1 Congratulations, you’ve been appointed! Now what?

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Contents

Acknowledgements vi Foreword by Professor Dame Alison Peacock, DL vii Introduction xi

Part 1 Settling into your new headship 1

1 Congratulations, you’ve been appointed! Now what? 3 With contributions from Emma Hickling and Neil Jones

2 Your fi rst day 13 With contributions from Emily Proffi tt

3 Your fi rst week and month 19 With contributions from Neil Jones

4 Your fi rst term 25 With contributions from Malcolm Laverty

Part 2 Vision and culture 35

5 Setting the stall and communicating the vision 37 With contributions from Dr Neil Hawkes, Andrew Morrish and John Cosgrove

6 Leading by example and cultivating the culture 51 With contributions from Rachel Orr and Hayley Walton

Part 3 Building a staff team 63

7 Recruitment 65 With contributions from Ben Barton and Hannah Wilson

8 Retention 75 With contributions from Ben Barton, Hannah Wilson and Dr Emma Kell

9 Building trust and distributing leadership 89 With contributions from Mark Chatley and Dr Kulvarn Atwal

10 Supporting staff wellbeing 99 With contributions from Adrian Bethune, Dr Kulvarn Atwal and Helena Marsh

11 Staff disciplinary, grievances and redundancy 109 With contributions from Christalla Jamil, Remi Atoyebi and John Cosgrove

Part 4 Accountability 121

12 Working with the board 123 With contributions from Raj Unsworth and Rosemary Hoyle

13 Reporting, recording, school performance and compliance 135 With contributions from James Pembroke and Malcolm Laverty

14 Getting ‘the call’ 147 With contributions from Amy Wright

Part 5 Building a community 155

15 Strengthening community relationships 157 With contributions from Amy Wright

16 Inclusion, equality and diversity 165 With contributions from Bennie Kara and Jules Daulby

Part 6 Curriculum, assessment and pedagogy 173

17 Curriculum and assessment design 175 With contributions from Ben Erskine, Mary Myatt, Dr James Biddulph and Luke Rolls

18 Pedagogy, research and innovation 193 With contributions from Hywel Roberts, Dr Kulvarn Atwal and

Pauline Stirling

Part 7 Handling the day-to-day 203

19 A strategic approach to fi nancial management 205 With contributions from Hilary Goldsmith

20 Health and safety 213 With contributions from Kate Owbridge

21 From behaviour management to behaviour empowerment 219 With contributions from Paul Dix and John Cosgrove

22 Dealing with complaints 227 With contributions from Sarah Watkins

23 Managing the unexpected 235 With contributions from Dr John Mynott

24 Safeguarding and pupil wellbeing 241 With contributions from Corinne Latham and Alison Woosey

25 Special educational needs and disabilities 251 With contributions from Anita Devi

Part 8 Staying the course 259

26 Wellbeing and self-care 261 With contributions from James Hilton

27 The joy of the job 267 With contributions from Dr Clare Campbell

28 Maintaining the vision – your fi rst year and beyond! 275 With contributions from Sir John Dunford

Final thoughts 281 Featuring Sir David Carter’s fi rst 100 days in headship

References 297 Index 301

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, my thanks and appreciation go to each and every one of the brilliant writers in this book. As headteachers, we learn with others and from others and in community, and I am humbled to have had the support and insights of so many expert and experienced voices from within the education eco-system to help create this book. I hope the thoughts, ideas, wisdom and inspiration that they have contributed so generously will enrich new, aspiring and experienced headteachers as much as they have me. There is so much sound advice and guidance that even someone like me, with 14 years of experience under my belt, will fi nd things here that will help them in their day-to-day management and leadership. Thank you so much, colleagues. I am indebted to you! Secondly, I would like to thank my incredible editor Hannah, for her patience, perseverance and skill, and for believing in me in the fi rst place! Thirdly, I would like to thank all the children, colleagues, headteachers, teachers, staff , governors, parents and professional partners in my previous and current schools. You have been my companions on this journey. My fi nal thanks go to my lovely mum and amazing teacher Deirdre, her partner Derek, my two fabulous sisters Sarah and Naomi, also teachers, and their families, my gorgeous husband Guy, and my two wonderful children Charlie and Esme. I am me because of all of you. Thank you.

Foreword

Welcome to this wonderful book that has been written to inspire and support those who aspire to primary headship. A quick scan through these pages shows you the wealth of collegiate contributions that have been made by headteachers both current and past who have generously shared their insights into school leadership. Leading a primary school is a privilege. It is also an incredibly diffi cult role. As you will see from the advice and stories of leadership that follow, it is an irresistible opportunity to make a diff erence. When I was a headteacher, I allowed a team of researchers into my school who were keen to document the process of school improvement as it unfolded. This was a risk. Looking back, I had no idea about how my leadership of our team was going to enable us to move the school from an Ofsted category of ‘inadequate’ towards becoming the ‘centre of excellence’ that I promised the governing body at my interview. What I was clear about, however, was that the school needed to move towards becoming a place where every voice was listened to, understood and valued. The role of the teacher and headteacher is a seemingly never-ending one. There are always more children to talk with, more families to understand, more goals across the full breadth of the curriculum to achieve. Within this impossibility, lie the satisfaction and the joy of school leadership. Over the ensuing years, the school moved beyond its fi rst judgement of ‘outstanding’ within three years and indeed as coach-loads of colleagues arrived at our gates from countries around the world, it is true to say that the vision of becoming a centre of excellence had become a reality. For me, this was never about sitting still. As the school began to improve, my vision moved beyond the individual setting towards how I might use this experience to work across our profession to liberate thousands of schools. As you read this book, and hopefully return to it again and again over time, I wonder if you might consider the following dispositions for humane leadership that were uncovered by the research team as they studied our school. Each of these dispositions increases the learning capacity of teachers and support colleagues as they engage in the career-long process of building and refi ning their professional knowledge.

Dispositions that increase capacity for professional learning

Empathy

Our own knowledge and perception may be limiting if not informed by empathy. This entails looking through the child’s eyes to comprehend their thinking and understanding in order to help them. Empathy transforms relationships between teachers and children, enabling children to feel that they are being listened to and taken seriously. Empathy operates both in teachers’ relationship to children and for each other amongst a staff group. It also involves mutual supportiveness amongst the staff group for one another, since all of the other dispositions are strengthened if members of a staff group are reinforcing each other. Mutual supportiveness creates the conditions where nobody is embarrassed to ask questions, or to admit that they do not have all the answers. Colleagues who are able to admit to problems or ask for help are able to draw on the collective wisdom of the team (that includes you!).

Generosity

Generosity refl ects a generous view of everybody’s future in the making and trust in everybody’s capacity to learn. It includes open acceptance of everybody; everybody has a rightful place within the collective, so we accept collective responsibility for fi nding ways forward when problems arise, rather than complaining or blaming when individuals encounter stumbling blocks or barriers to their learning. It is the human face of persistence – never giving up on people and taking responsibility to keep searching for ways of creating better conditions for learning. It means a willingness to suspend judgement, to give the other the benefi t of the doubt, to be ready to expand the boundaries of the collective to make it possible for everybody to be included.

Emotional stability

To exploit their power to make transforming choices to the full, teachers need to be able to trust their own judgement, rather than doing things because it is expected of them or trying to please a headteacher, multi-academy trust CEO or Ofsted. Emotional stability creates the conditions where teachers do something because it makes sense to them, rather than having to comply with what the group is doing. It generates the strength to resist popular notions of ability and

norms of practice, and nurtures the ability to take risks, to resist practices that create limits and restrict freedom to learn. Emotional stability means the readiness to both challenge and be challenged, to resist new orthodoxies, to stay close to the vision and not be knocked off course.

Inventiveness

Inventiveness entails the freedom and capacity to imagine and do something new. If teachers spot limits, it requires inventiveness to think of a way of overcoming them, even when drawing on their prior experience and existing repertoire. If they cannot come up with a solution from their repertoire, they need inventiveness to come up with a new idea that off ers a way forward. Inclusive teaching requires inventiveness to create new ways of thinking about children and new practices to enable everybody’s learning to fl ourish.

Openness

If teachers’ perceptions of what children are capable of assumes open-endedness, then there are no presumed limits. A willingness to embrace openness about both curriculum experience and opportunities for learning that may free children to learn means that teachers are able to avoid unwittingly creating limits through a rigid interpretation of curriculum and of opportunity to learn. Openness refl ects the belief that the future is in the making in the present. Everything teachers do every day either increases or restricts opportunities for learning.

Persistence

Persistence is needed to avoid giving up on people or practices. It means holding onto the view that there is always more that can be done to free children to learn, and the belief that, however challenging a situation, change is always possible. It is needed for teachers to enact their own power to transform learning capacity, even in the face of challenges; it enables them to keep trying. Persistence includes personal qualities of courage and humility, knowing that we do not have all the answers and that transforming learning capacity will be a struggle that we commit to.

Questioning and humility

This is needed to explore the interaction between classroom conditions and children’s states of mind that aff ect their capacity to learn. It entails the

commitment to question the status quo, and to wonder, ‘Could I do this diff erently? Is there a better way for this child? Is there a better way for all children?’

If, as a school leader, you can build and develop your team of colleagues so that you and they embrace these professional learning dispositions, you will create a culture of continuous development. As Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, I can see how every school leader who exhibits these qualities builds the capacity for transformative professional learning across their team. This book is your fi rst step in creating the kind of school you are proud to lead and where your colleagues will be happy and fulfi lled under your guidance. I wish you every success.

Professor Dame Alison Peacock, DL Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching

Introduction

When I became a headteacher 14 years ago, I would jokingly say that I had looked in the desk drawers in my new offi ce and was concerned that the previous headteacher had taken the manual. Becoming a headteacher is a challenging phenomenon because, although you are the ‘boss of the school’ and in many eyes you are expected to know everything, you really don’t have all the answers at all and you have no experience of headship to draw upon. You don’t know whom to ask for help. You don’t necessarily know what to prioritise. You don’t always know how to manage confl ict at the same time as building your team. You are nervous of asking others because you would like to appear knowledgeable and competent. This is where The Headteacher’s Handbook comes in. The Headteacher’s Handbook is the Haynes Manual for primary heads. The book I wish I had had. And the book that I hope helps you as you start your headship journey. Being a headteacher is a wonderful and inspiring job. It is a joy and a privilege. It is a job that I love and that has served me very well and no two days are alike. The fact that no two days are alike is one of the delights and also one of the challenges of the #bestjobintheworld. As I learned early on, on the best days headship is the best job in the world and on the worst days it is one of the most important. I began my headship adventure on 5th January 2007 at The Spinney Primary School in Cambridge, a bijou one-form-entry village school on the outskirts of the city. With a warm community ethos, and a supportive and talented staff and governor team, this was the perfect place to learn my craft. When I was appointed, I had not felt ready to take on headship, as it was a secondment supported by the local authority, but after about six months in the job, I was smitten. I wanted to work with the community to help shape a wonderful and engaging vision for the school and so I stayed for the next decade and beyond. Working with a highly creative, forward-thinking and outward-reaching team, and in partnership with local, national and international partners, we designed a holistic curriculum to develop the whole child. After 12 joyful years, an opportunity came up to apply for a bigger school that would be closer to home and would mean I no longer had a daily commute across the city. I applied for the post of headteacher at Milton Road Primary School and started there in January 2020.