MANAGEMENT
E VA L U AT I N G S U C C E S S
How does an SBL know when they’ve been successful? STEPHEN PEACH, assistant headteacher and business manager at the Dacorum Education Support Centre, ponders how an SBL can count their successes
I
’m sure you’ve all seen the climax of court cases on TV ‘How do you find the defendant?’ asks the judge. ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not guilty’ replies the chair of the jury. Cue high fives by the winning team, while the losers could not be more distraught, their faces distorted to reflect their feelings of turmoil and disbelief. Lawyers know when they’ve been successful – it couldn’t be more obvious – and so do many other professions, come to that. Builders construct monuments that celebrate their skills, doctors heal people and accountants make (lots of) money. Teachers can teach a good lesson and walk out at the end knowing that learners have moved forward because of their efforts. Good grief, even traffic wardens get to meet targets
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February 2022
and achieve a sense of (sociopathic, psychopathic and totally warped) satisfaction, inflicting misery, poverty and anger on unsuspecting motorists. (This is a magazine for school business professionals, right? I’m sure there won’t be any traffic wardens reading this and, even if there were, my car is always parked entirely legally and with all appropriate tickets purchased on time.) But how do SBLs (whatever we’re called this week) know when they’ve been successful? How do they even know what success looks like? How do they celebrate when they know they have succeeded and, more pertinently, when did you, as an SBL last feel a sense of achievement? Or is it so long ago that now success has been reduced to an empty
