The stories we tell | SEND

Daniel Willingham tells us that stories are psychologically privileged and two of the reasons that it is useful for leaders to tell stories is that they are easier to understand and they are easier to remember. Daniel Coyle tells us that to establish purpose, we should ‘fill the windscreen with stories’ because this can help to build mental models which drive others’...

A way of thinking about culture and climate

My mental model, not yours Culture and climate cannot be separated from the more general idea of school leadership and there are all sorts of models for school leadership, each professing to capture the reality of it. When people come up with these models, that is what they are doing - trying to represent reality....

Belonging cues before job descriptions | Inducting new colleagues

What are the aims of induction? Build relationships with new colleaguesEnsure they understand what we do and whyBe effective in their role as soon as possibleGet to know the logistics of school lifeCreate psychological safety To achieve this, there is much to get right but not a lot of time to do it. New starters...

#ImpactBook

What started as a blog post about impact is now a book, thanks to Bloomsbury! #ImpactBook has been kindly reviewed by John Tomsett, Mary Myatt and Michael Tidd. Nick Hart's focus upon the golden thread from leadership behaviours through to pupils' learning makes Impact the best school leadership book I have read for a very...

Leadership handbook 3.0

Viviane Robinson suggests three capabilities for leading school improvement: This has been transformative for me as a leader, particularly the first capability - using knowledge. It was, and still is, liberating to conceive of school leadership in this way because it gives me something concrete that I can get better at. Trying to be more...

Team meetings | A driver of school improvement

For those fortunate enough to work in a year group or department with multiple colleagues, the opportunities for collaboration - working together on common problems to achieve common goals - are brilliant. A combination of sharing workload and having plenty of developmental conversations make being a part of a team incredibly important. But every team...

Talking our school into existence

Schools might very well have a grand aim, vision and values but it is not these things that bring about improvement. They simply provide a direction, not the momentum to get there. So what provides the momentum? The organisation is created from the inside out, not in large airy abstractions but in micro interactions where...

What school leaders need to know about cultural leadership

The most important driver of outcomes for children is the quality of teaching and school leaders can influence this on a systematic level. Effective leaders will have a good mental model of what quality education entails including how to establish and maintain it. This mental model will consist of at least: Curriculum designEvidence based teaching...