Brawls, Beach heads & Special Hoovers. 10 tips for surviving the second 100 days as a Head in a challenging school.

“What do you mean ‘a bit of a fight…?” I said drowsily, seconds after my mobile had rudely interrupted my Saturday morning lie-in. 

“Parents?”

“Twenty!! That’s not a fight;  that’s a bar-room brawl!”

“I think you’d better come in.” Murmured the Chair of Governors.

Having started my first Headship in the April, the end of my first 100 days coincided with the end of the summer term. 

Moments before the phone rang I had been lying in bed, knackered but relieved to have survived the craziness of Terms 5 and 6 in my struggling school – my first 100 days of headship just about behind me and a whole 6 weeks R&R stretching ahead of me.  Just a week to go. Nothing can go wrong in a week….

Then the phone rang.

The night before I had attended the PTA ‘Parents Prom’, leaving just after 11 as things started to wind down.

“Simon, don’t get upset… but we’ve got a problem.” Blurted my usually calm and considered Chair.

A problem? How could we have a problem? There was only days left of the term and all the big jobs were done?!

“After you left the Prom last night there was a bit of a fight… about 20 or so drunken dads…You’d better come.”

I arrived at school 30 minutes later to see a police car in the car park and some PTA members mopping the hall floor. “We got most of the blood out…” Said one, sheepishly. “Although I did find a tooth…”

10 tips for surviving the second 100 days:

With your first 100 days behind you (the subject of my earlier blog), you now have a bit of a break before you tackle the next stage of your Headship journey – the second hundred days.

So here are my top tips on surviving them:

1. Have a holiday

The end of your first 100 days as Head will probably coincide with your first proper holiday. Step away from the laptop! Better still leave it at school over the holiday!

Although it might be tempting to catch up with paperwork or prep for the new term, don’t. In all likelihood you’ll have finished the first 100 days knackered. Your body (and brain) needs a rest if it’s to function properly in the next phase of your first year as a leader so don’t undervalue this downtime by polluting it with low-grade work.

Many analysts have  concluded that the reason the UK (with the longest working hours) has such appalling productivity compared with the rest of Europe (with much lower working hours) is that we confuse spending a lot of time working with working efficiently.

If you have a pressing task that absolutely can’t wait, then set yourself a strict time limit of a couple of hours to complete it. Don’t look at emails at all – and if you have email notifications on your phone switch them off.

Remind your family who you are. See friends. Enjoy your hobbies. But don’t work.

2. Secure the beach head.

Being a man who likes war films and has an overly developed sense of my own importance and professional impact, I think of this second 100 days as the time when you establish your beach head and start embedding your influence on the work of the school.

If the first 100 days was about big ideas and a few quick wins, then the second 100 days is when the real work starts. You will have a toe hold on the school but this influence is fragile and now is the time to start consolidating the changes which you are looking to make.

If you’re lucky, the staff will by now have bought into your vision and will go along with the new initiatives which you have suggested. However, in all likelihood, it is this second period when your plans are stress-tested and people start to wobble and doubt both you, your plans and themselves.

If the first 100 days were about storming the beaches and daring-do, then the next 100 days are about logistics and laying the foundations on which to build.

3. Nurture the green Shoots

By now there will be ‘early adopters’ – staff who absolutely love what you’re doing and have rushed enthusiastically to implement the changes you asked for. Nurture these green shoots.

Whilst we’d all like our staff to be able to adopted all new initiatives and ideas at the same pace and with the same enthusiasm, this is rarely the case. Some will be quicker and keener than others and you will need these people to bring the rest of the staff along.

Spend time (and CPD) making sure that his vanguard have fully understood the initiatives you’re developing and then provide them with the resources needed to make them sparkle (even providing a little ‘seed money’ for resources to start them off). Help them make their classrooms the blue-print for the learning environments which you want to see throughout the school.

At my first school, 2-3 staff took enthusiastically to the new approach to learning environments which we were proposing and were given extra resources to make their classrooms look amazing. Once the other staff could physically see what an excellent learning environment looked like they quickly decided they wanted their rooms to look as good and the initiative gained momentum.

4. Sweat the detail

At this point in the school year everything which you have brought in will be put to the test. Children will test any new rules by seeing whether you act when they break them; staff will test your new initiatives by seeing whether they can ignore them without you noticing. This period therefore has to be about sweating the detail – making sure staff and students are clear about your expectations and then enforcing them religiously.

The NYPD discovered in the 1990’s  that by chasing down every petty criminal who broke a window, they could slash serious crime.  This ‘zero tolerance ‘ message told the city that expectations would be enforced. In the same way, you must defend the standard which you have set for the school.

If a child isn’t wearing correct uniform – call their parents (it’s rarely the child’s fault, especially at primary school). If you’ve asked children to walk quietly down the corridors and they don’t, ask them to do it again – until they do. Likewise, if you have agreed on a particular planning, marking or teaching approach, allowing that one awkward teacher to not do what has been agreed is akin to telling the rest of the staff that everything is optional.

You will need to spend your second 100 days sounding like a broken record. We describe it more kindly as being ‘professionally fussy’ – but it is the only way to ensure that your fragile new initiatives take root.

5. Monitor, monitor, monitor.

The last thing any school leader wants, but sometimes gets, it nasty surprises. You think that your new marking policy has been universally adopted only to pick up a book during a lesson observation to discover that a particular teacher, or worst still, a whole group, has started marking in the new format but has quickly given up and gone back to the way that they did it before. This is known as the bungee effect – enthusiastically starting something new after training only to quickly spring back to the original practice once the daily grind resumes.

For new initiatives to become habitual takes a lot of time, and monitoring regularly will give you and the other leaders a realistic view of what is going on in classrooms.

This will not be popular as nobody likes to feel like they are being checked up on. However, many a school leader I know has fallen foul because they have blindly trusted their staff to do something only to discover that it isn’t happening. Any new initiative needs frequent random monitoring.

Even now in my school, which is doing well, we will still complete book scrutinies every 2-3 weeks when we have introduced something new. This cycle will last until every teacher has fully understood and adopted the new initiative, after which we will move to routine monthly or termly monitoring (just to ensure nobody gets into any bad habits).

“But I should just trust my staff?” you lament. Yes, in time you will. As my school becomes more and more secure, I can trust my staff more and more. However, we have the saying at my school “the road to ‘Special Measures’, is paved with good intentions”.

6. Provide bespoke CPD

As we’ve already established, not all staff are able to adopt new initiatives at the same rate.  The most common error which is made when introducing a new initiative is to view training as an event not a process. The INSET day which you held on X or Y in Term 1 will have been a useful introduction but it won’t secure people’s understanding. The initiative will need to be regularly returned to in staff meetings in the weeks and months that follow to check everyone has a common understanding and address any difficulties. However, there will still be some staff who ‘just don’t seem to get it’ – but this is unlikely to be down to intransigence or laziness.

Sometimes we all just need some more help and support when mastering something new. It is therefore essential that in this second phase of development, when you are trying to embed a new approach, that each teacher’s training needs are considered individually now that whole school training has taken place.

Ideally, teachers will self-identify that they need more support and will seek it out. However, more commonly, you will identify staff who need additional support through monitoring. Be proactive and generous with the support you offer. Explain openly that a book scrutiny or lesson observation etc had indicated that some more training would be beneficial and provide a mentor who can work alongside the member of staff until they have mastered the new initiative. Don’t allow this to be seen as a punitive action, and don’t confuse this with capability procedures. You want your staff to seek help when they are finding things hard – not trying to hide things from you for fear of being punished.

7. Seek out honest feedback

Three months in to a new leadership role is a good time to ask people for feedback- even (and especially) if you might not like what they tell you. Just as  regular monitoring will expose things which you wish weren’t there (but which you need to know about), surveying staff and parents anonymously is the only way to really gain an insight into how they see the school and your leadership of it.

Alongside the annual parent survey (which asked the same questions as OFSTED’s Parent View), each December we also have an anonymous staff survey (which also uses the OFSTED staff survey questions). We use a free online survey tool called esurv.org , which is similar to Survey Monkey but free! This is completely anonymous and the staff can tell the governors and I (as it really should be a survey run by the governors), exactly what they are thinking.

Even now, with a settled and secure staff, this survey makes me nervous and sometimes someone will (anonymously) tell you that they really don’t like what you are doing. But this is the only quantitative way of measuring the mood in camp and will provide a good opportunity for you to discuss any issues openly – which we always do in a staff meeting after the survey has closed.

Another good way to gain valuable feedback is through a ‘coffee and a chat’ day. Simply book a roving supply and allow people to sign up for 20-30 minute slots to give you feedback about how you are doing and their suggestions for improvement. As well as some actionable changes which you can make to your leadership approach, you’ll also get quite a bit of positive feedback at these meetings – so don’t obsess about the negatives.

8. Don’t obsess about the negatives

We are biologically programmed to obsess about the negatives (it’s called ‘negativity bias‘). In your second 100 days as leader, problems will start to appear as your ideas are put to the test. The warm glow which pervaded the staff room during your honeymoon period has been replaced by an icy chill and staff may question whether these new initiatives, or indeed you, are right for ‘their school’.

It this point it is important to remember one simple, unerring fact: Not everyone will like you.

This is hard to take on board – most of us like to be liked and, in a job which is all about people (big and small) we do our best to be likeable. But when you are making changes, not everyone will like you for it. Don’t go out of your way to upset people, and don’t discount negative feedback out of hand (sometimes even the most awkward staff room cynic is right!). But don’t agonise over every negative remark either. Reflect on it certainly, but having concluded that the negativity is not your fault, move on.

9. Hold the line

During your second hundred days, at times, it will appear as though the initiatives that you proudly unveiled back in September are doomed to failure and, with no crystal ball to gaze into, you will contemplate abandoning them and in favour of trying something new.

DON’T.

Very often things get worse before they get better and unless something very obviously isn’t working you need to give it more time. Again, it’s fine to be flexible – a plan will develop and change over time – but don’t flip-flop by throwing out an idea when it hits the first bump in the road. You need to work through the problems which a new approach throws up, which takes time.

10. Swallow the frog

Finally, in this second 100 days in a challenging school, with the clarity which all that monitoring, feedback and coaching brings, you may have to take formal action to improve teaching which usually involves placing staff on capability procedures.

If you are a good leader this won’t sit well with you and you will agonise about whether it is the best thing for the school or not.  However, if you are a good leader – having exhausted all the informal options such as bespoke training and mentoring  – you will do what needs to be done to secure good teaching for all the children at your school.

My only advice on this is to act fairly, transparently and honestly. Do nothing without speaking to your HR officer and don’t try to cut corners or by ‘having a quiet word’ to move things along more quickly.

I have seen members of staff be placed on capability procedures and then go on to be amazing teachers, so don’t prejudge the outcome.

But at the end of the day, the children only get one chance at their education and they can’t wait around hoping a particular teacher will spontaneously improve.

11. Roll with the punches

“So, explain to me how a PTA parents’ event turned into a bar-room brawl?” I said to the sheepish looking PTA Chair. I blamed myself. Maybe I should have stayed to the bitter end and perhaps I could have intervened and avoided the brawl.

A police officer stood making notes in the corner. “Will there be charges?” I asked plaintively (the unpopular and under-subscribed school needed negative publicity like a hole in the head).

“I doubt it,” he replied. “When we interviewed the line of blooded dads when we arrived they all claimed to have ‘just fallen over'”. 

The point I’m getting at is that sometimes things will happen out of the blue which are completely beyond your control and for which no end of planning and strategy will mediate. Okay, so we banned alcohol at PTA events from that day forward and I wrote to each of the fighty fathers and explained that they were not welcome at PTA events until further notice, but sometimes stuff just happens.

I describe to my SLT having a ‘shit hoover’ – a magical contraption which all staff, parents and the wider community expect me to have about my person at all times, which I can deploy to clear up a messy situation. Sometimes you just have to roll your sleeves up and sort out whatever mess you’re presented with.

So have a great holiday – and who knows, if you don’t have one already, maybe Santa will bring you your very own Shit hoover to use during your second 100 days in what, despite its challenges, is still the best job in the word.