Trust in change

School leader Paul Merrell on how Best Practice Network’s Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship Programme with NPQEL set his new school on a journey of major change.

Joining a Steiner Waldorf school from a big mainstream multi-academy trust was a challenging and exciting leap in my school leadership career.

Until recently Steiner Waldorf schools hadn’t had a conventional leadership model but in 2019 there was effectively a recognition that modern schools can’t run in that way any longer and that a proper leadership structure was needed.

Since September 2021 I’ve been in post as school lead – the equivalent of headteacher –at Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School in Stourbridge, an independent school educating 210 pupils aged 3 to 17. This has been my favourite job of my career so far.

While it was clear that change was needed my first months in the post were a challenging time for me. I don’t have a Steiner Waldorf background but in order to make the necessary changes to ensure that the school was effectively led, that it complied with Ofsted requirements, and that finances were on track while preserving everything that makes the school great – I needed to build trust.

I enrolled on Best Practice Network’s Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship Programme with NPQEL and the programme has given me some important insights and guidance that have really helped me in my leadership journey. One is the importance of the role of credibility and integrity in creating that trust.

When I arrived I had to establish a leadership team that could work together and trust me. I spent a month at the beginning just getting to know people and identifying colleagues I could work with who had appropriate credibility within the school. It was only then that I began to establish a senior leadership team made up of six colleagues, most of whom had Steiner Waldorf backgrounds and credibility but were actually open to changes.

One of the big messages I wanted to send to colleagues was that I wasn’t going to subject them to change that they had no control over. I made it clear we were going to make these changes together as a group. As part of this approach the chair of college, who represents the body of Steiner Waldorf trained teachers, became part of the SLT and we agreed to share an office so everyone could see that we were very much working together for the good of the school.

A lack of curriculum oversight was one of the criticisms picked up in the 2019 Ofsted inspections of Steiner Waldorf schools so our other priority was to create an entirely new middle leadership model. This is easier said than done when you consider that the teacher is king at Steiner Waldorf schools. Classes stay with the same teacher from Class 1 for the next eight years.

Meet our new NPQ Programme Director

My approach was to create a ‘big tent’ of middle leaders that included colleagues with a range of perspectives and experience, many with Steiner Waldorf experience as well as other colleagues with mainstream backgrounds.

We worked very hard on making sure that every decision we planned to make was well trailed in advance, and that there were opportunities for our staff to talk face to face and read draft papers.

We’ve had to make some difficult decisions to ensure that pupil numbers increase, which we are now beginning to see.

Sometimes in schools the drive is to resolve things quite simplistically, to paper over the cracks and say that we need this to work for this year and that will be fine. I’ve learned a lot from the programme about the nature of problems and realised that it’s OK to have a complicated solution that needs lots of brains thinking about it in order to be able to work our way through it.

Will Rogers is Best Practice Network’s new director for the National Professional Qualifications.

Before joining BPN in autumn 2022 Will led the programme management of a flagship professional development programme at the Department for Education’s National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE).

The role gave Will the opportunity to deploy and further develop a set of leadership and management skills developed across a 20-year career which began with teaching and then senior school leadership roles in the south west.

He later became Regional Network Lead at STEM Learning, a professional training and coaching organisation for science, technology, engineering and maths educators before taking on the NCCE role.

“Leadership of the NPQ programmes is a challenge which I’m relishing,” says Will. “The NPQs are having an enormous impact on the sector and I’m hugely enjoying working with our team and partners to build them into an even greater force for change and transformation in the coming years.”