Reflections of an ex-head teacher

After nearly a month of publishing a daily blog it has become clear to me that this is not sustainable. Moving forward, I will continue writing daily, but that effort will go into producing longer pieces, the first of which I am publishing here. I will aim to publish my longer pieces at least once a week. Todays post was inspired by a recent conversation with my partner, and the idea that I might challenge myself to write something interesting about what on the surface appears to be quite a mundane subject. I hope that I have succeeded... The History of the School Register In 1862, the government linked school attendance to school funding for the first time. This was known as 'payment by results' and no doubt served as the impetus for schools to encourage high attendance levels. Then in 1870 the Elementary Education Act made school attendance compulsory between the ages of 5 and 10, to address the issue of child labour. The age of compulsory education was extended to 11 in 1893...

On this Christmas day 2024 I wanted to share with you my the life of a head teacher in the form of a not-so-traditional carol. Have a great day everyone! On the first day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, A lot of anxiety. On the second day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, Two angry mums and a lot of anxiety. On the third day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, Three snow days, two angry mums and a lot of anxiety. On the fourth day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, Four different SENCOs, three snow days,  Two angry mums and a lot of anxiety. On the fifth day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, Five wasp stings, four different SENCOs, three snow days,  Two angry mums and a lot of anxiety.  On the sixth day of Christmas, my school it gave to me, Six stressful SATs tests, five wasp stings, four different SENCOs,  Three snow days, two angry mums and a lot of anxiety. On the seventh day of Christmas, my school it gave to me,  Seven lunch provide...

Having mentioned 'cultivational leadership' in a few of my posts, and alluding to what it means, I thought that today it would be a good idea to go into a bit more detail, so I am going to write about the key characteristics of a cultivational leader. Empathy - a cultivational leader will have empathy for all members of their team. As well as challenging them to be the best they can be they will always provide support wherever it is needed and in the form which best suits the member of staff. Trust - cultivational leaders need to trust their staff to do their role without micromanaging them. They need to instil confidence in them to take risks and try new things, knowing that they will not be reprimanded for doing so. Realism - with the constant pressure to improve results year on year it is very easy to lose focus on the fact that the children carry with them a lot of factors which may limit levels of progress. These factors can be addressed, and mitigated to some extent, but ...

This is the second instalment of what I am planning to be a regular theme within my blog.  As a school leader I always felt, and continue to feel, that leadership lessons can be learned from all walks of life, and today I am going to focus on the football manager Ian Holloway. In over 20 years of management, Mr Holloway has lead several high profile teams including Leicester City, Crystal Palace and Blackpool. He is currently back in management, at the helm at Swindon Town. As a manager he is known for his honesty and colourful personality, as well as for his refreshingly 'west country' turn of phrase. I have to state that find the latter really engaging, as I was born in the same city, and perhaps in the same hospital, as him. Most importantly though, behind the quirky and often humorous outer layer is a very deep thinker and an astute leader, and it is for his leadership style that I have chosen him for my second 'leadership lessons' post.  In my blog, and in my yet t...

Waking up this morning I am reminded of that old end-of-term feeling, one that thousands of teachers will be experiencing today, the first day of the Christmas break. Yesterday was December 20th, which means that there is only a short time now for teachers to decompress before the big day arrives. However, the latest I can remember breaking up for Christmas was on the 23rd, so at least it isn't as bad as that this year. My use of the word 'decompress' in the last paragraph is deliberate, as for me the end of term always felt like the completion of a deep sea dive. I would feel physically and mentally exhausted and I would need a couple of days to decompress whilst slowly coming up to the surface and feeling normal again. I am pretty confident that 99% of teachers would say that they experience something similar, and that they only start feeling human after around day three following the end of term. It is for that reason that I have given todays post the title 'why teac...

I get a lot of my inspiration from outside of the teaching profession, and often from within sport, as huge progress has been made in the psychology aspect of sporting success over recent years. Today I am going to write about the impact of negative team culture and I am going to use the example of the Australian Men's cricket team to illustrate my point. Let's start the story in 2018, during the third of four scheduled tests in which South Africa hosted the touring Australians. The South African team were building up a healthy lead, at 129-2 in their second innings, when the umpires got together to have a chat about something.  The commentary team speculated that they were looking at the quality of the light, which is one of the many peculiarities of cricket, but that was not the case. The camera then cut to a shot of one of the Australian fielders, Cameron Bancroft, who appeared to be rubbing a small yellow square on the ball. This was met by cries of "oh, no" and ...

Today's Christmas tale is the story of how the phrase "That's a gingerbread village" came to be part of the lexicon in my school. Every year we had a number of Christmas traditions, many of which I am sure were common to lots of schools, but there was one in particular that I had not heard of happening elsewhere. I think that after reading my post today you will understand why that was. One of my teachers was a keen baker and I always enjoyed cooking in school with the children, so one year in a particularly jolly staff meeting the idea was hatched to hold a Christmas Bakeoff in school. Please note that we combined the words 'bake' and 'off' to ensure that we would not get into trouble with Paul Hollywood et. al. for stealing their idea! We decided to keep it simple (as we weren't stupid, at least we thought we weren't) so we decided to stick to one round, which for the purposes of copyright we shall refer to as the show-ender. Further adaptati...

Today I am going to consider the impact of the new bill for your average primary school. I am therefore going to focus on part 2 of the bill, as that section contains the information directly relating to schools. There is a huge amount in just this section, but for me there are several key takeaways. The appropriate authority of a relevant school in England must secure that breakfast club provision is available, free of charge, for all qualifying primary pupils at the school. This is obviously huge but although the burden of providing this service is clearly placed on the local authority, rural schools in particular are unlikely to be able to meet this expectation due to a lack of staffing and or premises availability. I am concerned for my colleagues in rural schools as parents may vote with their feet if things are not put in place quickly and my experience of local authorities suggests that change will take time. There does appear to be a 'power to exempt' a school from hav...

A few weeks ago my parents bought me a card which contained the slogan, 'dogs have owners, cats have staff'. The events of last night / this morning have certainly reinforced the fact that this statement is true, but I will get to that in a bit. I should state at this point that I am the proud owner of two incredibly fluffy 4-month old Ragdoll kittens, named Lennie and Leo. They are brothers, and the original plan was only to purchase one kitten, but that would have left Leo on his own and I just couldn't do it. I had previously thought that a cat, or cats, was not an option as living in a maisonette means they would have no access to outside space. Being out of the house myself was also a factor, as it would not have felt right leaving them alone all day. The latter issue is no longer relevant since I finished work back in July, and thankfully the only other thing preventing me from taking the plunge has been overcome after learning about Ragdoll cats, a breed which are mo...

One of the key skills and priorities of a cultivational leader is spotting potential, putting people in the right positions in an organisation and giving them the chance to shine. Thinking back over my leadership career I can see the faces of those that I have, in the opinion of some colleagues, 'taken a risk on', dealt with negative feedback about as they developed in their roles and then seen flourish and become important members of our team. When that happens it is right up there with the best parts of being a school leader. For my own personal leadership inspiration I often look beyond the field of education and today I am going to write about someone who spent their career developing the talent of others to great effect in the field of music. Although he was not considered to be the greatest singer, guitarist or pianist, John Mayall is thought of by many at the greatest band leaders, and most significant figure in British blues music, of all time. His band, The Bluesbreake...

As the head of a primary school I found assemblies tricky. Sometimes a subject would be obvious and I wouldn't have to spend too long preparing what I was going to talk about, but there were many occasions when the muse did not strike and it became a bit of a slog.  I am aware of those '365 Assemblies' style of books, which certainly simplify things, but I always felt that it was important to make my assemblies personal and relevant to the children and our school, which you simply cannot do if you rely on a book. Trying to come up with something that is understandable and appropriate for the younger children whilst also having something in it for upper key stage two also added to the challenge.  I understood the tremendous potential of assemblies and wanted to make the most of them as a time when we could be together as a school and reinforce the concepts and values that were important to us. Some training I went on several years ago really helped with the quality of my ass...

A few minutes ago, after returning from a lovely walk on a sunny mid-December Saturday afternoon, I logged on to my computer to write a blog entry for today, but my original plan has been hijacked.  I have no idea how it works, but when I start-up my internet browser I get a homepage (I think it is called that) with a selection of news stories that the internet gremlins have decided I will be interested in. Most of the stories seem to be cricket related, and there are always loads about the weather too, but I also still get quite a few stories from the education world, along with a smattering of stories that might be termed 'local interest'. Today there was one headline in particular that caught my eye and I could not resist clicking on it. The headline was "Primary school pupils heartbroken after vicar tells them 'Santa doesn't exist.'" In my career I only had the briefest contact with church schools, but as the head of a village community school I really...

My mum is both a keen and excellent gardener. Even at nearly 80, she can be found most days throughout all four seasons pruning, planting or weeding in some part of it. Those are three of the few gardening terms that I know, as I take more after my dad when it comes to horticulture. I like to look at it but I don't really know how to do it. I am lucky to live in a property with no garden, and have done so for the last twenty years, so apart from at school my efforts have been restricted to things that can be grown indoors. Even though I have only been operating within the field of indoor gardening, my results have been mixed, to say the least. Any gifts from children, which once included a wonderful chilli plant, are killed within a matter of weeks, and family members know better than to give me anything that is alive to look after. I have even managed to kill 'air plants', which are supposed to need no care whatsoever! Whatever I tried, nothing worked. I over-watered, over...

What is Cultivational Leadership? Let's start with the elevator pitch. The term 'cultivational' is built from the words culture and cultivation, which might give you a bit of a clue. At the heart of this style of leadership is a reflective lens, which looks within an organisation, focuses on putting in place the conditions needed to achieve the best possible results and then sustaining these conditions. Just a quick note at this point, if you adopt this approach I would strongly suggest not trying to shorten the term cultivational as, although I fear you would be quite popular you would not be attracting the crowd you are looking for! How and why did I develop it? Cultivational Leadership has been developed over more than a decade and it comes from my belief that as a leader you need to be true to your own values and personality in order to be successful.  When I moved into school leadership I had a predetermined idea of what a leader should look like, and how they should b...

A few years ago we started a 'walking bus' at my school. Two of us would walk to the centre of our village and meet a group of children at 8:30 before starting our 'bus route' through the village, picking up more children, before arriving at school at 8:45. We started this for two reasons, primarily due to the increasing demands on our school car park, which was becoming a dangerous place at the start and end of the day, and also because we had noted that many of our children lacked enthusiasm in P.E. sessions and felt that getting a bit more exercise would not do them any harm. We were only a small village school, but on a good day we would have up to 25% of the pupils on the bus by the time we reached school, so it was proving to be quite successful.  After a while, I noticed that, as well as achieving our initial aims, the children were benefitting from the journey in ways that I had not anticipated when we set it up. It became a social event, not just for the childr...

Ok, this is going to be another bitter sweet one, but I promise I will end on a positive note... Today I am going to write about a Christmas tradition that I have experienced during probably every year of my career, namely Secret Santa. It is something I would recommend all schools doing, but there are some words of warning and helpful hints I want to share with you so that you can learn from the issues we had. I also want to use this story to illustrate the danger of Christmas traditions being ruined by a drive for 'efficiency'. Finally today I want to get a couple of moans off my chest about gifts that I was given in years past! Lets start with a handy hint, shall we? If Secret Santa is something that you thinking of setting up, or even if it is a tradition in your school already, it is worth double checking that everyone fully understands the rules. By that, I mean that you should be clear that the amount you specify to be spent on a present is not a rough guide, nor is it m...

As we approach Christmas once again, my thoughts turn to happy memories of Christmases in school, as both a teacher and head teacher. I am a little sad that I won't get to add to my experiences this year, but I am also quite excited about having enough time to properly prepare for the big day. One of my favourite parts of the build up to the Christmas in school was always the Christingle Service. It's ironic, as I don't have a religious bone in my body, but there is something magical about a Christingle in a proper old stone church. It is a tradition that I started in my school after experiencing it for the first time as a class teacher. For the uninitiated, a Christingle Service is pretty much a traditional carol service, but it includes a section at the beginning where the children process into the Church with a lit candle stuck in the top of an orange. There are also cocktail sticks with sweets stuck into the orange and a red ribbon stuck around the middle of it. As you ...

Every year, the Chief Inspector of Ofsted produces a report which includes a summary of inspection findings from the last 12 months. This year’s report was published after I had finished my book (to be published), which contains a chapter on ‘how to survive Ofsted’ so I thought it would be useful to write a blog post as an addition to that chapter. From the perspective of a head teacher, the findings from the report can be used as a barometer for the focus areas any potential inspection of their school might have in the coming months. I have looked at the report and formulated some key questions that should be considered by any head teacher. Early Years We knew already that curriculum content and the use of assessment was something that Ofsted were focusing on, and the report makes explicit reference to that continuing. The report refers to schools highlighting ongoing concerns about early years language, communication and social skills, and it acknowledges the impact of the pandemic o...

When I started my teaching career it was expected that every teacher ran an after school club for one day a week. I can clearly remember this coming up at interview, when of course you said yes and then desperately tried to think of a club that you were at least vaguely qualified for running. Over my time as a teacher I ran sports clubs, computer clubs, cooking clubs and even art clubs. It was just accepted that it was what you did. Your club night was by no means your favourite night of the week as it meant that you couldn't get on with any admin after school that day unless you wanted to stay late, but it was just part of the job. This was the norm, up to fairly recently, when we started to see the growth of external providers taking on clubs and freeing up teachers. Obviously this was a popular move with the teachers, and although my school resisted introducing externally provided paid clubs for fear of poor uptake from our families I was pleasantly surprised how this went down ...

Before I share the final part of the saga of our quest for a school lunch provider I want to write about why I chose to tell this epic tale. Recent Government data states that there are 2034 state funded primary schools with less than 100 pupils. We hovered around the hundred mark for the entirety of my time there. My point is, if we were a larger school we would either not have had this problem because we had our own kitchen or I would have had a team of staff to deal with the issue of provision if it arose. Also, if we were part of a MAT it would have all been sorted without taking up a huge amount of my time.  This is one of many issues faced by primaries who remain with local authorities, and with the reduced support they provide we are being pushed harder and harder into joining MATs. For 90 percent of my time in leadership I was a passionate 'remainer', but the pressure got so intense that I had changed my mind entirely before I left. My local authority was starting to ge...

Right, I promise that the final part in this trilogy won't fall foul of the usual cinematic law of diminishing returns (Home Alone 3 anyone?) So where were we? Ah yes, we had secured the services of a high end caterer, one more used to weddings than schools, so the staff were definitely happy with the quality of the meals. The pupils, on the other hand, were less so. I was determined to make this arrangement work, but even I was losing hope when our next move was made for us. Towards the end of the academic year, about the time when our contract was up for renewal, our lunch provider informed us that they had secured a contract for catering to a large country house so they would not be able to sign up for another year with us. This was getting silly! Luckily, we had heard of a local chef in our nearest town who was trying to grow his business, so we approached him with our fingers and toes crossed. He seemed committed (seemed being the operative word) and after visiting his kitchen...

A Response to TES Daily Blog Monday’s blog post from John Severs, the editor of TES, was certainly quite ‘triggering’ for me, as the young people say now. https://t.co/kYosRmprTN It was an excellent article that succinctly summarised the position of many head teachers, and ex-head teachers in my case, although the down side was that it did serve to remind me of several incidents from the last few years I had previously managed to bury in my subconscious. For me, the heart of his post was his description of a “a shift in perception of education towards it being a service.” and the fact that any perceived failure on the part of the school in the eyes of a parent is seen as a failure of the head teacher. This idea that an increasing number of parents have, that schools are working ‘for’ them, rather than with them, is a thread that runs through a number of the most challenging experiences I have had in the past few years. Now that John Severs has reminded me of them I thought that I migh...

The following post is in praise of jigsaws, and the effect that they have on my wellbeing. When I am doing a jigsaw my mind clears completely. Whatever is bothering me that day goes away. I don’t need music in the background as I like to hear the shuffling noise the pieces make as I sort them, that is music enough for me. Although I don’t really remember it, I was apparently a big fan of jigsaws as a small child, but I hadn’t done one in ages until the second half of last year when the desire to do one awoke in my consciousness. I think that it had something to do with the mental health challenges I was dealing with at the time, perhaps my brain was searching its memory banks to locate something that would help me reset things? In the past year since that point I have probably completed thirty jigsaws. My completion rate dropped in the spring once I returned to work but since leaving work for good this summer I am back up to a rate of roughly one per week. My partner is amazed by this,...

So, there we were without a lunch provider and the distinct possibility that we were going to have to produce 100 lunches per day ourselves. But all was not lost, as my office manager had a contact in a large primary school approximately 15 minutes away, and after a couple of conversations we were set. They would be prepared to produce our lunches, and start quickly, but the only issue was that we would have to get them ourselves and drop off our empties at the end of each day. Being a small school, with a tight budget, we did not have the capacity to employ a new member of staff to do this, so we had to rely on my office manager kindly agreeing to do this on our behalf, out of her existing hours. This was not ideal but our only option at that time. We stuck with this for as long as we could, but when my office manager moved on to another job we were seriously up the creek without any kind of paddle. We needed to find another supplier, one that would deliver, and do it quickly. As luck...