Headteacher Neil Coe’s mantra is to do things that make sense. He writes here about his key school improvement priorities during a challenging first year of secondary headship


When I started looking for my first headship, I wanted a school where I was able to really apply my leadership learning and my 25 years of teaching experience.

I found Westhoughton High School, which is a school with a personality that really fits me, and I started in the role just over a year ago.

We have 1,306 pupils on roll at the moment. Just over 29% of our pupils are eligible for Pupil Premium. It serves a largely white, post-industrial area on the outskirts of Bolton.

The school had been going through quite a time as I joined, with a rapid turnover of leaders. At the time it was expected that the school might lose its good rating and hit requires improvement.

An interim head had been in place before me, with a plan to steer the school through the Ofsted process before appointing a new head afterwards. However, inspections stopped during the pandemic, so I inherited a school waiting for the inspectors to call, which happened on day 42 of my headship.

I learned a lot from models of approaches to the first 100 days of headship during my NPQH programme and I applied this learning and adapted it to where we were as a school. The staff were on their third head in three years so the standard model of “hello ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to take 100 days to work out what we need to do” wasn't going to land well with colleagues.

Working with my team we put together an outline school improvement plan in September showing our direction. When we had a Section 8 Ofsted in the November – happily we maintained our good rating – we added the detail to the priorities, with each owned by a different senior leader. Each key strategic priority had four or five key actions that needed to happen in order to make it a reality. It also included some basic outcomes which are tracked as we go along.

We held a two-hour long roundtable for each priority, involving staff, senior leaders, the leadership coach, and governors. Involving governors in the construction of the school improvement plan meant that the questions they asked in governance meetings were more challenging because they had a more detailed understanding.

Ofsted will most definitely be back for a full inspection, so the development plan spans a calendar year. We launched it in January 2022, and it will run through until at least January 2023 when we expect the inspection team to return.

It is a different approach, certainly. In the summer term, instead of working out what we were going to have as our improvement priorities in the autumn we can spend more time really drilling into doing those things because they are already familiar. It means that when we returned this September, we didn’t have that awful moment at 11am on day one when everyone's already had enough because they have been hammered with 15 different strategies.

We kept the interim head on when I arrived, and he has been on hand for me as a leadership coach all the way throughout my first year as headteacher. If you are in your first headship and you don’t have the privilege of an experienced coach to challenge and support your thinking, then you need to make sure that you have opportunities to do that critical thinking.

Coaching was a key part of my time on the NPQH, and it showed me the importance of that kind of support. Making time to stop and think and explore has given me such clarity. Whether it's been me on my own or with my coach, just having somebody else to scaffold that thinking for you, but not to give you the answers or tell you how to think, has been incredible.

Staff need that time as well. We have professional learning on a Wednesday afternoon, which was in place before I arrived. The children finish early on a Wednesday and staff have their professional learning time. They’re very protective of it.

But with the government’s White Paper suggesting that we will have to find about another hour of teaching time in our week, the easiest thing to do would be to take that hour back and put it back into the curriculum. But we are not going to do that because we don’t want our staff to stop learning.

It is also important to be able to say to the children that learning does not stop for the adults, so I’ve now added 15 minutes at the start of each day which will actually create an extra couple of periods a week. That will give me a chance to move more towards the model I designed on one of the NPQH tasks on curriculum excellence.

As a first time headteacher, it is crucial to remind yourself that it is your school, and you can do things differently. Everything that happens here is on me. If I don't like it, I don’t do it.

On my wall there’s a mantra from my school improvement partner that says: “Do things that make sense. Don't do things that don't make sense.” After 25 years in schools, it was a complete revelation to me. I’ve positioned it on my wall so that it is line of sight for anyone who appears at my door and asks for an exclusion. The NPQH’s emphasis on going back to your values when it comes to difficult decision-making helps me every single day.

I was lucky to inherit a school with a set of values that really mean something. They are called LEARN, which sounds like it's going to be an inane acrostic, but it stands for something that's really valuable:

  • Look after each other.
  • Enjoy school.
  • Aim high.
  • Respect each other and yourselves.
  • Never stop learning.

That is a really good five-point plan for running a school. Making that come alive in our schools has been something that we've worked on over the year. Those values help you to make difficult decisions. It forces you to ask yourself a series of questions: for example, is what we are doing helping us to look after each other?

The NPQH programme did teach the importance of finding and applying good research to my day-to-day leadership as well. One of my approaches to gathering and applying research is a steal from my coach. I find bits of research on social media, print them off and put them on my office wall. I'm building up a quick reference collection of research-backed principles about how a school should run that I believe in.

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