Executive Leadership

Forget The Teaching Superstars – Bring On The Teams

As a gung-ho young head, Rob Carpenter was in love with systems. It was, he discovered, a big mistake. He now believes that the core of leadership should be based around relationships with staff and children – and that culture is at the root of school improvement.

My first headship, at Bannockburn Primary School in Plumstead in 2003, saw me make more mistakes than I care to mention. It was also the period of my steepest growth and most valuable learning—starting with the headship interview. As part of the process, I was asked to lead an assembly and attempted to deliver the ‘long spoons’ story—Google it if you haven’t used it before, it’s a good one—just don’t do what I did! On this occasion, it resulted in 250 pupils scrambling for sweets across the hall, all health and safety protocols abandoned as governors watched in shock, clip-boards to hand. Remarkably, they still appointed me—something which I will be forever grateful!

The first two years in post were a bit of a mess, to be honest, but they set me up to understand the power of relational leadership. Having taught through the introduction of the literacy and maths hours, I was obsessed with national strategy implementation—the flat-pack-furniture-approach to school improvement. This involved measuring anything that moved and lessons were timed to the minute. Teachers were judged and graded, depending on how slickly they could manipulate a counting stick or wave number fans around. Staff meetings were instructional—the milkman delivery method of training, rather than a design model. As for recruitment, I appointed teachers like football managers sign new players: SLEs, advanced skills teachers and expert professionals were all on my shopping list. Star signings were unveiled to parents, staff and governors with great fanfare. To my cost, I learned this doesn’t always make a cohesive team. I had unwittingly created a school culture crammed with Galácticos who didn’t want to play together! These were expert teachers who preferred to teach with doors closed and who had a similar mindset towards learning. It taught me that it is better to have a school full of open-to-learning novices than closed-to-learning gurus!

Over the next ten years, I slowly learned that school improvement is about much more than strategy. Schools are complex, adaptive organisations, bound by relationships at every level. Bannockburn Primary School became a centre of excellence not by mandating change, but because we grew to become network and story-focused. By networked, I mean the way in which collaboration between teachers, schools and across the system defined our work. On multiple levels, staff developed agency to make a bigger difference and worked closely in teams to support each other. Planning lessons became intrinsically social and organic. Ideas for lessons grew from putting children’s needs before what was in the schemes of work the government produced. By 2011, the school expanded its roll by another 2 forms of entry, we became the focal point for the community, began supporting other schools and opened our doors to share best practice. By giving away our best school improvement ideas, it forced us to create new ones. Staff recruitment concentrated more on mindset rather than talent, which enabled us to strengthen relational leadership, building strong teams who worked for each other.

This then allowed us to tell a powerful story of improvement. Stories in leadership are important: they have the potential to bind people together, connecting beliefs with action, engaging people emotionally, necessitating inter-dependence. The most sustainable school improvement occurs when everyone sees themselves as investors, owners and creators of change—a very different approach to the national strategy days of instruction. Storytelling schools create a values-led approach to the organisation of learning, including:

  • Recognising that learning communities are created when we concentrate on people’s gifts rather than deficiencies
  • Engaging all community members in the process of a common vision for learning
  • Understanding that success depends on everybody achieving
  • Knowing that sustained improvement is achieved only when learning communities are given the power and permission to act
  • Realising that lasting success is gained by harnessing social capital

This matters even more because education attaches such high status to measurement of outcomes, which can stop us from focusing on what is harder to measure but which matters just as much. High-stakes accountability has resulted in schools learning that survival depends on maintaining good results, sometimes at a cost. We have been suckered into a pre-occupation with cognitive development—linear, sequential, easier to measure—than more abstract, but equally important, concepts like self-regulation, motivation and collaboration. Education reform has been framed around accountability and test outcomes, leading many schools to game the system in order to maintain a cognitive illusion of success. It has encouraged us to view pupils as objects to be counted—we ask what can pupils do for us instead of questioning what we can do for our pupils. It has been used to self-justify and reinforce political preference, reducing pupils to the outcome of a test. Schools obsess with data reporting for external accountability.  

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