I don’t know about you, I’m fascinated by articles, blogs and podcasts where experts and celebrities discuss the advice they would offer to their 18-year-old selves.
In an era of increased candour about mental health and wellbeing the interviewees featured offer personal, often relatable, insights into their busy and demanding worlds.
If you were interviewed (we are all minor celebrities in our own school contexts after all!), I wonder what advice you would offer to someone starting out?
Having been a headteacher for nine years, and before that a deputy head in two schools for seven years, I can distil my best advice on proactively managing your mental health and wellbeing as a senior leader into two key themes:
- Know and understand yourself.
- Know and understand your school context.
How to do this can be practically managed too. Like everything in school leadership, all it takes is a strategy, an implementation plan, and time allocated to working it through.
So, below are my suggestions: with a promise – no tips on eating and drinking well, sleeping enough, or getting more exercise! Not least because there are more qualified people than me to offer wise words about grazing on nuts at breaktime instead of sausage rolls or the counter-productivity of wine on a school evening!
1, Know and understand yourself
You can’t control everything
We know that our mental health and wellbeing is determined by both external and internal factors. Those who quickly understand that they won’t necessarily be able to control as many external factors as they would like are those most likely to last the course in school leadership.
Government funding, Ofsted, teachers’ pay – these are just a few of the factors that school leaders named in the 2023 Teacher Wellbeing Index, the annual mental health research from Education Support, as affecting their wellbeing.
But these are all outside the day-to-day control of school leaders. The cliched adage – that the only thing we can control is our own response to external forces – is never truer than in school leadership.
That is the job: being bold and resolute while adapting to, or creatively planning for, the impact of those external factors. This is where both the responsibility but also the enjoyment of influence and creativity lies. The first tip then is to accept that you can’t control everything – so don’t even try.
Professional pride leads to good mental health
My second piece of advice is that knowing you are the kind of school leader you could yourself respect provides you with almost all the psychological self-confidence you need to manage your sense of professional worth – and in turn your own mental health and wellbeing.
Over your time as senior leader, you will find out a lot about both what kind of leader you are and what kind of human being you are – where your strengths lie and where you might have to work a little harder or seek support.
You will find this out through your successes, but even more so through your mistakes. I cringe when I think back to some of my early decisions – not big enough to change my schools’ fate necessarily, but conversations that I wish I’d managed differently or priorities I decided on that in hindsight might have been different.
Decision-making is important
Take comfort, therefore, in my third tip. Of the errors you are bound (and entitled) to make, very few will be “intellectually wrong” decisions.
Remember you have been trusted to progress in school leadership because you have already made some very sound decisions in former roles and been able to demonstrate the positive impact of them.
If you are well researched, consultative and reflective you will be able to defend or justify almost all decisions you make, even when you can see the sense in opposing arguments. But make sure you ringfence time to stay up-to-date and professionally developed.
Skilful judgement is even more conducive to wellbeing
While it is easy to focus on decision-making, my fourth tip is to pay even closer attention to how your personal and professional judgement is affected in certain situations.
Do you really know how you respond when you are tired, under pressure, feeling despondent, or backed into a corner? Likewise, do you appreciate how you respond around others when you are energised, excited, convinced, or certain?
In senior leadership positions, where your judgements affect more people, it is not so much about making the decisions (you’ll recognise quickly that you will make scores of those every day), but the judgement you need to employ in doing so – and which will be on display for all to see. That is a much more personal thing.
Use knowledge about yourself to develop good team-work
Take time early on therefore to find out how you make judgements – what core values are at play when you decide on a course of action.
As part of the recruitment of senior leaders we ask interview candidates to complete a psychometric test. We mostly use the detail in the report to help us understand what motivates and drives each member of our senior leadership team once they are appointed.
All members of my team complete one and we agree to share our findings – “warts and all”.
The benefits to us as individuals, as well as to the team, have been significant. I would recommend that anyone new to senior leadership finds out a little about themselves using a similar tool.
By sharing our reports we can support and challenge each other as a team around our decision-making, often proffering, before others do, a reflection on our motivation.
Often this will mean that as a team, or as an individual, we pause to reflect before decisions are made, but we then rest easier and sleep deeper knowing we have done this.
Take control of your time
Senior leadership is busy – but so was middle leadership and so, let’s face it, is classroom teaching. You will never invent more time to invest in your school without making wider aspects of your life suffer. One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I first considered taking on a leadership role was that rather than being busier, I would have more control over when and how I managed my own workload. It’s true. Set yourself allocated time for tasks (with built-in flexibility) and don’t let being in a new role compromise other aspects of your life that are crucial to your wellbeing.
2, Know and understand your school context
Understanding yourself is key to your wellbeing but understanding the context you work in will prove just as important. In many ways this knowledge is easier, if a little more time-consuming, to secure.
Understanding your context will help you act with integrity
Knowing your school and the community it serves is key to making the all-important judgements referred to above with integrity, in turn helping you make peace with decisions, even ones that are especially hard to make.
Your school’s existing values and traditions
You can only really know you are doing a respectable job as a school leader if you feel that you are serving your stakeholders well. Take some time to learn about your school's history and traditions, especially those valued by parents, staff, and students before you start work on clarifying or asserting a new vision or set of values.
I quickly learnt, for example, that our school Sports Day, a highly inclusive and less traditional event than others I had seen working well in other schools, was one of the most highly rated days on the annual calendar by students – I was to mess with it at my peril.
This was much more important to 800 young people than anything I was going to post on the welcome page of the website and a clear, early indicator for me of what students valued.
Meet your stakeholders early on
While it is tempting to get busy within your school and make changes that seem obvious to you, an investment worth making is early interactions with your community.
Go and introduce yourself to other local school senior leaders (both secondary and feeder primary) and invite them to visit your school in your early days of leadership. Don't assume they know your school well.
Get to know your counterparts in other schools, governors, local faith leaders, alumni group chairs, committed and influential parents, as well as having meetings where you listen carefully to your own colleagues.
Ask everyone you meet about what they think is good about the school and what they consider to be priorities for improvement. These comments are easy to listen to in the early days when you don't necessarily feel total ownership yet.
Knowing that you have listened and consulted before you have acted will again lend a confidence that will underpin your own sense of connection, another factor in building your resilience and wellbeing as a leader.
Final thoughts
Luckily there are also an increasing number of organisations that can offer advice and support in more difficult circumstances. Charities such as Education Support and the Heads Together campaign are attempting to tackle the stigma surrounding mental health issues (see further information).
My last tip? Give yourself time. Remember that interview question we all get asked: “What would you do in your first week, first term, and first year in the role?”
The best answers are always centred on knowing yourself well and getting to know your school.
- Josephine Smith is headteacher of Kesteven and Sleaford High School, part of the Robert Carre Trust and can be found on X at @Josephinessmith or on Linked In. Find her previous contributions to SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/josephine-smith/
Further information & resources
- Education Support: Teacher Wellbeing Index, 2023: educationsupport.org.uk/resources/for-organisations/research/teacher-wellbeing-index/
- Heads Together: headstogether.org.uk