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 rulesInformalnot 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 hand,...

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...

School improvement model | What is it and how might we formulate one?

How do you go about improving your school? This post provides an example school improvement model and seeks to pull out some generalisations that could inform sector wide work, as well as providing advice for school leaders on formulating their own school improvement model. Assumptions It is useful to consider the parameters that we are...

School improvement | A way of thinking about evaluation and strategic planning

The continuous cycle of understanding the reality of school life and making decisions to improve aspects of it is at the heart of school leadership. This post proposes a model of how leaders might think about this work. It is incredibly useful to look at how others conceive of school leadership because when we do,...

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....

Problem solving from the classroom to the wider system

The ultimate anchoring concept Sitting at the core of what schools are for is children’s learning and therefore the expertise that teachers and leaders need in order to maximise it. Viviane Robinson puts it succinctly: Whether we’re teaching a class, leading a phase / department, leading a school or leading multiple schools, this model is...

SEFs and improvement plans | Thinking before templates

Twenty school leaders in a room with their SEF and development plan will probably yield twenty different approaches and twenty different proformas. And rightly so because each school has a unique combination of its context and the Headteacher's mental model of school improvement. One size certainly does not fit all. School self evaluation and strategic...

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...

Purpose

There is a good chance that, when we look at things going on at department or classroom level and are not happy with what we find, we are seeing the symptoms of a problem further upstream, rather than the cause of the problem.Jonathan Mountstevens Most activities that leaders do to quality assure or to monitor...