Reflections of an ex-head teacher

I am fully aware that this post might be a bit controversial, but please read it in its entirety before judging me. It seems to me that the obsession that schools have with improving attendance at the moment is misguided at best and self serving at worst. Whilst regular attendance is of course what are looking for, I don't understand why are we spending so much time and energy trying to get attendance to 'above average' levels when that effort would be much better spent elsewhere. For a child, 94% attendance means missing about 8 days school over the course of the year. Younger children in particular are often ill and although the expectation on teachers is super high now we haven't quite got to the point where we are expected to provide a medical service. Sending letters and threatening families if attendance drops below 90% is not what we should be doing and the hard line on holidays in term time is a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  Surely there is room ...

Since leaving my school, as mentioned in a previous post, I have been writing a book. As well as it being a manual for headteachers, it focuses on my leadership journey, and the development of my leadership style, which I have called CULTIVATIONAL LEADERSHIP. In my book I refer to my leadership influences, and to one person in particular, but I do not go into much detail about them, so I thought that my blog entry today could remedy that. Having worked for a frankly terrifying head teacher in my first, thankfully short term, position, I then moved to a school much nearer to home, where I was to stay for the next ten years. A first school, for those of you who have never heard of one, is a school which takes pupils up to the end of year three. That has its pros and its cons, but the school has since changed to a full primary, so they take children up to the point where they transfer to secondary school. The head teacher of this school is the subject of todays post, and definitely my big...