If we are serious about improving schools, then we must invest in leaders, train them to perform their role/s really effectively and support them as required. Leadership, though, requires professional discipline and often moral courage.
School leadership is a demanding area of school life. As a leader you are expected to be all things to all people and you really have to know your onions. There is a real need for leaders to provide clarity, certainty and consistency. You need resilience, and an unwavering commitment to the school’s expectations, values, norms and standards.
Too often, however, leadership in education becomes diluted by competing priorities, vague ideologies that are often founded in preference as opposed to what really works and a reluctance to confront uncomfortable truths. There is a need, at times, to have difficult conversations that can require internal bravery and there absolutely is a need to hold the line, hold it some more and hold it again. Often this can be in the face of some sharply critical voices.
At its core effective school leadership should begin with a simple premise; namely that your role is to ensure that teachers can teach in a disruption free environment, that children can learn and, if nothing else, your systems, processes, procedures and policies ensure that you keep your community safe.
This position and view may sound obvious, may sound overly simplistic but the reality is that these should be the non-negotiables upon which you build the foundations of a school. Without this strong platform in place little else will be successfully driven, actioned and embedded. However, these key non-negotiables can be easily obscured by other distractions that serve as cat nip.
Leaders can become preoccupied with optics, initiatives, and external pressures. Fads and gimmicks, which seem to offer a short cut solution to a problem, easily slip in. Too many competing priorities can easily take over a leadership team to the point where leaders are doing everything and doing nothing.
Losing sight of the fundamental purpose of education truly is kryptonite to the culture leaders, deep down, want to achieve. A challenging aspect of school leadership is navigating external pressures. Notably inspection frameworks, accountability measures, parental expectations, and wider societal issues all exert influence. While these cannot be ignored they should not dictate the core values of the school nor the actions of leaders.
Strong leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose and resist the temptation to chase short-term gains at the expense of long-term improvement. Strong leaders cut through this noise, resist fads and hold true to what they believe in. They focus relentlessly on teaching, learning and behaviour because these are the big-ticket items that make everything else possible.
Central to leadership is the establishment and embedding of high expectations. This goes beyond mission statements, vision and values documents and words on walls. Whilst there is a place for all of those things they must ultimately be lived, breathed, believed in and provide the foundation for your fundamental why?
In other words, what is your establishment about, what is it purpose, do people believe in it and are all of your actions as a leader crafted, designed and enacted to ensure you uphold what your school is about? Your high expectations must be lived, they must permeate every classroom, corridor and conversation.
Students must know what is expected of them academically and behaviourally. Staff must be supported, and held accountable as and when necessary, to uphold those expectations without compromise. There is no shortcut here. Standards are not achieved through slogans. They are built through daily, deliberate action.
Behaviour is a key litmus test of the impact of leadership. It defines school culture. Behaviour extends significantly beyond merely a punitive sanction system.
Behaviour is about the standards leaders at all levels uphold, how staff and children interact with one another, the professional values and behaviours the adults engage in, how the school interacts with its community, etc.
Where behaviour is poor, learning ultimately suffers. It is that straightforward and we really do not need endless research papers to tell us this. Leaders who shy away from addressing disruption, who excuse it under the guise of context or complexity (which is a seductive thing to do) risk failing the very students they aim to support.
Phrases like ‘but those children cannot do that’ or ‘children in this area don’t have that level of aspiration’ are unhelpful. Whilst this may be true and may underpin your contextual thinking and contextual wisdom the key question to then consider is ‘what are you going to do about it within the parameters of your influence and control?’ Context is absolutely key and knowing your contextual setting inside and out is crucial to your school improvement trajectory.
In terms of behaviour this does not mean adopting a fiercely punitive or inflexible stance but it is key that your approaches are rich in clarity, certainty and consistency. The more ambiguous your rules and expectations are the more open to interpretation they become and this is where inconsistency creeps in. Clear rules, applied consistently, create a culture where students feel safe and teachers can teach. Without that foundation no amount of curriculum innovation will succeed.
Consistency is an area of leadership that is underrated. Leadership is often about doing the same simple things over and over. It is often about being a presence, be it at the start of the day, during lessons, at break, at lunch, in assemblies, as children leave the school site at the end of the day etc.
Leaders often need to invest in a few pairs of good hard-wearing shoes as their daily step count is likely to be high. I remember as a junior leader being told a big part of my role was to pound the corridors and ensure I was a positive presence. Effective leaders are present. They are not continuously confined to their offices or consumed entirely by meetings.
Of course, there are times leaders have to be in their offices and in meetings but finding the balance here is key. But if collectively as a leadership team you are predominantly behind closed doors and not a presence across your school then you have a problem. This presence is not symbolic. Presence is strategic. It allows leaders to understand the lived reality of their school, to reinforce expectations in real time and to build relationships grounded in authenticity.
Visibility without purpose though is performative. Leaders must know what they are looking for and why. A walk through the school should not be a passive exercise. It should involve deliberate attention to key indicators. You should always be looking out for something specific. For example. are students engaged? are routines being followed? is the curriculum being delivered with clarity and ambition? These observations, when combined with professional dialogue, form the basis of meaningful school improvement.
Leaders also must make difficult decisions. There is a tendency in some quarters to equate leadership with consensus-building at all costs. That you must consult, consult and consult some more. While collaboration is important, it cannot come at the expense of clarity. You need to consider carefully when you will consult and canvas views and why.
Sometimes this is powerful and necessary. Sometimes people simply need a decision to be made. It is key to keep in mind that no matter how much you consult you will never please everyone. It is also important to consider if consulting will have a counter-productive impact on staff. Notably, will staff feel that the consultation is tokenistic? Leaders are ultimately responsible for the direction of the school.
This means that at times they must take decisions that are potentially unpopular but necessary. This is where being brave comes into play and following the spirit of your convictions is necessary. Avoiding these moments in the hope that issues will resolve themselves is not leadership; it is abdication of your professional duty.
This then leads to staff culture, which leaders have a huge influence over. Schools do not improve in spite of their staff. They improve because of them, and it is important that staff are front and centre within your thinking, your approaches and how you support workload and wellbeing.
I hold firm to the view that happy staff result in happy children and that supported staff who can do their job highly effectively mean children can learn, thrive and succeed. Leaders must invest in developing their teams. They must provide clear guidance and create an environment where professionalism is the norm.
This includes addressing underperformance directly, fairly and professionally but also supportively. Difficult conversations are part of the role. When handled properly they are developmental. They signal that standards matter and that everyone is accountable. Professional development should therefore not be an afterthought or a box-ticking exercise.
It should be purposeful, aligned with the school’s priorities, grounded in evidence-informed practice and your contextual wisdom. Teachers need practical strategies that they can implement swiftly, easily and effectively. They do not need abstract theories that have little bearing on the realities of the classroom. Leaders must therefore ensure that training is coherent, sustained, and evaluated for impact.
The hard thinking about the training can and should be done behind the scenes but the training delivered to staff should be made as simple and easy to understand as possible. It should also be delivered in a timely manner, that gives colleagues the professional space to think about what it is you want, the how and the why so they can enact it effectively.
Within this is easy to introduce new systems or policies; it is far harder to ensure they are embedded and sustained. Staff quickly lose confidence in leadership when expectations shift or are applied unevenly. The strongest leaders understand that their credibility rests not on what they say but on what they do repeatedly. They follow through. They notice. They act.
So leaders should seek to avoid changing the playscript every two seconds because of the latest idea, social media post or blog. They need to consider carefully what their setting requires and needs and carefully construct a clear plan that will allow that to become a living and breathing reality.
Leaders also drive the curriculum, and this is another area where clarity is essential. A strong curriculum is not simply a collection of topics or just the subjects your school delivers. There is a real need to carefully consider the sequenced body of knowledge that enables students to build their understanding over time.
Leaders must work closely with subject specialists to ensure that what is taught is both ambitious and accessible. This requires a deep engagement with content and not just pedagogy. Without true subject expertise there is a risk of superficial coverage that leaves students with fragmented knowledge. It is therefore incumbent on leaders to work with subject teams to ensure that staff have the space, time and training to upskill their own subject specific knowledge.
Without deep and rich subject knowledge in place curriculum design can easily be built upon sand. This then stems into the realm of assessment, which is inextricably linked to curriculum design and enactment. Assessment in all of its guises must serve a clear purpose. It should inform teaching and provide meaningful insights into student progress. It should support staff to identify where there are gaps in learning so educators can then consider how this influences their next steps. Leaders need to support colleagues to strike a balance in the volume of assessment to ensure that assessment practices are efficient, focused and serve the curriculum.
Finally, integrity underpins everything. Students and staff are acutely attuned to inconsistencies between what leaders say and what they do. Trust is built when actions align with values, when decisions are transparent and when leaders hold themselves to the same standards they expect of others.
Without integrity even the most well-designed strategies will falter. School leadership is therefore about responsibility. It is about recognising the profound impact that decisions made at the top have on the experiences and outcomes of your community, both day-to-day and in terms of absolute accountability. It requires a willingness to prioritise what matters, to challenge and reject what does not and to remain steadfast in the face of complexity.
There are no easy answers, no silver bullets and very rarely are there any quick fixes. With clarity, certainty and consistency (the 3Cs as I like to refer to them) leaders can create schools where both students and staff thrive by design.
