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Why should I appoint you to my Leadership Team?. Geoff Barton Headteacher, King Edward VI School, Suffolk www.geoffbarton.co.uk. I ’ m a Fast Track teacher: Get me into here!. - What are schools like now and what will they be like? - What kind of leaders will they need? - Why you?.
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Why should I appoint you to my Leadership Team? Geoff Barton Headteacher, King Edward VI School, Suffolk www.geoffbarton.co.uk
- What are schools like now and what will they be like? - What kind of leaders will they need?- Why you?
Leadership and management are at least satisfactory in most schools and good or outstanding in over six in 10. Outstanding leaders analyse the quality and consistency of teaching across the full range of provision in order to ensure that the professional development provided for staff brings about improvement. HMCI 2006
A recent survey by the Institute for Policy Studies in Education revealed that only 2.5 per cent of secondary teachers were considering headships, while 86 per cent of secondary heads in England are over 45.
Average time from NQT to Headship = 20 years NCSL
Who are the school leaders who have inspired you? What did they do? What didn’t they do enough of?
Margaret Thatcher: “Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions” “Never underestimate the power of an announcement, Kenneth”
Tony Blair: “Saying yes is easy; it’s saying no that’s tough” Jeremy Irons: Which living person do you most admire, and why? Tony Blair, for living so publicly with the knowledge that he's not perfect.
Bill Clinton: “If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got”
Homer Simpson: ‘You’re a “but” man. That’s the difference between success and failure – the use of the word “but”’
David Reynolds, University of Exeter “High-Reliability Organisations”
Such complex social organizations as air traffic control towers continuously run the risk of disastrous and obviously unacceptable failure. The public would heavily discount several thousand consecutive days of efficiently monitoring and controlling the very crowded skies over Chicago or London if two jumbo jets were to collide over either city. Through fog, snow, computer-system failures, and nearby tornadoes, in spite of thousands of flights per day in busy skies, such a collision has never happened above any city, a remarkable level of performance reliability …
… By contrast, in the U.S., one of the most highly educated nations on earth, within any group of 100 students beginning first grade in a particular year, approximately 16 will not have obtained either their high school diploma or a General Education Development certificate 12-13 years later. In Britain, just under half of all 16-year-old pupils will not have the benchmark of 5 or more high grade public examination passes in the national system. Obviously, many nations have even lower levels of educational performance.
So what kind of people do we NOT need on our leadership teams …
1 People with the lingo2 People who leadership or management is via paper or emails3 People who think having an office is a key feature of the job4 People without credibility5 People who can’t see that, ultimately it’s a job
Leadership teams need people who … 1: Accept the inevitability of change: they ride with it and channel it rather than resisting it
Leadership teams need people who … 2 Are endlessly resilient
Leadership teams need people who … 3 Understand the symbolism of the job: how we present ourselves isn’t cosmetic
Leadership teams need people who … 4 Know that the first job I should do today is the job I’d rather not do
Leadership teams need people who … 5 Make life reassuringly simpler
Leadership teams need people who … 6 Understand that the job is about people, not systems
Leadership teams need people who … 7 Recognise the changing nature of schools, teachers and young people
Leadership teams need people who … 8 Remain intolerant of mediocrity: good enough is rarely good enough
Leadership teams need people who … 9Evaluates endlessly …
Leadership teams need people who … 10 Understand values-added as well as value-added
Why should I appoint you to my Leadership Team? Geoff Barton Headteacher, King Edward VI School, Suffolk www.geoffbarton.co.uk
WHY YOU? • Already showing a commitment to … do things differently • … to be ambitious • … to be intolerant of mediocrity • … to know that schools are about students
Why should I appoint you to my Leadership Team? Geoff Barton Headteacher, King Edward VI School, Suffolk www.geoffbarton.co.uk
1. School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on pupil learning. 2. Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of basic leadership practices.3. The ways in which leaders apply these basic leadership practices, not the practices themselves, demonstrate responsiveness to, rather than dictation by, the contexts in which they work. 4. School leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly and most powerfully through their influence on staff motivation, commitment and working conditions.5. School leadership has a greater influence on schools and students when it is widely distributed. 6. Some patterns of distribution are more effective than others. 7. A small handful of personal traits explains a high proportion of the variation in leadership effectiveness. NCSL, Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership, 2006