Educating Greater Manchester head: what I’ve learned at school
Manchester School of Technology: For upon|In the eight years, I have been headteacher at Harrop Fold I’ve learned every bit as much as the young people we teach. Lessons about leadership have come from pupils and staff, parents, the local community, and private business leaders. Here are some of the key rules I use to guide me, and which might be useful to others.
Change usually takes longer than you expect
When I took over the school in 2009 I wanted the exam results to rocket. In 2013 we hit our highest ever GCSE pass rate – 57%. I was chuffed to pieces. Then the performance league tables were changed. The government decided to remove vocational qualifications, and ever since then, our results have looked less good. Manchester School of Technology.
My immediate reaction to seeing our result rates dropping was to double down. I made it a central focus and we’ve run ourselves ragged trying to improve them, but it hasn’t shifted the needle as much as I wanted. I’ve found that devastating.
But real change takes time. We were good at the vocational qualifications, and shifting over to the new system requires a transition that staff needs to prepare for and train in.
You need to be present to help teachers feel supported
Spending the first years at Harrop Fold walking around and managing problems was an eye-opener. At the start it really felt as if the value of this would be the help I could give by going into lessons and talking to children; it never occurred to me that the value would be in how much people wanted to be seen and heard. Manchester School of Technology.
Turning up at the door meant the teacher no longer felt alone. The feeling of togetherness that breeds is often enough to give the member of staff the boost they need to deal with a pupil’s behavior on their own.
Competition between schools is a distraction
One of the worst things the government has done in the past 10 years is to make schools compete with each other. It’s a cliché to say that collaboration is better than the competition, but it’s true.
We all have pupils to help, and we can all do more to help others. We should be completing the mission of making sure every child is being educated, not competing over who can do it the best.
You have to be able to ask for help
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The reason headteachers sometimes feel isolated is they can tend to believe they must have all the answers to a problem. Yet heads are surrounded by so many different people with different experiences that it’s almost never the case that you will be the best person to solve a problem. It’s important to listen to others. That’s what stops the job from being lonely. Manchester School of Technology.
Nothing comes without risk
When the Educating Greater Manchester opportunity came along I spent a long time thinking about the potential downfalls. What if I lost my temper at a pupil? What if a teacher didn’t behave in the way I wanted them to behave?
In the end, no action comes without risk. If Harrop Fold had turned down the opportunity to be in the television show then we’d have avoided any potential negative publicity, but we’d have also limited our potential for telling our story. We would never be able to talk about our debt. We wouldn’t have a permanent record of how amazing our staff and pupils really are. Manchester School of Technology.
Not doing the television show could have left the story of Harrop Fold untold, and that seemed a waste. So we grasped the nettle and got on with it. Sometimes that’s the best thing you can do.
Ofsted is just one piece of information
People get really hung up on the judgments of Ofsted, the school inspectorate, but in the end, it’s just one piece of information. Inspectors aren’t there, day-in and day-out. They don’t see the relationships developed with pupils over a whole year. At best, they see a couple of days and talk to a handful of pupils.
One of the things that are great about the Educating… series is that it shows how a school works over a whole year. That’s really important. The way a pupil is in September is very different from how they behave by Easter or by the end of the year. Likewise, as a teacher, you go on your own journey each year. Some things go well, some things go badly. Any inspector turning up halfway through the process can’t see how things will turn out in the end. Manchester School of Technology.
It’s your job to help staff through challenges
As a leader, I’m really good at one thing: helping people get through difficult times and giving them hope. My advice to any headteacher taking up the reins at a new school is to think about the key messages they want to repeat to staff. How will you make them believe that even though a day looks challenging, by the end of it that teacher or caretaker or receptionist is going to be able to go away knowing they contributed to an important mission? Manchester School of Technology.
The article was originally published here.
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