I’d like to share something with you- around 13 years ago, I won the lottery. I know you’re probably looking at me and thinking either the money’s run out or she’s talking about a different lottery and you’d be right- I’m talking about the school leadership lottery.
In 2010, I qualified as a secondary English teacher. I’d had a really difficult training year, I had completed a Graduate Teacher Programme delivering the timetable of an experienced teacher from the start. I’d found it really difficult to shatter the illusion that I was a good early career teacher and as a result didn’t seek the help that I needed.
A few years later I became aware of a conversation that had occurred at the end of my training year, my university tutor had been to one of the schools and asked a ‘favour’. She asked if he would be kind enough to take me as an NQT but recognised that this wasn’t going to be an easy task. She said ‘ she’s not the finished article, she needs some work…’
In her book ‘Leading with Presence’, Maggie Farrar says that ‘every moment is a branch point’, an opportunity to change the course and outcome of any situation. Unknown to me, this conversation was a branchpoint in my career- the moment where my fate would be decided in one of two ways. I’d either find myself welcomed into a school environment, supported by a senior leader who really understood the project of developing the staff in his care, OR, I would coast through a career which may have been characterised by a lack of drive, becoming resistant to change and becoming skeptical of the role and purpose of school leadership.
Luckily for me, I was placed under the care of a leader who understood the ‘project’- in my early, formative years as a teacher, this was a senior leader who was modelling and demonstrating the best in staff development and school improvement. This wasn’t about fast-tracking to leadership, it wasn’t about being on any sort of ‘leadership flight path’, but what it was was an expert who acknowledged that staff professional development went hand in hand with personal development- he saw that he wasn’t just developing teachers, but improving people. This was somebody who saw that he could carefully curate a set of opportunities that simultaneously developed the colleague, the person and the school. Being able to see those connections so seamlessly and in such a balanced way is a skill and way of thinking that I still aspire to today.
So why is it a lottery? Well, this kind of thinking doesn’t form part of the NPQ curriculum, it doesn’t form part of early leadership development training, but is the level of thinking we need to be able to retain and recruit the best into our profession and to sustain high quality leadership moving forward. So, if you’re a member of staff on the receiving end of leadership that can simultaenously develop the teacher, the person and the school, then you’re set for some really great and rich developmental opportunities, if you’re not, well, the odds sadly won’t be in your favour. So, whilst the system catches up, I would argue that organisations need to plug the gap in the meantime.
I’ve spoken a little bit about why this is a lottery because measures need to be taken to support leaders to flourish in their roles. In the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis, this project has greater urgency and greater moral imperative than ever.
The 2023 Teacher Labour Market published by the NFER suggests a whole host of reasons why we are losing colleagues from our profession- these are complex, sometimes nuanced challenges that are worth unpicking. It makes for very bleak reading- “Schools posted 93 per cent more vacancies in 2022/23 compared to the year before the pandemic”, “Teacher autonomy, a measure related to how manageable workload feels, has also been consistently lower for teachers than for similar graduates since 2010/11.”, “ITT recruitment was significantly below target in 2022/23.”, “Teachers have consistently reported lower workplace autonomy than similar graduates in other occupations.”, let’s dig further- the most significant number of teachers leaving the profession after those who retire are women between the ages of 30-39.
As with everything in education, there’s real complexity to why attrition rates for women within that age range are so high- Emma Shepherd, founder of the MTPT project has conducted some light research to find out why:
Add this list to a whole host of other reported reasons as to why people are leaving, including feeling isolated, feeling disempowered, feeling as though they don’t have the tools in their arsenal to effect change in their organisation, feelings of disconnection or a lack of belonging, a lack of real representation in school leadership teams, beacause values that don’t align and feelings of imposter syndrome and feeling as though your career and your family commitments just aren’t compatible, we suddenly have a lot that needs unpicking and quickly.
Conversely, as cited by Emma Shepherd, the NFER found that job satisfaction was ‘the most significant protective factor against considering leaving’ and Booth et al. remind us that ‘attrition from the profession can be predicted by… teachers’ satisfaction with their work environment’.
I’ve been really interested to unpick this further, and to find a mechanism to allow both growth of the individual alongside the growth of the organisation- I believe this is instrumental to ensuring personal motivation and satisfaction in role.
This academic year, I’ve worked within and beyond our Trust with a small sample group of female senior leaders from a range of backgrounds in their mid-30s- mid 40s- falling into the prime group who are at risk of leaving the profession. Unsurprisngly, what I found was a real melting pot of the issues I outlined earlier and some additional surprises that I hadn’t anticipated.
The four participants had the following profiles:
Participant 1: Experienced leader, ambitious for continual improvement, astute in noticing what the school wants and needs but felt frustrated that these things weren’t being carried out in the spirit she had intended (or at all). Highly respected, the ‘fixer’, who has Plan B, C and D up her sleeve.
Participant 2: An experienced leader who had felt frustrated and disconnected with her team- she did not feel empowered or informed enough to make the best possible decisions. She felt she had become a dissonant voice and has felt desperately unhappy at work but felt a moral tie to the school and the cause.
Participant 3: An experienced middle leader who is aspiring to senior leadership. She was unsure of future direction but wanted to learn more. She had recently completed a Masters in Educational Leadership and as a result of her learning, can see that there’s a desperate need to decolonise the curriculum yet doesn’t know where to start. She wasn’t clear on how to apply the learning she had gained from external courses and did not have the tools in her armoury to affect meaningful change across her organisation.
Participant 4: A new senior leader who was also new motherhood- struggling with having to negotiate wanting to progress in her career with the want to be the best parent she could be in the early stages of her child’s life and development.
So, having found these four participants, we required a tool, external to the organisation, which would give us a framework to work on the personal effectiveness of these colleagues. This was really an exercise in being able to prompt some much-needed personal reflection. It was key that this wasn’t just based on our internal view of the colleague/or our own (deeply flawed) biases, which could have been damaging and detrimental to any future coaching relationship. We used Insights profiling to support participants in gaining greater transparency as to who they were, what their key drivers were and where their blind spots lay.
Insights Discovery is a psychometric tool for personality profiling based on the psychology of Carl Jung. It uses a four-colour personality profile model to highlight key personality preferences and behaviours, helping people better understand themselves and others. This then generates a detailed report, using the information given, to share blind spots, opposite person types, it even generates a ‘how to handle’ and guide on how best to communicate with the participant. There are, of course, other profiling tools available that serve different purposes, though in this case, this was best fit for our needs.
The programme then took the following form:
- Insights Profiling
- Initial coaching session (internal organisational coach and external INSIGHTS coach). This session gave the participant an opportunity to respond to the results, to identify anomolies, to share reflections from the process.
- Follow-up session with TG to identify area of school leadership, how this could be twinned with an aspect of personal development and then to plan a course of action, linked with their area of school responsibility.
- Monthly 1.5 hour long protected coaching sessions to check on status of developmental work and what was learnt about self in the process.
- Reflection and reviewing exercise.
It’s probably important to caveat at this point, this was not a research project, I know that there’ll be academics in the virtual room wincing at the idea- I’m not an academic researcher, this is merely work based on the experiences we have had as an organisation.
However, that being said, there is a fairly secure evidence base that outlines the plentiful benefits of coaching in education and I acknowledge that that can take a whole range of forms. For the purposes of our work, we found this definition of coaching to be accurate in what we were trying to achieve:
“A one-to-one conversation that focuses on the enhancement of learning and development through increasing self-awareness and a sense of personal responsibility, where the coach facilitates the self-directed learning of the coachee through questioning, active listening, and appropriate challenge in a supportive and encouraging climate. (van Nieuwerburgh, 2012, p. 17)”
I have been really struck by the impact that this has had, both personally and professionally for the participants and would like to take an opportunity to share some of their reflections.
Participant 1: The experienced leader, ambitious for continual improvement, astute in noticing what the school wants and needs but felt frustrated that these things weren’t being carried out in the spirit she had intended (or at all).
For this participant, there were several areas of key learning:
For participant 2, the reflections on learning were even more profound:
This whole process was a challenge for this individual, in her own words, a ‘painful’ one, but also an enriching one- the process itself enabled her to step back, reassess, understand and actively survey the relationships she had with her colleagues.
For Participant 3, the opportunities we were able to offer this colleague were all as a result of truly understanding a colleagues’ need at any one time- by listening actively, and being genuinely curious about her lived experiences and observations, we have unlocked a greater depth of understanding and awareness, too. For this colleague, the only real barrier was not having the knowledge of effective implementation and the ways in which she could affect change in her organisation. She has successfully shared her vision for a decolonised curriculum, had the opportunity to present to a wider, Trust-wide audience on the decolonisation of the curriculum and is also leading a school-based enquiry and research group into the topic.
Finally, Participant 4: As a new senior leader who was also new to motherhood- having to negotiate wanting to progress in her career with the want to be the best parent she could be.
On a more personal level, she shared this reflection:
What perhaps struck me most of all about this work was realising that there were so many branch points- and so many opportunities that we miss to get the best out of our colleagues. There are a series of smaller steps that senior leaders can take in the meantime to support colleagues’ personal, professional and the school’s development:
- Make the implicit, explicit. If you’re in a position where you are leading others, take the time to explain what you’re thinking and how you’re processing a problem and the steps you’ll undertake to fix it- we know the benefits of thinking aloud in a classroom, it works with your staff too.
- Carve out time to support wellbeing and the personal development of your staff and really take the time to fully understand the issues being presented (listen to what is being said, as well as what is not being said). Staff need that support and it’s one of the most professionally satisfying aspects of the role.
- Remember that if colleagues are on the receiving end of poor leadership, they’ll become poor leaders. This is a model that sustains itself- your time and influence now could help leaders for generations to come.
- ‘Chance favours only the prepared mind’ spend time THINKING with colleagues and valuing cultures of thinking in your organisation. Give yourself permission to pause, and listen and talk with others to help you see the bigger picture.
The Learning Addict 