The playground was eerily quiet. The parents collecting their children stood in shocked silence. We’d seen it on the TV, in other places, first far away, then closer, as the storm blew in from the east. But when it arrived it caught us all off guard.
As a staff we had begun planning for a possible closure a fortnight before. We’d even managed to write a plan and hold a staff meeting on digital learning. But that was theory, role play, some mad critical incident task that would never come to anything.
“We’ll be closed a fortnight at the most… Just until after Easter.” I confidently declared to the staff, moments after we watched the Education Secretary announce schools would close on Friday.
On the playground that Friday parents looked into my eyes for reassurance which I couldn’t give.
It would be 118 school days before we met again.
Leadership lessons learnt in lockdown
I have no exceptional wisdom on this subject and no doubt most of you will have equally valid reflections on a time like no other. However, having had the summer to process the last five months, here is what I, as an experienced headteacher, have learnt:
1. We need more action and less dither.
48 hours. That’s how long we all had to move learning for all our students online. 48 hours.
Now, I’m not saying that was ideal – it was absolutely not! But nor was it impossible.
But the rate of decision making, change and innovation, which took place in that moment in time, far outstripped much of what we would usually do in many months of careful planning. As an SLT we spent 2 hours hatching a plan, we discussed it with staff for an hour and then we all, as a team, made it happen.
There were no carefully crafted action plans, discussed at length at numerous governor’s meetings and re-written numerous times. There was no agonising about whether we’d picked the best approach (nobody had the faintest what the best approach for digital learning during a pandemic was).
We identified the problem we had to solve and the risks of not solving it well, then we, as a team, came up with a workable plan and set about making it happen.
And I don’t think our plan would have been any better if we’d spent a month discussing it numerous times and fiddling and dithering.
Interestingly, at a (Zoom) meeting with Sir David Carter during the lockdown, he echoed the same observation from his work with schools nationally. He reflected that, in ‘normal times’ schools often over complicate action planning to the point where actual action is secondary to creating clever-sounding plans and convoluted implementation models with the result being that very little actually changes.
When all this is over, let’s remember that we can make real change happen without the dither and delay. Plan by all means, but don’t make clever planning the end goal.
2. Let your team fill in the gaps.
I have long laboured under the misconception that staff like a fully formed plan or approach with which to work from. I have been wrong in this.
The urgency with which we as a school had to move all our learning online meant that there simply wasn’t the for the school’s senior leadership team to work out all the detail. Instead we presented the problem, defined the parameters of what successful home learning would look like and then got out of the way.
The result of this was an explosion of creativity and innovation.
This is not to be confused with providing no leadership or guidance. We gave staff clear expectations about how much home learning and direct video-based teaching we should aspire to each day. We were clear as a team as to what subject matter could and couldn’t be well taught remotely. We presented the problem very clearly. But what we didn’t do is provide a fully formed teaching approach which teachers would have to administer (in 48 hours it wasn’t possible).
But having given staff (our teaching assistants did more than their fair share – so to the admin and site teams in their own domains) this clarity of purpose, they were given ‘freedom within the frame’ to fill in the blanks themselves.
And as a result innovation spread like wildfire. First came the videoed lessons hosted on the school website (900 by the end of the lockdown), followed by live zoom lessons and increasingly detailed written resources (delivered to the doors of those child without access to printers or the internet). Teachers quickly shared effective approaches organically in a way which would have been impossible had the SLT tried to organise this into some formal CPD.
So come September I will lead differently in this regard. I will continue to provide focus and frame the task in hand. But I won’t fill in all the gaps. The staff do this better themselves.
3. Don’t underestimate the support staff
Throughout the lockdown, another group which showed how much untapped potential they had was our team of Teaching Assistants and Admin staff.
The traditional role of the Teaching Assistant up is that of supporting the teacher, usually through directed tasks. However, the lockdown meant that they had to find other ways to support learning.
Again, as with the teachers, we defined the problem and gave them key areas to support. Our Reading Assistants made it their mission to keep the children reading: ringing parents, checking and managing the online book activities and, as time went on, hearing children read in their homes via Zoom! Other TAs took on similar roles, often supporting parents with SEND concerns and leading small group working via zoom. They played a key role in supporting vulnerable children and their families, sharing the load with the teachers in speaking to anxious parents. Where necessary, anxious children received a visit from the TA who stood at the end of their drive and spurred them on.
They also, as a team, we’re thirsty for training opportunities and for the chance to attend the same webinars and online activities as the teachers. It highlighted to me how much talent and potential we had previously overlooked by not giving the TAs the same training as the teachers.
4. Invite everyone to the staff meeting
Like most schools, our staff meetings were fairly traditional – after school on a Wednesday to the teachers, and fortnightly before school for the TAs. However, this led sometimes to training being uneven and communication sometimes getting confused.
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