Building capability

I recently went to a workshop on sustainable leadership run by Prof Brent Davies. I hope he will not mind my brief bit of thinking out loud which came out of my personal reflection following that day. I begin with a couple of points made by Prof Davies on the day, the following numbered points are my 'version'. Please remember that I have used his ideas here but have not necessarily repeated verbatim.

“A strategically focused school is one that is educationally effective in the short-term but has a clear framework and processes to translate core moral purpose and vision into excellent educational provision that is challenging and sustainable in the medium- to long-term.”


Rationale: enduring success; 85% of strategic plans fail because things change before you get there; we need to move away from sequential leadership towards parallel leadership. We need to get all members of the school community thinking strategically (note: thinking not necessarily writing-it-down).

Some key ideas for moving from Good to Outstanding …….

1. Identify where intervention is needed then outline clearly why, what, where, with whom and why --- consistency across classrooms, consistency in middle leaders’ approaches. How do we discourage compartmentalised thinking and encourage whole school perspectives?

2. Building capacity … letting go: delegating responsibility not tasks. Sustainability is “the ability of individuals and schools to continue to improve to meet new challenges and complexity in a way that does not damage individuals or the wider community but builds capacity and capability for the benefit of all.”

3. Reflecting on the organisation: should we set reading activities for leaders between meetings  and should all teams be having one meeting per term which is purely reflective/strategic? Consider structure of meetings … model what we want

4. Develop a culture of engagement in strategic discussion/debate. We should be using invitational language when we speak to staff, students, parents, governors, community – ‘join us on the learning journey’
5. School Improvement Process (not necessarily Plan) – this needs to be strongly tied to Performance Management and CPD (Davies' example: ask each team to produce 1 side of A4 ‘where are we now’ and 1 side ‘where should we be in 3 to 5 years time’ – this is a process not an action plan, to get people thinking strategically). If you asked any member of staff, “what are you doing this week and/or next week to contribute to the SIP?” would you get consistent answers?

6. Think carefully about recruitment and development of leaders at all levels. What demonstrates the potential for leadership? Some ideas from Davies included: ability to reflect on yourself, passion, courage – see it = do something about it, confidence and credibility, see the big picture, mastering the basics of their role quickly and look for more, don’t look the other way or walk past incidents, initiative and self-motivation, intellectual curiosity, resilience and empathy.

Thinking out loud

As usual, something sparks my day dreaming about education and here we go again.....

This time it was Steve Joyce on Undercover Boss USA  ----

Well I work in an organisation of only about 1000 or so people and everyone knows me so I could not go 'undercover' but I wonder how I would fare as any one of the following (even for an hour let alone a day):

- receptionist
- student services
- exams analysis officer
- PA
- site staff
- finance
- school business manager
- catering
- or even ..... a classroom teacher with a full teaching load!

Makes you think doesn't it? I have got to my job through a teaching route and nowadays I dabble with all of the above through liaising, line management etc. BUT could I do the job?

Of course there are some things here that I just don't have the knowledge or skills for and because there is only one person doing some of them I would slow them down and hinder them so much that even shadowing for a day is not practical.

So how could I pay forward some of the great contributions that they make? Do they know they are valued?

Food for thought again .....

(PS thanks to the colleague who gave me a great card today that reminded me yet again that we are never alone when we work as a real team.)

Performance management and all that

I have done a lot of thinking about perfomance reviews in schools over the years. In my last post, I considered some ideas about leadership, tasks and responsibility. Constantly reflecting on conversations with friends and colleagues (and, yes there is an overlap in those groups), I have had three discussions in the last few days:

• do leaders become anxious when their view of the world is disturbed?
• does this apply to leaders at all levels?
• does performance review only take account of objectives related to tasks and outcomes rather than processes, values and aims?

As usual, there are more questions than answers!

I saw this on Twitter today from Prof. Wiliam @dylanwiliam Good teachers benefit students years after they stopped teaching them, so value added can't identify good teachers: bit.ly/nM3G3v

If everything we do in schools is geared to students, I would suggest that we need to ensure that teacher 'performance' is measured not by output/outcomes (or, at least, not solely - we do still operate in a certain culture of course); there must be 'soft' measures - such as how a teacher affects the emotional maturity of the students in her/his care. And how do you measure that? Here is another spot from Twitter today:

from @combi31 Facilitative Leadership - The"Easy Way" is.gd/yltHfv #learning #coaching #Leadership

So, if all teachers are leaders of learning then we need to move towards being facilitative leaders of learning, able to cope with perturbations in our perceptions of the world and to proactively use them to move forward with our students.

A brilliant example at my school's weekly staff briefing this week when a colleague reminded us all about the lollipop idea to avoid hands up in class - that was at morning break, by the end of the day there was a buzz of conversation about it! That reminded me that we mustn't ever rest on 'what we always did' .... because then we might 'get what we always got'.

Comments welcome as always please.

so what is leadership?

I had a great chat with a colleague today about what we mean by the term leadership. Well, lots of erudite writing exists about transactional, transformational, buffered, distributed leadership ..... and much much more. She asked me what I see is the key aspects of leadership and I trotted out some of the usual trite stuff about shared vision and so on. I also remembered something a colleague once said to me about delegating responsibility rather than just delegating tasks. Does that make you a leader ... or the person to whom you are delegating? Does helping to build leadership in others make you a leader?


I started to wonder if we need a new word. So much has been written about the differences between management and leadership. Are we entering a phase where we need to acknowledge that there are overlaps and ermm outerlaps?

Later in the day, she asked me if I had planned my career and I had to admit that I had not. I talked her through my life story (well she did ask) and was struck by her response: "so you've never said no to an opportunity?" I admitted there was one major opportunity I had turned down but broadly agreed with her assessment.

I believe that I've been lucky, blessed even.

Is leadership 'letting go' of management? I think it is certainly letting go of micro-management. Leadership from within a team is an interesting concept that is currently exercising my sociological imagination.

My colleague came up with the idea of chats recorded on video and saved on our VLE. Perhaps we should start some panel chats .... has anyone done this? I'd love to hear about it ...

this also appears on reflog