, you must teach, really well. Be patient; you teaching well matters more than you might ever realise.

I have been a teacher for 31 years, a head teacher for 16 years and, at the age of 55, this much I know about the challenges for early career headteachers: establishing your core purpose.

I am in my seventeenth year as a state school secondary head teacher. Recently I was interviewed by an organisation exploring the biggest challenges for early career head teachers. I began the interview with the knotty question, “What do you mean by head teacher?” We settled on the traditional definition of the head teacher who runs the school with a significant level of autonomy, both challenged and supported by a traditional governing body in a critical friend role.

I identified eight major challenges for early career head teachers:

1. Forging your relationship with the chair of governors (CoG);
2. Managing the fact that the buck stops with you;
3. Understanding the finances;
4. Establishing your core purpose;
5. Being patient;
6. Establishing a position on teaching & learning;
7. Understanding change management;
8. Coping with the loneliness.

In this current series of short blog posts, I am addressing each of these challenges and providing some tips which might help early career head teachers to overcome them. This post explores, establishing your core purpose.

Establishing your core purpose

I had no idea where the school was heading when I began my first headship. All I could do was replicate some of the behaviours I had learnt from observing the several headteachers I had served under. I made some awful mistakes in that first term, nearly all in how I interacted with people. I was quite hapless, in so many ways. And it was all short-termism. I just dealt with the next issue confronting me.

As JFK said, Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.

Fortunately, at the end of that first term, Sue Ellis, one of the deputy headteachers, attended a newly developed Investors in People leadership course. She returned insisting that we establish a core purpose for our school. I had completed my NPQH in 2000 and I remembered being told something about Pepsi’s core purpose being “Beat Coke”, but beyond that I was clueless about what a core purpose was and why we might need one. Sue said, pithily, that a core purpose should encapsulate the reason we get up in the morning and come to work.

After some false starts and endless consultations, we came up with the distinctly unpithy core purpose: “To inspire everyone in our school community with a love of learning and, by doing so, maximise their life chances.” About a year after we had splattered this core purpose around the school and over all our literature, Di Fitzgerald, head of Drama, pointed out that it was grammatically incorrect and should have read “…maximise his or her life chances”. Despite our illiterate ways, our core purpose really stuck, and three years later it resonated throughout the school, to the point where, according to one of our students, at the beginning of the “Romeo and Juliet” Lord and Lady Capulet wanted Juliet to marry Paris to maximise her life chances…

Huntington’s core purpose, established as soon as I began my headship there in 2007, is, “To inspire confident learners who will thrive in a changing world”. It has stood the test of time. It influences everything we do.

And every word counts. We all strive, not just to teach, but to inspire our learners; building confidence is essential for all of us to succeed; we are all learners, including the staff; rather than just succeed we would rather thrive which suggests that we are happy both in our career and in our relationships with other people; as technology develops we find ourselves in an ever changing world.

We did have students but replaced it with learners. Many schools have a line about everyone being a learner, but we really mean it. Learning something helps you understand as a teacher what it is like to be a learner and to struggle at learning something. Teacher learning is central to our school’s success and every single member of staff has to accept the professional obligation to try to get better at what they do if they work at Huntington.

We really worked on getting the wording of our core purpose absolutely right. It was pedantic stuff. The students chose the word thrive, where we had used the word succeed. I like the word thrive. Think about it – plants thrive when the conditions for growth are right. And I think the job of Headteacher is to get the conditions for growth right in a school; when the conditions for growth are right, students and staff will thrive.

So, why is a core purpose so important in your day-to-day running of the school? Well, the process of establishing that core purpose was crucial in helping me understand how to lead a school. When I had to make a tough decision, I returned to the core purpose and considered whether taking that tough decision was aligned with our core purpose; if it was, then that gave me the courage to make the decision, no matter how tough it might have been. And now, 17 years on, that still holds true.

Most importantly, however, defining your core purpose allows you to put learning at the heart of everything you do – surely the core business of every school.

Truly great schools will have a core purpose that is timeless and was established way before you begin your headship. That said, there are many schools that are purposeless. Literally. So, if you are appointed to lead a school which has no discernible reason for existing, here are my top five tips for early career head teachers for establishing your core purpose:

1. Avoid developing your core purpose within the four walls of your office, the way Headteacher Stuart Simmonds developed his mission statement, “To seek to ensure that each pupil shall maximise their optimal potentiality”…
2. Consult everyone who might have the remotest interest in your school doing well. It matters that everyone is involved in shaping your core purpose. That process takes weeks, and, whilst the creative process is messy, it is essential. When developing your core purpose, brief the governors on your intentions and then begin with your staff – every single one of them. Your colleagues need to contribute their understanding of why they work at their school if they are going to unite behind the new core purpose. If you get the process of developing a core purpose right, when the caretakers are putting out yet another 250 chairs for the morning’s assembly they’ll tell you they’re helping the school fulfill its core purpose.
3. Make your core purpose pithy, memorable and easy to recite.
4. Strive to articulate a core purpose that belongs precisely to your school. I know it is really hard to avoid developing something clichéd. As I demonstrated above, every word counts.
5. Every chance you get to publicise your core purpose, publicise it! I know it’s prosaic, but good signage is worth every penny. And your core purpose should be one of the first things anyone sees when they access your website.

I have been a teacher for 31 years, a head teacher for 16 years and, at the age of 55, this much I know about the challenges for early career headteachers: managing the fact that the buck stops with you.

I am in my seventeenth year as a state school secondary head teacher. Recently I was interviewed by an organisation exploring the biggest challenges for early career head teachers. I began the interview with the knotty question, “What do you mean by head teacher?” We settled on the traditional definition of the head teacher who runs the school with a significant level of autonomy, both challenged and supported by a traditional governing body in a critical friend role.

I identified eight major challenges for early career head teachers:

1. Forging your relationship with the chair of governors (CoG);
2. Managing the fact that the buck stops with you;
3. Understanding the finances;
4. Establishing your core purpose;
5. Being patient;
6. Establishing a position on teaching & learning;
7. Understanding change management;
8. Coping with the loneliness.

In this current series of short blog posts, I am addressing each of these challenges and providing some tips which might help early career head teachers to overcome them. This post explores, managing the fact that the buck stops with you.

Managing the fact that the buck stops with you

The first time the buck stopped with me it came as a bit of a surprise. It was late August 2003, a week before I began as headteacher at Lady Lumley’s School, when the deputy told me we didn’t have a psychology teacher for the start of term. My first thought was “Why is he telling me?” And then it suddenly struck me that, ultimately, it was my job to ensure we were fully staffed.

The thing is, no-one forces you to become a headteacher. If you have chosen that career path you need to have secure coping strategies in order to survive in the role. You certainly have to be able to control your thinking. The mantra I try to live by is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

An appreciation of one’s own insignificance is, generally, a good thing. There are 32,000 schools in the UK and approximately 3 million schools in the world; as a headteacher, you lead just one of them. Keeping things in perspective, but not too wide a perspective, is an important facet of running a school and leading a contented life. Certain things have to matter, but not too much.

If you find yourself taking yourself too seriously, go and scrape some chewing gum off the carpet in the school reception. Or take a walk around your local cemetery.

On occasion, I respond to situations inappropriately. I once broke down hopelessly at a colleague’s packed funeral and people couldn’t look me in the eye at the wake. For them it must have been deeply unsettling, like when you see your dad cry for the first time. Colleagues need to feel they are in safe hands, especially when there is such uncertainty and fear in our professional world. You have to hold steady.

So, here are my top five tips for early career head teachers for managing the fact that the buck stops with you:

1. Shun self-pity. Recently I was asked which human characteristic I most despised and I replied, self-pity. When things go awry, I never ask “Why me?” Rather, I ask “Why not me?” Once you accept that being human means you will suffer pain, life becomes significantly easier.
2. When things go wrong in school, learn to step back and laugh at your predicaments. You can choose to train your brain that way. As Frankl says in his life-affirming treatise, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Take a helicopter view of life. In a week, a month, six months, a year, what appears a huge issue now will seem a mere trifling inconvenience.
3. Get a good night’s sleep. I once heard Stella Rimington, erstwhile Director-General of MI5, say that the only advice she could give to headteachers is to get a good night’s sleep. She thought it impossible to make sound decisions when you are fatigued. And when it comes to sleeping, invest heavily in the best mattress for your bed you can find. Seriously!
4. Remember that every single challenge that you have faced until this point in your life, you have met. No matter what life has thrown at you, you are here now, you have endured. When we have an unexpected fire alarm I stand in the centre of the playground, as 1,700 people mass around me, and I tell myself that this too shall pass. It really helps. Especially if it is raining.
5. Finally, when you find yourself in the eye of the storm, when the crisis you are dealing with tests you to the limit, when the buck has not just stopped with you, but has sat with all its crushing weight upon your chest so you can hardly breathe, remember that you only have to deal with the next 60 seconds. And once you have survived those 60 seconds, you can cope with the next 60, and then the next. One. Minute. At. A. Time.