The Tim Brighouse view: ldr January 2010

Plan and save the pain

The canny school leader will already be preparing for tougher times ahead, says Tim Brighouse.

There’s one skill often overlooked by those who write about leadership. What’s more I have never known of a governing body expressly look for it when appointing a new head. Nor, for that matter, do local authorities articulate it as desirable let alone essential selection criterion when seeking a new director of children’s services.

So what is this essential skill? Michael Fullan, so often the exception to the rule, calls it ‘coherence making’.

It involves making sense of apparently diverse and unconnected sets of knowledge and information, and then shaping them into a coherent whole which makes sense for those likely to be most affected by them. Canny headteachers are good at this. They expect their department heads or curriculum leaders to know far more about the teaching and syllabus in their areas, although they will acquire enough knowledge to ask ‘good enough’ questions to stimulate their expert colleagues’ thinking.

It’s then the head’s task to make coherent all this expert knowledge, as well as reading the runes of the budget, thinking of legal and other implications of various possible courses of action and reading key websites, media and leadership books. Out of all this comes speculation about how best to shape future development. Staff, rightly, expect their school leaders to see further and more widely than they can. After all they have a big enough detailed brief of their own. They expect the headteacher to anticipate correctly the key changes that can’t be avoided in the hailstorm of change which constitutes governments’ policies nowadays. Despite the protestations about protecting front line services, I’d stake my pension – not that that’s a very reliable asset any more – on there being cuts in school budgets. So the canny headteacher will even now be planning for ‘contraction’.

There are six priorities to consider.

1.

Stick to your principles. It’s time to dust down and get out those mission and vision statements: they need to be reasserted and guide behaviour and everybody – well the majority – needs to be on side with them as a guide to action.

2.

It’s tempting but mistaken to protect staff numbers, especially teachers, at all costs.There’s no evidence to support the view that marginally smaller classes have any impact on pupil outcomes. Nor that large leadership teams have any improving effect either. So anticipating retirements and promotions in the next two years and making adjustments when they happen is good sense. A five per cent cut in staffing should be possible in medium and large schools, although not of course in smaller ones.

3.

Use some of the money saved to double the amount spent on staff development. Without their intellectual curiosity and energy, nothing will be achieved.

4.

Protect ICT spending. Installing and then developing all aspects of the e-learning platform will improve learning, pupil motivation and parental involvement as well as take some of the bureaucratic slog out of teachers’ lives. But remember you need good facilities management and that’s unlikely to be achieved alone.

5.

Join a trust or partnership of schools committed to sharing professional development, ICT services and the reduction of ‘back-office’ spending.

6.

Act now in working with partners on bids for extra resources for innovative projects by applying to one of the major charity foundations such as Paul Hamlyn or Esmee Fairbairn. But do your homework first to optimise your chances of success.

So that’s my advice. What’s certain is planning now will save pain later.

Professor Tim Brighouse was London Schools Commissioner and Education Officer in Oxfordshire and Birmingham local authorities. He was knighted for his services to school improvement earlier this year.

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