Time to unlock middle leadership potential

Middle leaders are the powerhouses of schools – the key is giving these colleagues professional development that helps them realise their full potential, says academy principal Paul Hammond.

Oasis Academy Enfield (OAE), north London, is now five years old and with no predecessor school, we are experiencing our very first Year 11 cohort.

With the focus very much on securing the best possible outcomes for this group of 180 students, those features most likely to secure success coincide with the four foci of the new Ofsted framework – achievement, behaviour, teaching and leadership.

And my previous – and first –  year of academy leadership made me acutely aware that our success in these areas is very much dependent on the quality of our middle leadership; our subject leaders, year heads, assistants and the like.

High-achieving schools are heavily dependent on subject leaders with razor-sharp subject knowledge and a contemporary understanding of issues, not only within their discipline but in the wider educational arena.

Successful middle leaders inspire both staff and young people to go beyond their potential and achieve extraordinary results. This will require a keen understanding of data, a tenacity when it comes to encouraging attendance at weekend revision sessions and the ability to bring the best out of staff across the spectrum of motivation, age and expertise.

Increasingly we are requiring classroom teachers and learning areas to become their own behaviour mentors, using their individual and collective expertise to engage young people, deflect attempts at low-level distraction and to provide subject-level rewards and sanctions. This cannot be achieved without the proactive support of middle leaders who take on this responsibility as appropriate before using senior staff and whole-school solutions.

When it comes to the quality of teaching, the best subject leaders take on the role of head coach – making sound judgements about classroom performance and then working alongside colleagues to secure consistent high performance. Senior staff and outside agencies are available to moderate judgements and provide specialist expertise, but our best middle leaders will make that job all the easier by providing a detailed diagnosis of evidence-based strengths and areas for development.

The quality of leadership in a school depends on individuals in all corners of the organisation stepping up and showing themselves to be reliable, credible and with the right blend of personal attributes to bring the best out of their colleagues.

Middle leaders set the tone of professionalism within their teams and therefore have an influence that matches that of the senior team. Individuals with a real passion for their subject and an obvious affinity with young people often make an impact when it comes to attracting increasing numbers of option groups, developing junior colleagues and securing a track record of high achievement.

Before the first national middle leadership development programme, Leading from the Middle (LftM), came on the scene 10 years ago, the quality of middle leadership training was very much a hit-and-miss affair. If you belonged to the right subject association or taught in a forward-looking local authority then you might be fortunate to get on a useful course.

Thanks to LftM, a whole generation of aspiring leaders have been exposed to ideas, skills and knowledge that have given them the confidence to step out and work with their colleagues in different ways that benefit the learning of students. One of the key achievements of LftM was to achieve recognition that the tens of thousands of ‘primary co-ordinators’ were just as much bona fide middle leaders as their secondary counterparts. The role of pastoral leaders, key stage co-ordinators and special educational needs co-ordinators also grew in stature as their involvement in the programme injected leadership theory, strategies for managing awkward colleagues and opportunities for reflection.

However, if the National College was to achieve its aim of reaching more of England’s 250,000 middle leaders then the way middle leadership training was delivered had to evolve - hence the Middle Leadership Development Programme (MLDP) was born.

OAE is one of the pioneering schools which now offer MLDP to all middle leaders in the borough in a partnership with the local authority. Deputy Principal Karim Murcia is the senior team member who received four days of facilitation training in preparation for delivering the programme to an eager first cohort of local colleagues this autumn.

The programme contains all of the successful features of LftM – the face-to-face sessions, online learning resources, learning coach from within their own school and a leadership challenge – but the clusters delivering the programme locally have the freedom to adapt materials to meet the particular challenges of the participants.

"This bespoke element of MLDP is a very welcome feature," says Karim. "In our first session it became clear that colleagues from across the phases face common issues such as meeting the language needs of a diverse community and engaging parents in the learning process. Through negotiation we were able to identify leadership issues and identify resources that will help us address these in the course of our time together and online."

The academy works together with a consortium of other local schools that pool expertise to deliver leadership courses to teachers within the borough. Others have a track record of successful programmes to equip aspiring senior leaders to complement the focus on middle leadership provided by OAE and MLDP. All schools in the partnership, supported by the local authority, see this suite of courses as a viable future model for the provision of high-quality, needs-driven leadership learning.

The success of our school relies on its middle leaders, but if we are to maintain that momentum we need to carry on investing in support and development for these leaders. That is what we intend to do in Enfield. I’d urge other leaders to do the same.