Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my blog. I’ll be sharing with you my thoughts on leadership in schools based on my experience at middle and senior level in a range of schools covering a broad range of age settings and school contexts. This is a personal view and one that is derived from practice and theory. At times it will be pragmatic and other times more theoretical but always rooted in my experiences of leading departments, year groups and schools.

Who is this for? Well anyone interested in school leadership. You may be only thinking about promotion, preparing for an interview, new to the role, established in the role and so on. Hopefully you will find something useful here to give you a different way of looking at your leadership. I don’t profess to have answers to your problems. Too many books on school leadership seem to tell you how to do it; I don’t agree with this approach as I believe that leadership is a personal undertaking and as everyone is different so everyone’s approach to leadership is different. Solutions to problems may work for some and not others, contexts are different but crucially so are the personalities of the leaders. So basically leadership is something that you have to make your own and adapt the tools of leadership to your needs, skills, aspirations and shortcomings.

My own belief is that leadership in education boils down to two elements, relationships and processes. We frequently use the “leadership and management” label, and crudely leadership is about relationships whilst management is about processes, however such a reductionist approach doesn’t do the role justice and so I will use the term “leadership” encompassing all aspects of the role. I will refer more often to relationships and processes as this can be clearly linked to the day-to-day life of a school leader. Much of this blog will be based on the processes as the life of a school leader can often be broken down into a set of tasks but threaded throughout all of these tasks will be the crucial golden thread of “relationships”. The nature of the relationships with those you lead and with those who lead you will ultimately determine the way in which you execute the processes. Consequently you must always place the process within the context of relationships you have formed with all of the key stakeholders. Therefore whilst the process may be the same from department to department or even school to school, the way it is put into practice will depend on the relationships between the individual leader and all those affected.

I place so much stock in the importance of relationships that my approach to leadership has changed radically over my career. Early in my leadership career I studied for a Master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Management. I remember reading various sources that talked about the range of leadership styles including such categories as “collegiate”, “democratic” and “authoritarian” (there are more but I can’t remember them!). At the time I found this useful by analysing myself and recognising where these different styles apply. However all of these were about you as the leader and didn’t really consider those being led. I realised that the same process when applied to different members of staff required different leadership styles and that these styles were not necessarily the same when a different process came along. This quickly got out of hand as I was leading a large science department at the time with lots of staff and a multitude of processes. Gradually with time I came to realise that leadership was not a process in itself that gave itself to such a mechanistic methodology, instead it was a human activity rooted in the relationships between thus leading and those being led. I was recently quizzed about my approach to leadership in an interview (the outcome of which was successful) and I roughly said what you have already read. I went on to explain that I had about fifty people working for me and that they had good days and bad days. Consequently I explained that I had about 100 leadership styles, two for each member of staff! Now whilst this may sound like an exaggeration in reality all I am saying is that I know my staff well and that I lead them in a way that meets their needs. Staff want to be led and it is considerably easier to lead a group of people who recognise that you see them as individuals rather than as a group who can be herded into the categories dreamt up by management “experts”.

Please visit again. In coming articles I will be considering the concept of authority as opposed to power along with some practical issues that may be helpful.