Being a school middle leader has never been tougher. With two-fifths of new teachers leaving within five years, and many citing increased workloads, stress and pay cuts as reasons for considering leaving, the challenges of leading frontline teaching teams are great.
A shortage of senior teachers is adding pressure to many middle leaders, including teachers with additional responsibilities, such as assistant or deputy heads in primary schools, and heads of year and departments in secondary institutions. This middle tier is taking on greater responsibility for the day-to-day running of their schools, while trying to juggle team management and a teaching timetable. So when time is so scarce, how can you juggle classroom tuition with management responsibilities?
Jane Bishop, head of year at a sixth form in England has some practical solutions. She joined as a newly-qualified teacher five years ago and was promoted to her current role when the school converted to an academy in 2012. Not only has she remained in the profession while many of her cohort left, she has also seen how these developments have transformed the running of her school. In her opinion, organisation is crucial.
“It’s a very difficult job,” she says. “I only have two-hours a week assigned to me in my role as head of year. The key to using your time effectively is making sure everyone in your team knows what’s expected. I have weekly meetings with my tutors where they can ask questions. Behavioral and performance-related problems from classrooms are reported to tutors, who then inform me so I can monitor the situation and intervene if required. That way there’s a managed response that doesn’t eat into your time.”
Empowering team members is a fundamental part of middle leadership. Bishop says that listening to your staff reassures them. “Sometimes my tutors feel like they don’t have enough time to do plan their classes properly,” she says. “In some instances I’ll help by covering their tutorials, or I might sit in on one of their sessions to help them use their time with their students effectively. In general I like to make sure I visit tutorials to make sure everything’s going okay, too.”
Regular and flexible contact with team members isn’t just a way of maintaining good communications – it’s also how middle leaders can show they’re doing their job. “Visibility is paramount,” says Bishop. “Being a conspicuous presence at work not only means that the teachers you’re responsible for know you’re there to help, but students know that you’re always around too. Consequently, senior leaders can see that you’re interacting with the school.”
Structuring a working relationship with the senior members of staff responsible for assessing middle leaders can be problematic; both parties generally have little contact time and scrutiny of results can create extra pressure during appraisals.
“With more data about results published now than ever before, middle leaders need to evidence what they’re doing,” says Louis Coiffait from NAHT Edge, a professional association from NAHT for middle leaders in schools. Bishop agrees: “I have weekly meetings with my line manager who sets my targets. One of these is data-led, and last year my target was to improve pupil retention, which I was able to demonstrate by recording pupil numbers.”
With the roles of middle and senior leaders changing, new challenges are also emerging. “Prioritising the middle tier of management is quite new to senior leaders,” says Coiffait. “Traditionally, they’re used to doing everything themselves. As a result, support for middle leaders can be quite reactive – only responding to problems when they arise.”
Patricia Kendall, results coordinator and teacher at a comprehensive in London, thinks that the key to a successful relationship between middle and senior management is cooperation.
“The school I’m currently working in has an ‘open door’ policy, which means I can always drop into a senior colleague’s office if there’s an issue,” she says. “However, I’ve worked in other institutions where you have to book an appointment to do so, which isn’t very time effective. Also, my current school encourages both staff and senior leaders to observe and report on each other, which means you share best practice rather than having it directed from above.”
Middle leadership training can also help. Presently, there are many middle leader training programmes on offer, including those by run by the National College for Teaching and Leadership, the Institute of Education at the university of London, NAHT Edge and SSAT. Generally, these will be funded by your school or local authority, however, there are privately funded online alternatives such as Optimus Education, although these start at £250. Education charity Teaching Leaders also runs an informative website and Twitter account, tweeting links to articles and jobs.
At a time when reforms to education are causing teachers to take on more tasks – and blurring the lines between levels of leadership as a result – these are all options to consider. Nonetheless, for Bishop, good middle leadership comes down to some basic principles.
“You need to have a good knowledge of your teaching subject and you need to know who your pupils are,” she says. “Ultimately, you also just need to be professional and have a clear vision of what you’re doing. If you can manage that, people will notice.”
The names of teachers in this article have been changed to protect their professional identities.
