John Bald on what makes for a good and poor leadership in our schools.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, HMCI, suggests a significant minority of school headteachers – he says around 5,000 – lack leadership. It's hard to know exactly how many there are, but I've met a lot, particularly in secondary schools. Here are what seem to me to be characteristics of good and bad leaders:
Good leaders
Poor leaders
There is clearly more to say and finer lines are to be drawn. But Sir Michael is right. Not all headteachers are like him. There is a typically weaselly quote from a heads' union leader in the ST piece to the effect that teachers should not be "intimidated" by pupils' behaviour. It is the head's responsibility to ensure that they are not, and it is good to hear this said by HMCI and not some poor whistleblower who can be victimised and hauled up before the kangaroo court of the GMC, as happened under New Labour. I once got into trouble with a lead inspector (a choir school alumnus) for helping a teacher control behaviour in a class who had reduced her to tears. He said that I was wrong to intervene and that teachers "had to be
tough". No one can pull rank on HMCI.
And this from Sir Michael on Teach First:
“I was talking to Teach First [a teaching charity]: they are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed — idealistic. Sometimes they go into schools where leadership is not good, where behaviour is not good, they are not supported in the early years of their career as much as they should. It has got very little to do with workload or bureaucracy or anything like that, that’s not true. They leave when they are in a school where the leadership is not good.”
See Oenone Crossley-Holland's Hands Up! for a first-hand view of this type of Teach First Experience.
And finally, a quote from Denis Hill, a former senior adviser for training in Essex, about the County hierarchy – "Some people are promoted to the point at which they no longer feel obliged to think." Denis was mostly thinking of chief education officers, but he could easily have reeled off a dozen secondary heads who fell into that category, and a smaller number of primary heads.