Inside Out School Leadership

Will Ryan

Chapter One

The Inside - Out School Leader.

Primary schools have coped with wave after wave of government initiatives since 1988. As a consequence schools have become organisations that have been managed rather than led. Head teachers have managed the implementation of government initiatives rather than think about the specific needs of their school and community. The professional life of many of our school leaders has felt out of control. This chapter helps you reverse the trend of everything coming from the outside into your school and turn it inside out.

There are four key steps to take:

Step 1: Take control of your professional life
Step 2: Look at the needs of your children and establish the moral purpose
Step 3: Refuse to compromise your principles
Step 4: Model human excellence

The text urges you to be brave, to do the right things for your community and to make a lasting difference for the future.

As you start you journey remember this:

‘Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has’
Margaret Mead

Step One: Take control of your professional life

It is three o’clock in the morning and it seems as though the whole world is asleep. But you are wide awake and your whole mind is racing.
You are thinking about Mrs Humphries who is still accusing you of picking on their Amber-Louise.

You are thinking about the Local Authority Inspector who watched the direst lesson on stressed vowels within word level work. You are now firmly convinced that stressed vowels is in fact a most uncomfortable medical condition.

You are thinking about whether the layered targets within the Raising Attainment Plan within the Intensifying Support Programme are going to enable you to set numeric targets based on average points scores that will help you to reach the Fisher Family Trust D predictions for the boys in the 2008 cohort.

If you lie awake at night swimming against the tide of these thoughts, then stop and think.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Why is it that you do this job and no other job? You are intelligent, creative and talented. Once upon a time, maybe when you were a much younger person, you chose this job and no other job. All the things which are now keeping you awake were not amongst the reasons for joining this profession. A profession which you should be proud to belong to. A profession that should be changing lives for the better and shaping our future. You are experiencing the sensations of outside - in school leadership. The influences are all coming from the outside, whether it is the local authority, OFSTED or the government. They are coming from the outside and determining what happens inside your organisation. These influences could be controlling every move you make in your professional role. And now you are even being kept awake by these outside forces. Don’t let them drain away your energy and life blood.

Stop and think:

 
Why?

Why?

Why?
 

So what made you join this profession in the first place? The odds are that it was due to a moral purpose that came from deep inside you. This moral purpose formed your principles and values and was truly energising. It may have been so powerful that it made you feel as sharp as an axe. It is now the time to go back inside you and find that moral purpose once more. Rediscover it and bring it from the inside and wear it on the outside.  Stand up and be counted for what you genuinely believe. Once upon a time a Rabbi was asked what he thought it would be like when he reached the Kingdom of God and he replied:

There is only one thing I know about what it will be like when I arrive at the Kingdom of God. I am not going to be asked ‘Why weren’t you Moses, I am going to be asked, ‘Were you fully you?’

Top US motivation guru, Anthony Robbins, argues that our most successful people have seven fundamental character traits which give them the fire to do whatever it takes to succeed. These are clear to see in our outstanding inside out school leaders.

Trait One: Passion

These people have discovered a reason, a consuming energising almost obsessive purpose that drives them forward. The inside out school leader has a passion to make a lasting difference to a school and community. He/she is also passionate about the way in which this will be achieved. This passion is driven by the fact that the school leader has a love of their school and its community and is therefore desperate to do the right things for them. There has never been a great leader who has been devoid of passion. Outstanding schools are created by passionate leaders. It is passion that will make the head teacher rise early and stay late in order to achieve his /her goal. And this is a goal that is owned personally by them and certainly not a goal of the local authority or central government.

Trait 2: Belief.

Robbins argues that if we believe in magic we will live a magical life and if we believe that our life is constrained by narrow limits then those limits will become real. What we believe to be true about primary education and what we believe to be possible within our school will make it true and make it happen. Whilst many people are passionate about primary education too many of them have limited belief in who they are and what they can do and therefore they seldom take the actions that could turn their dream into reality. The inside out school leader has absolute belief that they will succeed and will demonstrate resilient perseverance until they do.

As Henry Ford stated:

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t you are probably right.

Trait 3: Strategy

Having a passion and genuine belief will never be enough. Passion and belief can propel you towards excellence but a clear operational strategy will always be required if you are to succeed. Passion and belief may launch your spaceship but the danger is that it will start careering all over the heavens. Effective primary schools led by inside out school leaders are built on a clear educational vision backed by a strong strategic plan of how to achieve that vision. They create a path, a clear sense of logical progression and a plan to make the best use of the resources they have available.

Trait 4: Clarity of Values

Values are highly significant to the inside out school leader. Values are specific belief systems about what is right or wrong for our lives. They are often judgements about what makes life worth living. These values become a code of conduct for all that the school does. Inside out school leaders  consider what values they want children to have for their present and future lives and also which values they want the teachers to have, demonstrate and model on a daily basis. These could include tolerance, kindness, loyalty, self discipline. The inside out school states explicitly what these values are and develops programmes to ensure that they develop consistently across the schools. There are high expectations that the staff of the organisation to model theses values persistently and consistently and they fully realise that values are manifested through action and not rhetoric.

Trait 5: Energy

People of excellence grab every opportunity to shape things. The best inside out leaders live as if obsessed by the wondrous opportunities each day may bring and the recognition that the one thing nobody has enough of is time. Great success comes from the physical, intellectual and spiritual energy that allows them to make the most of what they have. Having a passion, belief, strategy and clarity of values is not enough unless there is genuine physical vitality to take action. When the heart is engaged and the brain is engaged it can provide contagious energy.

Trait 6: Bonding Power

Nearly all people of excellence have an extraordinary ability to bond with others. The need to connect with and develop a rapport with others is essential. They create the right collaboration for the right purpose. School leadership can be a very lonely existence despite the fact that you are surrounded by people. To be successful requires developing lasting and living bonds with others; without that, any success will be shallow and short lived. Too often schools that are deemed to be effective crumble once the head teacher moves away. This is often due to fact that too much emphasis was placed on the autonomy of the head teacher. The inside out school leader works hard to create bonds that empower others within the organisation to drive the vision forward.

Trait 7: Communication

The people who are most successful in life and shape future lives are masters of communication to others. They have the capacity to communicate vision or quest to others. Too many school leaders have a clear vision for primary education but lack the capacity to effectively and articulate it to others. Mastery of communication is what makes a great parent or great artist or politician. In short, the singer and the song come together in perfect harmony.

You most likely chose to join this profession for ideological reasons. Maybe it was because you recognised that children only receive one childhood and you wanted to help make it magical. Alternatively, you wanted to ensure that pupils would get a better education than you received in the past. Maybe you were inspired by a particular teacher who ignited a passion for teaching and learning. It could also be that you were driven by social injustice.

If social injustice was the driving force then don’t believe it has been eradicated. There is now clear evidence that whilst Britain has the fastest improving educational system in the industrial world, your life chances are still largely determined by where you are born.

In the twenty first century this should not be the case. With the easy access of modern technology this should genuinely be the era when the lad in trainers from Bash Street Primary can rise to the fore. In the modern world knowledge is power and the route out of the poverty trap. During the industrial revolution it was hard to amass wealth if you had no money to invest in the first place. In the middle ages the only way to join the landed aristocracy was through birth right. Today we are in the era of high speed technology and inclusive education. Every child has the opportunity to be successful. However, it too often fails to happen because of low self esteem and low aspiration.

Inside out school leaders take a close look at the needs of their children and establish a clear moral purpose.

Step Two: Look at the needs of your children and establish the moral purpose

I was recently walking through the town centre of a northern town, observing a young mother with a toddler in a buggy. They came to a stop outside the fish and chip shop and the mother bent over the buggy, removed the cigarette from her mouth and said to the youngster, “ I have told you, you can’t have no bleeding chips, talking to you is like talking to a brick wall”. I believe that is a level of poverty that should not exist in 2006. I also am aware of the significant challenges the pupil will potentially bring to his school in the near future. It seems inevitable he will arrive with low self esteem and very little aspiration.

Let me be clear at this point that I regard high standards in literacy and numeracy as essential. This is not a text promoting low expectations. I believe that education is the only way out of the poverty trap for many of our youngsters.

However too much of what is now taught in our schools in the name of literacy and numeracy is in the form of academic exercises which are easily forgotten. I appear to have reached the age of 53 and still do not know what a pronoun is. This is despite regular beatings by the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ at the ‘Roman Catholic School of Hopeless Cases’. The teaching of Latinate grammar did not engage me or stimulate me with a desire to become a better pupil. Despite the fact that we all run at ninety miles an hour, education remains the slowest moving industry in England. Too much of the work carried out in our schools is based on academic exercises rather through exciting relevant experiences. Too many classrooms are sterile places where neither pupils nor teachers take risks.

The Primary National Strategy was right to promote learning experiences that were vivid and real. However, OFSTED have told us that at this stage the impact has been limited. One in three lessons remain satisfactory and a common feature in these lessons is that teacher talk dominates. The citizen of the twenty first century will need high standards in literacy, numeracy and ICT. However, they will also need to be creative, flexible, enterprising and have high emotional intelligence. If you want the evidence for this look at any person specification in a job advert. Too much of the curriculum within our primary schools dates back to the 1870s when compulsory education was introduced.

The content of the curriculum has changed little despite the fact that growing up is an increasingly complex process. In today’s world as many as 1:8 children are considered to have mental health problems and 1:10 children believe they are ugly. There are rising obesity rates and yet children are exposed to thousands of junk food adverts every year encouraging them to eat unhealthy food. Children are being told to take more exercise and yet there is a housing estate within the North of England with 120 signs saying ‘No Ball Games’. In the South of England a local council rejected plans for basket ball posts to be erected on a local park for fear that it would attract children. A parish council recently dealt with a complaint about a girl riding her bicycle on the pavement because it squeaked. There are increasing fears about the safety of children either near roads or mixing with strangers. As a consequence they do not spend long periods of time devising their own games, building dens in the woods or making sense of the world through play. Growing up in the locality can lack adventure and too many classrooms are sterile places where teachers fear taking risks either because they feel tied to frameworks for fear of being different to a perceived norm. Celebrity television shows make it popular to disparage others and this has aided the anti swot culture prevalent in secondary schools where it isn’t cool to achieve in school. Pupils at a local secondary school consider attendance at the homework club as social suicide.

Despite all this primary pupils have many special qualities. The absolute majority come to school because they want to. They want to please their teacher and they want them to be the best teacher in the world. Shrewd business men have already worked this out. It is why every Christmas shops are stocked with cards to the best teacher in the world. Each day represents a fresh start for many primary pupils. If the previous day has been filled with problems most children will return the following day wanting to do the best for the school and the teacher even though sometimes success may be out of reach.

There could be clear evidence that the curriculum in our primary schools is aimed at white middle class girls. There can not truly be equal opportunities in our schools if there are not equal outcomes. The inside out school leader thinks very carefully about the needs of his or her pupils prior to shaping the school and curriculum. When Tesco build a new supermarket they look at a range of socio economic factors to ensure that the design is appropriate and to ensure they sell the right range of stock. They use post code information and mosaic indicators to ensure that each one uniquely serves its clients. In primary education there is still too much of a sense that one size fits all. Individual schools need to create a curriculum that meets the educational needs and provides holistic health for all its pupils. The system needs to celebrate diversity and absorb difference. The inside out school leaders ask questions like:

• What is it like where our pupils come from?
• Do they fell safe, secure, loved and are their basic needs met?
• What do they think?
• What do they care about?
• What motivates them?
• What do they know about learning?
• Can they build relationships?
• Can they deal with conflict?
• Do they have self esteem and high aspiration?

There could easily be streets within your school’s local community where the adults have no significant qualifications. Have you considered what it may be like for those growing up there? Equally, in other areas children could be under intense and unreasonable parental pressure to succeed.
So now consider the complexities of growing up in twenty first century Britain and the challenges of being a child in your school’s locality.  Why not pause and think for a while and see if you can write 5 statements that start from the following stem:

Education in the twenty first century should:

Education in the twenty first century should:

Education in the twenty first century should:

Education in the twenty first century should:

Education in the twenty first century must:

Once the inside out school leader is clear about what they wish to achieve they move forward purposefully and refuse to compromise their principles.

Step 3: Refuse to compromise your principles

Teachers should see themselves as part of the proudest profession. Potentially they change lives for the better. In short they have the capacity to maintain the current inequalities that exist within our society or create a future where every child genuinely matters and all children achieve their full potential

‘Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become head of the mine, and that a child of farm workers can become president of a great nation’
Nelson Mandela

Whilst the power of teachers is tremendous too often they are simply struggle to cope with the rapid rate of government initiatives. Each initiative in its own right is valuable, but the speed deters the development of principled leadership and the creation of autonomous self improving schools.
However consider what we know about our best school leaders. Some are men and some are women; some are tall and some are short; some are fat and some are thin; some are democratic and some are autocratic; some are left brained and some are right brained; some are old and some are young. In fact our best school leaders only have one thing in common and that is that they are driven by a strong moral purpose that provides them with the vision to do the right things for their community, and the do not compromise their principles.
Consider the inside out leadership skills of Martin Luther King, who began his famous speech with the words ‘I have a dream’ and not I have an improvement plan with short term objectives and measurable success criteria. As a school leader, you too must have a dream and a vision that will make your community a better place. After Martin Luther King described his dream, he lived and led it from the front, he led it from the middle by standing alongside his people and he left a legacy behind him.

 The Inside Out school leader has a clear view on the legacy he or she will leave behind for the school’s community. Despite outside pressures they remain focussed and are not detracted from the process.

If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed
If you are thinking ten years ahead plant a tree
If you are thinking a hundred years ahead, teach children

Where the model of outside in school leadership persists there will be an over emphasis on achievement in the national tests. When the Secretary of State for Education launched the Primary National Strategy he stated;
As a government we stand charged with taking enjoyment out of education and enjoyment is the birthright of every child.

The strategy also stated ‘we will try and cut the burdens on schools and encourage them and support them in being innovative. Tests, targets and tables play a vital role in helping to raise standards but we are ready to adopt and shape them to do their job better’. The words were rhetoric, very little has changed.  The system is obsessed by the tests.

If the children within our schools perceive that schools are simply about passing tests then it will take three generations for the impact of that theory to unwind. There is much research that tells us to reverse the current trend of outside in school leadership

• The school is not now a learning organisation. Irregular wave of change, episodic projects, fragmentation of effort and grinding overload is the lot of most schools. (Fullan 1993)

• Somewhere along the way, in the name of educational reform, policy makers may have confused structure with purpose, measurement with accomplishment, means with ends, compliance with commitment and teaching with learning.

• The focus on standards, inputs and outputs, data and accountability has been relentless. I struggle to recall apiece of legislation which, even when implemented, would have increased children’s’ enjoyment of education and made them want to come to school more.

If you are still awake at three o clock in the morning tossing and turning and the problems of work are eating into you, then the odds are that you are compromising your principles. Your mind is in conflict. You will be compromising your principles because you are either doing things that you either don’t value or own. It isn’t only the sleepless night that will affect you. Other physiological symptoms will strike the next day. There will be the early symptoms of stress that the pressures of work will make you ignore. These symptoms will include different breathing patterns that feel much shallower, headaches, muscle tensions that cause the stiff neck and shoulders, skin complaints, and regular minor illnesses. Your fuel tank will be on empty and yet you will still be trying to run at ninety miles an hour and going nowhere. There is no reserve tank and you will be low; you will feel that you are taken for granted, angry and resentful.
When you feel these symptoms the question becomes: will it be fight or flight?

In this context fighting should not be equated to violence. It is about having the emotional intelligence to confront the issues in front of us and do the right thing. It is possible to fight back but I believe that the only way to correct these physiological conditions is to re centre all your actions from your own centre of gravity. The outside - in school leaders simply struggle with the energy that is opposing them, whilst the inside out school leader examines the deep fundamental beliefs inside them and uses them to provide the considerable energy that can fuel both fundamental change as well as contest the myriad of little fights that head teachers face on a daily basis. Regardless of circumstance they are focussed and ‘unfreakable’.

‘Perhaps the most indispensable tool for man in modern times is the ability to remain calm in the midst of rapid and unsettling changes. The person who will survive the present age is the one which Kipling described as the one who can keep his head while all about are losing theirs. Unfreakability refers not to man’s propensity for burying his head in the sand at the sight of danger but to see the true nature of what is happening around him and to respond appropriately. This requires a mind which is clear because it is calm’

W. Timothy Gallwey  - The Inner Game of Tennis

As an educationalist with over thirty years within the profession I believe that upon meeting a teacher and engaging them in conversation for five minutes I can then get them to talk about their head teacher.
If I am unlucky they will simply go in to a diatribe about all the things they don’t do, (he never takes assembly, or teaches lessons, or talks to children in fact he is hardly ever there).

If I am moderately lucky they will talk about the things they do and do well (she always runs an after school club, she always remembers to say thank you, she teaches twice a week).

However, if I am really lucky they tell me everything their head teacher believes and values such as the provision of wonderful first hand experiences that create a genuine sense of awe, wonder and spirituality in pupils and inspires them to want to learn.

We all know that school leaders genuinely make a difference when they:

• Focus on learning and teaching
• Generate positive relationships
• Provide clear vision and high expectations
• Provide time and opportunities for collaboration
• Distribute leadership; build teams
• Engage the community
• Evaluate and innovate.
• Engage and inspire others

Too often school leadership focuses on the following shallow strategies:
Streamlining efficiency based on a means/end analysis to reach the desired outcome as soon as possible. In order to achieve this a simplistic model of the curriculum will be developed, probably based upon published frameworks. There will not be the time for pedagological debate.

Calculating numbers to ensure that everything can be quantified through rounding people into groups. The success of the organisation will be quantified in numbers. The quality of the experience is less important.
Constantly predicting outcomes because the organisation can not cope with surprise or shock. Continually controlling everything so that all targets can be reached. Constant monitoring will take place to aid this process.

Some would argue that this is an extremely effective form of leadership and schools need increased use of numeric data as indicators of performance. However, these are exactly the same principles of management as those used in fast food outlets. Burger King may not provide either a wholesome product or a healthy diet. As a restaurant it lacks aspiration to be the best.

Too often our school leaders have to compromise their principles. Whilst it can lead to what may seem an easier life it often goes too far. Before long head teachers start to forget their key principles. Too many school leaders experience a lack of harmony between what is imposed on them and what they believe in. This causes sadness, frustration, resentment, bitterness and anger. To cope with these school leaders, will often then attempt to modify their beliefs. However, this will only bring further trouble and simply leads to further irritability and discontentment with the job.

When a school leader compromises their integrity it does not happen overnight. It takes place over a far longer period of time and it can have devastating effects. Let me remind you of the Parable of the Boiled Frog:

If you throw a frog into a saucepan of boiling water it immediately senses danger and jumps to safety. However, if you put the frog into a saucepan of cold water and very gently heat the water up until it gets to a high enough temperature to boil the frog simply gets used to the higher temperature and stays there until it is boiled to death.

The same happens to teachers. They enter the profession driven by a moral principle and then gradually get used to a central imposed way of thinking. They end up constantly trying to quantify what should be a qualitative experience and seeking ways to serve and please their political masters. There is a much used phrase within educational leadership which says that we should measure what we value rather than value what we can measure. The reality of the situation is that it appears to be that it is easier to count the bottles rather than judge the quality of the wine.

So pause and think again and assess your present reality from the last week and see how you respond to the chart below:

1. List your key educational beliefs or those things that should be non negotiable in your school  
2. List the things that you have done in last two weeks that were absolutely important to you 
3. Now list anything you have done in the last two weeks that potentially compromises your beliefs, values or integrity.
     

Once you start to refuse to compromise your principles and integrity you are in a genuine position to model human excellence

Step 4: Model human excellence

The starting point for shaping our schools should not be the National Frameworks but aligning our moral purpose with our knowledge of the pupils and the community in which they are growing up. When schools genuinely know the answers to these questions they are in a position to shape vision and create a curriculum for the future which will incorporate the appropriate parts of the National Strategies. The realist within me knows that there will be occasions when you have to ‘bend’ your principles. We are all part of a much bigger system. If you make a positive correlation between what you value and what you practice and instil it throughout your school children will bound through the door keen to learn through the vivid and real experiences that you create. They will be literate, numerate, have high emotional intelligence, and be creative and enterprising. They will believe in themselves, and you will have made a difference for the future.

When you have considered all these issues, and can set a clear direction for the school based upon principled leadership, stop and consider one more thing: Our best head teachers are always high profile within their organisation. They appear to be around every corner. They model human excellence through the beliefs they hold, the values they espouse, their mental approach and thinking steps and their actual behaviour including the physiology they adopt. Above all else they have a four point approach to school leadership.

They:

• Do what has to be done
• When it has to be done
• As well as it can be done
• And they do it that way all the time

If you are lying awake at night tossing and turning over the problems of your work place then change. Take the first steps towards being an inside out leader. You will have new energy driven by a moral purpose. Set a clear direction, and have high expectations and low tolerance of underachievement.

This chapter opened with the quote ‘Never doubt the capacity of a small number of like minded individuals to change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’ This is your chance to change your school community for the better. You may also wish to consider the words of Helen Keller who said, 'The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision'.

The way in which an inside out school leader sets vision will be considered next...

For more information contact Will at learn@independentthinking.co.uk

© Will Ryan 2007