Post by Kristian Shanks @HistoryKss
A version of this blog was presented at New Voices 2019
In April 2015,
things could not have been better in my teaching career. I’d spent five wonderful years at an
outstanding secondary school in West Yorkshire, been part of a fantastic
History department that consistently gained superb results, I’d been acting up
on SLT there for the previous year, and had just gained an Assistant Head’s
position at a nearby school as Head of Sixth Form, a job I’d wanted to do
pretty much since entering teaching. To
boot, I’d just got married and was soon to find out my wife was pregnant with
our first child together.
By May 2016 I’d
resigned from that position without a job to go to (a case of jumping before
being pushed) and had gone back down to being a main-scale teacher – I’d been
badly burned and it felt like I was being relegated back to square one. To compound matters, I’d bounced round the
interview circuit looking for posts with responsibility and failing at that too
(and deservedly – I did not interview well at all). My mental health was probably not in a good
place – not ideal when you’ve got a newborn on the scene as much as anything
else! As much as anything I felt like an
absolute failure and that it was humiliating to go back to a position I’d not
been in since the second year of my teaching career.
Now, I’m a Head
of History in a good school in North Yorkshire, and really enjoying the job
again. I now feel in a position to
reflect in a more analytical way about what went wrong, what lessons I take
from the experience and to hopefully share my story to help others who may find
themselves in a similar situation.
What went
wrong?
This is a
question I’ve thought a lot about most days since handing my notice in for that
job. I identify four key problems:
The weight
of responsibility
·
I was not prepared for the weight,
or burden of responsibility that SLT brings.
Frankly, I was too inexperienced to live with it, especially in a school
context that for various reasons was not as favourable as the one I left. I’d just live and die with every mistake or
problem that came up (and there were many).
I’d get massive ‘Sunday dread’ and work every hour going and it still
didn’t feel like I was doing enough – especially as things would proceed to go
wrong during the week! I was just not
really prepared to feel this way, and I think a lack of experience was
problematic here. I’d done a range of
different roles in my previous schools – but was looking for something
weightier. On reflection, I should have
been looking at Head of History roles (a position, crucially, I’d not done
before) as I think that would have been better preparation for dealing
psychologically with the challenge of leadership. I was at that time fairly ambitious and
wanted to move up the ranks, as it were – in hindsight I should have been more
patient and thought much more about what I wanted to do rather than what I felt
like I should have been doing.
Lack of
experience
·
In addition, I hadn’t worked in
enough schools of different types. When
you stay for a while in one school, especially one that’s successful, you can
become institutionalised. That makes it
harder to transition to a new context, especially one that did not have a
history of success. I was joining a
school graded Inadequate six years earlier (but ‘Good’ when I started), with
some financial issues and a school roll that had cratered – affecting the Sixth
Form numbers I now had some responsibility for.
I was not prepared for staff who fundamentally mistrusted SLT and seen a
revolving door of them come and go (4 heads in 7 years). I was not prepared to inherit a Sixth Form
where previous colleagues running it had both hated each other and both
resigned at once and there had been a bit of a void in the direction and
leadership and where students, who’d gone through the full gamut of problems,
felt a bit betrayed. Also I hadn’t
realised how hard just being new is – you’re nothing when you move school. It’s not like football transfers where a new
player carries a reputation with them.
In a new school, especially one with high staff turnover, SLT or not
you’re just another new face that’s probably not going to last very long. When you then all of a sudden can’t control
the behaviour of your class because the personality and systems you’d relied on
before were no longer present or didn’t work, you had a problem!
Having the courage of your convictions
·
I don’t think I really knew
what I thought then, or at the very least my beliefs were tentative. For example, I knew at that time I didn’t
really feel comfortable with grading lesson observations or work
scrutinies. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t
like it – it just didn’t sit right with me.
Now my employer also happened to share that view, which was good,
however we were in partnership with another school Sixth Form that didn’t share
that view. We used to do joint QA work
and as part of this they did grade some work of our staff, which was then fed
back to some of our colleagues directly by that school. You can imagine the emails of outrage from
those colleagues and rightly so. Why
hadn’t I said something? Why hadn’t I
said – “We don’t this here?” As the only
member of our school involved in this QA exercise and as SLT I got a pasting
for that one from all corners – and not undeservedly.
Alignment
·
This was a big one – I
fundamentally at that time did not share the same view of where the school was
and where it needed to go as did my colleagues.
That becomes impossible to sustain when you’re being asked to do things
you don’t really believe in. In
particular, it seemed to me that the school felt that the issues were faced
were to do with teachers and their effectiveness. To me, the issue was that behaviour was
extremely poor and that fixing this would be the route to improved outcomes. When my Deputy Headteacher and line manager said
to me that basically it doesn’t matter how good the system is, it’s about the
individual teacher’s relationship in the classroom with the students, I thought
we had a bit of a problem.
Ultimately, I
was essentially ‘managed out’ of my position with the informal support plans
that aren’t very supportive. Resigning
before anything worse could happen was, in the end, a massive relief. I could now focus on starting again and
rebuilding without trying to cling on to this job that I didn’t like and didn’t
seem to be very good at.
In Part Two – I’ll explain how I did that!
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