During my first two years of headship I have learned a great deal, some of which has come from studying the theory of leadership in more depth, other aspects of my development have come from learning from mistakes.
Once I secured a leadership position in a school I spent the first few years surviving on common sense, gut instinct and just being a pretty good teacher. However, I soon discovered that as a head, this just isn’t sufficient if you want to be successful and certainly if you want to have a long career leading a school.
I embarked on my NPQH qualification at the start of my headship and it quickly made me realise just how much I had been missing out on in my preceding years as a leader. Since then I have devoured leadership books from the likes of Michael Fullan, Andy Buck and John Tomsett and it has certainly changed the way I think, the way I work and the way I am.
A significant shift for me was the realisation that I cannot do everything myself. As an assistant and deputy head I had significant autonomy to complete my responsibilities but I was oblivious to the fact that my head was implementing a distributed leadership model which was providing me with ownership and authority.
However, the more experience I gain as a headteacher, and the more I read about the theory of school leadership, the more I appreciate the importance of developing this type of approach with both my senior and middle leadership teams.
With my senior leaders this has been reasonably straight-forward. Within the first few months of my appointment I spoke with them individually and as a team to explain this approach and they have all been effective enough to fully distribute leadership responsibilities to.
My dilemma has been that in an ideal world, with a large secondary school, I would love to operate a distributed leadership model throughout my layer of middle leaders, giving them authority and autonomy while balancing this with the accountability they would hold for their areas of responsibility.
However, it has taken me until the end of my second year to establish a middle leadership team that I am confident this approach will work with.
Through either training inexperienced but enthusiastic leaders, or by moving on those who were acting as blockers, my middle leadership team is now in a place where I can start to give them the freedom I need to in order for us to become a truly great school and this is really exciting for me.
This year marks the start of our development as a school where we have a sustainable and organic leadership structure, where we develop leaders from within the school, shaping their values and vision as effective leaders who all subscribe to our school ethos.
But I feel I would be foolhardy to think that this will miraculously click into place, right from the start of term. I will need to work just as hard, maybe even harder than I did to secure my “dream team” of middle leaders, and investing in them in terms of their CPD and development will be crucial.
We use coaching throughout the school and this has been a key driver for us delivering sustainable improvement and it is through coaching, both peer-to-peer coaching and through the use of a professional leadership coach, employed by the local authority, that I will seek to embed this further.
I am also determined to ensure my colleagues learn from the mistakes I made as a middle leader and early on in my senior leadership roles.
It is not good enough to solely rely on your instincts and common sense as a school leader; studying the research-based theories of successful leadership is key in order to develop individuals and teams who are confident, autonomous and effective.
It is certainly a challenge I am looking forward to!
- SecEd’s headteacher diarist is in his third year of headship at a comprehensive school in the Midlands.