6 questions for school leaders

I believe three things to be true about school leadership. Schools are complex. School leadership is problem solving. Problem solving requires a great deal of knowledge. This post is a mental model for school leadership; a way of thinking about the problems that we face as leaders, and the expertise required to solve those problems....

The imagined school | Traps to avoid

In The Matrix, the story starts with Neo in essentially an imagined world, far different from the related that his physical body is experiencing. Morpheus offers Neo the choice of taking the blue pill, continuing his blissfully ignorant life in this imagined world, or the red pill, opening his eyes to reality. Matthew Evans wrote a...

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...

Influencing culture

School cannot improve without trusting relationships and there is plenty of evidence to suggest the kinds of behaviours that contribute to trusting relationships. Our strategy should certainly include some sort of codification of these behaviours. We use the metaphor of the horizon in my school and set out behaviours that broaden our horizons; that enable our school...

Building capacity

Let's imagine a school that experiences a reduction in its leadership team. Maybe a senior leader leaves and for whatever reason cannot be replaced. Maybe a senior leader leaves and there is a time lag before being able to have a replacement in post. Maybe a senior leader needs to pick up more teaching because of teacher availability...

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....

A good kind of disruption

How can we get better as a school leader? We could certainly seek to build our knowledge of educational issues and of building trusting relationships in the school community. But of course, it is not as simple as that or any other suggestions that come to mind because schools are not simple, nor even complicated....

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...

Leadership handbook 4.0

For the last four years, I have been developing a handbook for school leaders, compiling all the things that I have been reading and thinking about into one place. We need to know a great deal in order to solve the complex problems of school leadership. Organising this knowledge in our minds makes it easily...

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...