Lessons from 23 years as a headteacher

 Survival of the long-term leader by Geography Expert:

The video is about the speaker's experience as a head teacher for 23 years.

The speaker shares his insights on how to stay motivated and effective in a long-term leadership position. He emphasizes the importance of embracing change, looking for new challenges, and developing new projects. He also stresses the need to be self-aware and guard against one's ego getting in the way of the job. Additionally, he recommends accepting board or community positions to broaden one's experience and network. Finally, he encourages leaders to enjoy their work, be creative, and not get stuck in a rut.

Here are some specific examples from the video:

• The speaker describes how he set up a charity to support his school, a community interest company to look for new ways of funding, and a school farm to offer vocational and support opportunities.
• He also talks about how he developed his accounting skills in order to submit annual accounts to company's house and the Charity's regulator.
• He admits to being outspoken and sometimes impatient, and he shares how he has worked on delegating tasks and communicating more effectively with his subordinates.
• He also describes how he has served on several boards, including a local Enterprise company, local FE College, and local University, as well as some local charities.

Overall, the video provides valuable insights for anyone in a long-term leadership position. The speaker's advice is based on his own experience and is sure to be helpful for others who are looking to stay motivated and effective in their roles. 

Transcript

Lessons from 23 years as a headteacher. Sometimes people can ask and say, you were a headteacher for 23 years, how could you enjoy doing your job for so long? Weren't you desperate to retire and get out? Or didn't you want to stop working earlier? Well, after 23 years on the job, I was still really enjoying it. and actually I could have carried on for a few more years. However, I decided to finish when I was still enjoying the job. I also worked out how long it would take me to finish the projects I had started, as I wanted to leave my successor with the opportunity to work on their own priorities and not have to finish mine. I stayed on one year after the normal retirement age of headteachers, At that time it was 60 years of age. So at 61 I finished my 23 years stint as a head teacher and little did I realise I'd be asked back to work part-time for the Education Authority to train teachers, which I did for a further three years. I particularly enjoyed my last few years leading up to my retirement. I had given the local authority two years' notice of my intention to retire, as I wanted to ensure they'd be able to have someone in place as soon as I left, and also to give them time to think about what sort of headteacher they'd want to replace me with. Is the job stressful? Yes, the job is stressful, but some of us like a little bit of stress. It keeps you sharp. and it gives you adrenaline to get the job done. It feels great when you can overcome obstacles and the stresses that go with any difficult job. I often feel stress is overplayed. Anything you do in life can have stress. Almost any job has its own stresses and a demanding job with long hours unsurprisingly has lots of stress built in. There are deadlines to meet, emergencies to deal with, several things need attention all at once, complaints, bereavements. There's always something happening in a school. A headteacher must get used to the reality that despite all the planning, the day can throw up issues that just have to be dealt with and take priority over the planned work. Certainly, if you're in a school and you have hundreds of young people, many, many teachers and other staff, and you have a large campus to look after, there are lots of things that need done every day and lots of things that can go wrong on a daily basis. You have to realise you cannot do everything all at once. You have to manage what you do. Many people, when they become headteachers, get ground down by the day-to-day management and the everyday issues that emerge. Sometimes these issues seem important and they feel they have to deal with them. But as a leader you cannot let yourself get bogged down. If you feel swamped by management you are not approaching the job correctly. You have to get out of that deep pit covered in the minutiae of the organisation. What I realised early on in my career was my bin was the most essential piece of equipment I had. I became a headteacher in 1991, in the days before computers took over as our primary management tool. Indeed I brought the first computers into the school office and into our management offices. Over the years we moved from a very paper-driven administration with letters kept in triplicate, using real carbon copies. In 1991, everything was hard copy, and I had ranks of filing cabinets full of documents. By the time I finished as a headteacher, school management was much more electronic, documents kept on computer, on the disk, in the cloud. So yes, when I started the position of a headteacher, it was the mail that came in every day, the physical mail. You had to select what needed attention, what did not, what could be thrown in the bin, and what could be passed on to others. What really needed a reply? And just like emails today, often 80% of the mail that came in could be discarded. I did not worry about what I put in the bin and discarded, because if it was really important, I always worked out somebody would get back to me. And frankly, in 23 years, that never happened. So I think the first thing you've got to do is decide what you're not going to do. Do not attempt everything. Latterly, with emails, I tended to get into work early in the morning. I'd have a quick look at my email inbox. It'd probably be a couple hundred emails since yesterday evening, waiting for my attention. After putting 80% in the bin I would then decide which were important and I'd deal with that day and which could wait. Some of them that could wait I might never get to and I would bin them eventually. After the pupils went home in the afternoon I'd check the emails again and there'd be several hundred more emails. Again 80-90% in the bin. I would not waste my time during the day checking emails, as frankly a head teacher should not be slave to their inbox. The key to managing a lot of your time is just do not let other people dictate what you should be doing. Some things are really important and must be done. If you're dealing with examination boards, there are certainly deadlines that have to be met, and these are pretty clear-cut, so certain pieces of work are time-sensitive. But most of the work the headteachers handle is not, and you have to learn to put things off. Just because something happens or crops up and it needs attention, it does not mean it needs to be dealt with now. it might be better to wait. I've often found that delaying action can pay dividends, as sometimes issues almost sort themselves out given time. You do not need to rush into action all the time. This skill is something you can get better at the longer you're in a job, and the more you see the same issues recurring time after time, the better you get at judging just how long to leave them. Deal with what is important and make sure you have the time for the things in your job that will make a difference in the long run. Make sure you have the time to do things that really matter to the young people and to the community that the school serves. People caught up in day-to-day minutiae never get to the important tasks that will count in the organisation. Now the key resource that any headteacher has is their staff. And if you've not appointed them or not come from that school, it's going to take you some time to get to know the staff, their strengths and their weaknesses. If you're new to an organisation, it will take you time to identify staff that will form the core of your support, that support that you need to get anything done. this core group of staff you will add to at every opportunity when you have the chance to fill vacancies. You have to decide what kind of staff do you want to appoint when vacancies become available. I would argue you need people that think the way you do in terms of the type of education they wish to provide, the way they react and support young people, people that will fit into the ethos of the school, and if necessary, help you change the ethos of the school. I felt that until I had appointed a sizable number of staff and achieved that sort of critical mass of people that were interested in changing the school for the better, everything I did was so much harder to achieve. and until you get to that point it is difficult, it's hard. Very hard to take your agenda forward at the pace you would want to do. Once you have that critical mass of staff you can implement change much faster and a lot easier. And while on the topic of appointments, I've always believed you do not appoint unless you're absolutely sure the person you're appointing is right for the job and right for the school. Just because you have a vacancy it does not mean you need to fill it with the next available warm body. I would not appoint a member of staff unless I felt they shared some of my values about education and if I had any doubt I would make temporary appointments, and I would advertise and re-advertise until I found the right person. I always had at the back of my mind when I'm interviewing for members of staff, would I want this person teaching my children? And if I had any doubt, I would not appoint. I think one of the resources that headteachers forget from time to time are the non-teaching members of staff. They can be an incredible resource. The poorest paid members of staff, the cleaners, the janitors, the kitchen staff, will generally live in the community. They will know the children, they will know the families, they know what's going on in that community. Once you have their trust, they will tell you what is going on things that might be a problem in the school later on. For example, families that are falling out with each other in the community will often have children in the school, and if you know what's going on, you can head off trouble before it happens in the school. Sometimes the pupils and their families might wonder, how did the headteacher find out about this problem in the community? How do you find out about my Facebook post I always protected my sources. I've always felt that it's my job to understand and know what is actually going on locally. Headteachers who ignore what's going on beyond the school gate, in my view, are not really doing the job they're paid to do. Some of my colleagues would say, I'm not paid to be a social worker or police officer. That's not my job. I always took a different view. The school does not exist in isolation. It is part of the community, often the very heart of the community. Being actively involved in that community will pay dividends and in the end make your job easier. One of the impressions I like to create was that the pupils never really knew where I was going to be, if I would be turning around the corner, catching them out. I think a headteacher must be visible in their school. You're everywhere. Generally, I like to walk around the school campus two or three times a day so as many people would see me as possible. I would try hard to be out of my office as much as possible during the school day. At the morning interval, when the pupils are having a break, I'd be visible and speak with as many pupils as possible. And I'd try to be in different areas of the school each day. At lunchtime I would do the lunch duty every day I was in school. I would also be at the school canteen before the children. I would sit with a different group of pupils each day and converse with them over lunch. It's surprising what you find out in an unguarded moment. And then, once we'd had lunch, I'd be moving around at school so that they knew I was always on the move. That way they never really knew where I was going to be turning up. It's especially important for a headteacher to have that sort of presence. When I started this as a young headteacher, I wore a bright maroon blazer, and it wasn't so much a fashion statement, but in a sea of black uniforms, a maroon blazer sticks out very clearly. I wanted the children to see me and to think that I could be anywhere in the building at any one time. That way, they're less likely to chance it and get into mischief. I just wanted them to wonder, is the head going to be around the next corner?