I'm sat here in my office after another hectic day at work, with a pounding headache and felt the urge to write. I admit now, I don't know what I am going to write about, I am just going to see where my thoughts take me.
School leadership is the greatest privilege I can imagine. As a school leader I get the opportunity to support talented individuals to shape children's lives. I am not the most important part of the school, but I am the driving force behind it. I am the rudder that steers the ship. I have been a head teacher now for five and a half years. I took on a school that was trying its best, but was coasting. The head teacher was seeing out their time to retirement. It was an Ofsted "Good" school but what I took over was anything but. There were no structures, no routines, no policies, no vision and no identity. It had so much potential to be great and it was my job to help unlock that potential.
The most important thing was to shape the vision of the school and create a plan. Where did we see the school going? What did we want it to look like? What would we want people to say about our school? I stripped it right back, using the Simon Sinek model, and asked the team to think of the "Why". Why are we here and what is our core purpose. By doing that, we started to mould and shape and effective vision which was shared by all. We have to keep revisiting this vision to check if it is still relevant and are we achieving the goals we set ourselves.
Once the vision was created, we looked at our values. All schools have values. They should be the core of what you do - like the words running through the stick of rock. The values we had at the school were great, but nobody knew them or understood them. We had to simplify them and reduce them to terms that all could understand. I personally do not particularly like one word values like trust, respect, pride as these can be too abstract. (NB This is not me criticising schools who do use single word values!). I feel that values need to be short, snappy phrases that mean something such as "We are all individuals" or "We aim to be best we can be". These are easier (in my opinion) to unpick and explore with the children.
Once we had these in place, we then build our curriculum. We again started with our why. Why do we teach what we do (just because it is on the NC is not a good enough reason!)? We created four curriculum drivers to underpin all we do, and we based these on character building. We want our children to come out of our school as good characters who know how they can be better and continue their learning journey away from us. Once we built these, we could then start to hang the content and knowledge we want to be taught onto this scaffold. We ask the question, how can this knowledge support our children to achieve one of the curriculum drivers? We want the children to have core knowledge, but also know how to use that knowledge and make inferences from it.
From there we had the structure of a really good school and it was then looking to build on this by adding additional, exciting opportunities for both the children and the staff. We invested in CPD. We invested in resources. We invested in SEND. We invested in people. This has been hard work as the money has not been there to do this. We have scraped, begged, borrowed for every single penny possible to provide these opportunities for children and staff. We are, however, running out of sources of income and I am now looking at other ways to maintain this momentum. I hope I can as it is important to what we do and who we are.
As a school we are in a good place, we have plans moving forward. I love my school and see great things for it in its future. We have build a really solid foundation for it to grow from strength to strength. So why am I getting itchy feet? Why am I beginning to wonder if I have taken the school as far as I can? I have a vision, and do see myself as the person to lead the school into the future, but would the school be better with someone else and a fresh set of eyes?
Also, I have learnt a lot about myself as a person, as a leader and as an educator in my years here. Would I be better bringing these skills and experiences to another school? Do I feel that I can have a positive impact upon another school and help bring that school forward? The insecure voice in me (which often dominates me) tells me "No, of course you can't, you just got lucky this time. If you go to another school you will fall flat on your face - you're lucky you haven't been caught out here!" The other voice in me, which is only a little one in comparison, tells me that I can.
I am at a crossroads with what to do. I love my job, I really do (despite the DfE!) and I love my school. Do I continue to do the best I can for the school, but run the risk of becoming the coasting head I replaced? Do I step out of my comfort zone and look for another school (the thought terrifies me!)? Do I look creatively and look for opportunities to become and executive leader across multiple schools? I really don't know!
Thanks for reading my ramblings. As I said at the start, I didn't know where this blog would take me. I have just written this for catharsis I think! As always, comments and tweets are welcome.
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