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Lucie Carrington on a new project which aims to help heads, aspiring leaders and governors take a fresh approach to organising the headteacher role.
The role of head is becoming ever more complex, but Susan Tranter, Headteacher at Fitzharrys’ School in Abingdon believes that with a bit of imagination and some sound organisation, heads can deal with the complexity and still enjoy the job.
Susan has implemented a number of changes to make the job of head work for her and the school. On a personal level she employs a cleaner and uses a laundry service. “Yes it costs money, but we can’t have it all,” she says. In addition she insists she only takes six weeks holiday in any year. “This takes away the pressure to complete every task by the end of the term and means that when I am on holiday, I am really on holiday,” she says.
Meanwhile, at school she delegates as much responsibility as is practical to her five-strong leadership team. She meets every week with each member of the team to monitor and talk through their workload. “So there are no surprises on either side. I know what they are doing and they know they have my full support because whatever it is, we will have discussed it.”
Susan has developed a set of structures and systems that work for her in her school, but there’s work to be done on a larger scale in the face of the leadership succession challenge, and NCSL is playing a key role. In June it will be launching a new national network of schools that are rethinking their leadership model. A website and online community, national facilitator and three regional facilitators will support the network.
It’s in part the result of a research project NCSL commissioned last year – Redesigning Headship. Led by consultant Colin Burns, the project worked with existing, former and aspiring heads to look at how heads can share the leadership load – and the fun. “Heads have bigger budgets, greater accountability and are better paid than ever before but it is becoming too big a job for one person,” says Colin.
“When we started out we expected to find a set of key structural patterns that would work for all schools. But it soon became clear that there was no one way to do this. There are almost as many models of distributed leadership as there are schools doing it.”
Instead Colin and his colleagues came up with a set of seven core leadership and management activities common to all schools. These were: develop staff and culture, school strategy, accountability, inclusion and extended services, leading beyond the school, learning and teaching, and finance and business. Colin and his research colleagues discussed with heads which of these they felt they could realistically delegate to other school leaders and which they would keep for themselves.
He says: “Successful headship is about prioritising and properly delegating responsibility but it became clear in our discussions that many heads would be unwilling to move away from responsibility for school strategy, staff and culture and overall accountability they see this as the heart of the job.”
It’s not just heads and potential heads who need convincing – the Redesigning Headship team has also set out recommendations for governors, NCSL and central government. These include, replacing headship standards with leadership and management standards; holding leaders other than the head to account and developing tools to audit distributed leadership.
As Colin says: “We have to encourage everyone involved to move away from the idea of the ‘hero head’ who can do it all. It’s a 20th century model that is no longer fit for purpose.” ldr
Next steps
www.ncsl.org.uk/modelsofleadership
www.ncsl.org.uk/tomorrowsleaderstoday |
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