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      • Middle leadership in primary schools
        • Set direction and plan
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        • Role of the headteacher

Motivate and influence others

To motivate and influence others, leaders must establish a climate of trust and mutual respect in which people are open to ideas and creative ways to improve performance and tackle problems.

The video clip shows Judy Unsworth who is the co-ordinator for the Foundation Stage at St Joseph’s RC Primary School in Cleveland. She is also responsible for leading learning across the school.

Her work has been an integral part of the school’s development plan. Her starting point was to evaluate current practice and its outcomes in terms of learning and standards. As a result, she gathered compelling evidence for the need to do things differently. Judy used her professional knowledge to motivate her colleagues to re-examine their practice and adopt different approaches in the classroom.

Judy wants teachers to feel more confident about teaching design and technology. Her observations of teaching and learning, together with her professional knowledge and skills, are a powerful lever for motivating others to do things differently. Everything she says to her colleagues, either during the lesson or in feedback, is based on her detailed observations of children’s learning and the way it has been influenced by teaching.

We asked Margo Evans, a middle leader at Appleton Primary School, Oxfordshire, what she thought was key to being a successful middle leader.

"It is of paramount importance as a middle leader to build good relationships with other members of staff, not just teaching staff but teaching assistants as well. I don’t think I could do my job very effectively if I hadn’t built up those relationships, because people have got to be able to trust me and come to me if they are worried about something."

Margo is responsible for English. Her monitoring identified the need to improve children’s speaking and listening skills so that they would be more confident when asked to transfer their ideas to the written word.

She recognised the need to extend the use of writing across the whole curriculum. Margo works closely with the two key stage teams, sometimes alongside them in the classroom and sometimes in meetings to give feedback or discuss progress and problems.

Her approach is supportive of people at all times, while ensuring that she communicates her high expectations of both teachers and pupils. As a result of Margo’s leadership, standards of writing have improved steadily and are now very high. Similarly, children are more articulate and confident speakers.

View a transcript of this video.