Chapter 5 moves on to Domain 2: Excellent Pupils and Staff.
The six characteristics that make up this domain of the National Standards of Excellence for Head teachers are as follows:
- Demand ambitious standards for all pupils and staff overcoming disadvantage and advancing equality, instilling a strong sense of accountability in staff for the impact of their work on pupils’ outcomes.
- Secure excellent teaching through an analytical understanding of how pupils learn and the core features of successful classroom practice and curriculum design, leading to rich curriculum opportunities and pupils’ well-being.
- Establish an educational culture of ‘open classrooms’ as a basis for sharing best practice within and between schools, drawing on and conducting relevant research and robust data analysis.
- Create an ethos within which all staff are motivated and supported to develop their own skills and subject knowledge, and to support each other.
- Identify emerging talents, coaching current and aspiring leaders in a climate where excellence is the standard, leading to clear succession planning.
- Hold all staff to account for their professional conduct and practice.
1 and 6 are quite difficult to achieve while also managing 3, 4 and 5. It is easy for ambitious demands and holding staff to account to seep into destroying the chances for openness, motivation and succession planning.
The examples for 1 and 6 should be quite instructive. Unfortunately, the example that Blatchford gives for demanding ambitious standards describes a headteacher with an ‘uncanny ability to motivate others’, and the mysteriousness of this ability is not helpful for the reader. Similarly, the same headteacher has a ‘secret knack of instilling in others loyalty to the cause’. It is possible that such mystical abilities may be what headteachers need, but as an attempt to make clear the standards of excellence this is not very analytical. I would have hoped that there would have been space to explore some of the things that the headteacher did which appeared to affect motivation and loyalty as a basis for some further study.
Fortunately, the example for holding staff to account is much more critically analytical. The Head, named Christine, clearly adopts a take no prisoners approach to standards. Blatchford is quick to state that she does this because of the ‘context’ that Christine chooses to work in: Failing schools which are obviously in need of turning around. Staff are expected to read from the from the teachers standards in staff meetings and are not expected to be friends with other staff members (although they can be friendly). It is clear that this would not be appropriate in a school which already had an outstanding ethos and culture and Blatchford acknowledges that Christine then moves on. She is also ‘not everyone’s cup of tea’.
For those who would aim to emulate Christine in every school context, they could read ‘The One Type of Leader who can Turn Around a Failing School’ by Alex Hill, Liz Mellon, Ben Laker and Jules Goddard published in Harvard Business Review. Analysing Christine’s approach after reading this article, you might say that her leadership is somewhat unsustainable and that explains why she quickly moves on to new challenges.
One interesting aspect of Christine’s leadership is that she ‘grows leaders quickly and expertly, shaped in her own image, and passes them on to her headteacher friends in other parts of the city’. I would guess that she instils the personal traits of leadership in developing teachers and then the other heads are that she passes them on to can confidently develop their managerial and interpersonal skills knowing that their core teaching standards are already burned into them by Christine. It is an interesting approach and one that a school leadership team can look at developing in an intra-school setting.
The chapter is worth reading for the example of Christine alone.