Growing leaders | A strategy for succession planning

Like any organisation, schools change over time and this is because the people change. They might change because they are learning and developing their practice or they might change because people come and go. Heraclitus tells us that we never step into the same river twice and likewise, we never step into the same school twice. This river…

If everything is a priority, nothing is

List the things that you think you’d like your school to be better at. The chances are that if you set aside a good chunk of time to do this, you’ll end up with quite a list, some quite broad and some more specific. Here are some of the things that might be categorized as broad: It’s…

From avoiding mutations to encouraging emergence | A paradigm shift for school improvement

How does a school improve? We ought to know it when we see it. Children might be learning more, learning better or learning faster, a proxy of which might be statutory assessment results. Children might be coming to school more often and have better attitudes to learning. Children might be happier, forming better relationships with their peers and adults….

Direction, trusting relationships and professional learning

Pat Lencioni hosts a great podcast called At the Table, talking about culture and organisational health. and this episode focused on warning us about the novel, easy and immediate. It’s a short listen but here’s a summary: What does this mean for school leadership? We’re so used to annual improvement plans that coincide with the…

One headteacher is not a school

I wrote about systems and process in one of my books and now realise that I didn’t quite fully understand the difference between systems and processes and why that difference is important. This post is my thought process on developing that understanding further. Our school is a system because it is made up of components…

LO: write learning objectives and success criteria

As teachers we put all our effort into striving for children to learn the things that we think are valuable but we sometimes overcomplicate the systems that we use to make this happen. Deciding what we want children to learn and the work that they will do to make that happen is the bread and…

Turning the dials

There are some ultimate indicators, whatever we might think of the reliability and validity of the judgements, that indicate that a school has improved. An uplevelling of the Inspection grade. Growth through an increased number on roll. An increase in the proportion of children achieving a given standard in statutory assessments. Staff retention. An increase…

4 hopes for the English education system

From August I’ll be switching school leadership in the UK to school leadership in the Middle East. The English school system is all I’ve known and this post sets out some hopes for the how it evolves. Following work by Jen Barker and Tom Rees, my conception of school leadership is that high levels of…

School improvement, informally

Formalhaving a conventionally recognised form, structure, or set of rules Informalnot following a conventional structure or set of rules The level of formality in the leadership of schools is an interesting continuum. On the one hand, leaders need to establish systems, structures and rules of thumb to ensure the smooth running of the school. On the other…

Questions that a strategic plan must answer

It’s about that time of year when those responsible for drawing up school improvement plans are thinking about the new academic year. I think there are several questions that a strategic plan must answer: 1 | What are our anchoring concepts of school life? 2 | How are we communicating these anchoring concepts to the…