For those fortunate enough to work in a year group or department with multiple colleagues, the opportunities for collaboration – working together on common problems to achieve common goals – are brilliant. A combination of sharing workload and having plenty of developmental conversations make being a part of a team incredibly important. But every team needs a leader and whether it is a year leader of head of department, the role is crucial in school improvement. Where does school improvement happen? Does it happen in senior leaders’ offices? Does it happen in whole school training? Does it hap ..read more

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 inspirational, or more dynamic is a vague way to try and get better at school leadership (and at odds with a naturally introverted preference), but knowing more and understanding more is a sure fire way to clarify our purpose, improve our decision making and ..read more

What constitutes effective teaching? What kind of things do the most effective teachers do? Take a minute to jot down some ideas. What we’re doing here is parsing the practice of teaching – breaking it down into it’s components in order to understand it better. You might have a list of several things that you think are important. And if you compared notes with someone else, you’ll certainly find some similarities and some differences based on individual preferences and prior knowledge. Many have done this and their work has been extremely useful in curating a body of formal knowledge (easily s ..read more

Nine Lies About Work (Buckingham and Goodall, 2022) does an interesting job of explaining some of the misconceptions that we have about organisational culture. This is the third in a series of posts examining the implications of these lies for school leaders. The first is here and the second is here. If you want improvement, then [your highest priority interrupt] should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert to those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a li ..read more

Nine Lies About Work (Buckingham and Goodall, 2022) does an interesting job of explaining some of the misconceptions that we have about organisational culture. This is the third in a series of posts examining the implications of these lies for school leaders. The first is here and the second is here. If you want improvement, then [your highest priority interrupt] should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert to those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a li ..read more

Nine Lies About Work (Buckingham and Goodall, 2022) does an interesting job of explaining some of the misconceptions that we have about organisational culture. This is the second in a series of posts examining the implications of these lies for school leaders. The first is here. Lie #2 | The best plan wins Many plans, particularly those created in large organisations, are overly generalised, quickly obsolete and frustrating to those asked to execute them. It’s far better to coordinate your team’s efforts in real time, relying heavily on the informed, detailed intelligence of each unique team ..read more

Nine Lies About Work (Buckingham and Goodall, 2022) does an interesting job of explaining some of the misconceptions that we have about organisational culture. This is the first in a series of posts examining the implications of these lies for school leaders. Lie # 1 | People care about which school they work for You may not care which company you work for, but since you do care which company you join, [cultural plumage is] crafted to help a company attract a certain kind of person by highlighting what the company thinks this kind of person values. …the impact of plumage on how you and your t ..read more

How do we know if a school is getting better? Or worse? How do we know if the strategies that we choose to improve our schools are working? Or not? Cause cannot be reliably attributed to effect Schools are such complex places, with multiple influences on outcomes, that it is almost impossible to directly link cause and effect. Consider the example of improved attainment in reading at the end of KS2 compared to the previous academic year. There are a number of possible contributing factors. Was it because of the now ‘research informed’ reading strategy? Was it because of better attendance? Was ..read more

Back in 2019, Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins revised their seven strong claims about successful school leadership. Here is the paper (it is an accessible read) and Tom Rees’ Twitter thread does a great job of summarising the revisions from the original. Their seventh claim was as follows: While further research is required, a well-defined set of cognitive, social and psychological ‘personal leadership resources’ show promise of explaining a high proportion of variation in the practices enacted by school leaders. Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins (2019) This claim is of particular interest because o ..read more

If you’re a senior leader it is likely that you’ll have some responsibility that involves the the curriculum. It is also likely that, at least in part, you’re aiming to meet the headteacher standards. Here’s the standard to do with curriculum and assessment: That second statement is the focus of our attention in this post. Establishing effective curricular leadership involves: Knowledge of curricular issues Curricular infrastructure Enabling behaviours Knowledge of curricular issues To categorise what leaders might need to know, it is worth thinking about the different types of knowledge ..read more