Surviving and Succeeding in Senior School Management

Getting In and Getting On

Paul Blum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134163489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This lively, practical account explores the vital aspects of the assistant or deputy headteacher's role, which often means playing piggy-in-the-middle to a variety of school stakeholders, including the headteacher, other senior managers, the teaching staff, parents and local authority advisors, governors and pupils. The author gives practical tips on how to organise yourself well when the pressure to perform multiple tasks simultaneously is high, such as how to lead and manage major strategic changes, do a good presentation to staff on a training day, and give a rogue pupil an effective telling-off. The book also covers how to apply for a senior management job and successfully get through the stringent written selection criteria and complex interview process.

This is a highly informative text for any aspiring subject leader or middle manager in the primary or secondary sector. It will also be of interest to existing senior managers who want to reflect on the way they are doing their job already.

Part 1
Getting into senior management

Chapter 1
Preparing for a senior management position

In this chapter we look at: the knowledge you need to prepare yourself for school senior management; the absolutely essential and highly desirable career experiences you need to prepare yourself for a promotion.

No two people’s career development and aspirations are the same. Person specifications for senior management usually demand a minimum of five years’ experience as a successful classroom teacher. Many ask for at least seven years’ teaching and middle management experience.

My experience in secondary schools over the last twenty years is that colleagues take between seven and twelve years to get into a senior management position. The average age range for a senior management appointment in secondary school has been between 33 and 40. In primary schools, teachers can become deputy headteachers in their late twenties and headteachers in their early thirties. However, some people do get into SMT jobs in their late twenties in some secondary schools. I would suggest that it is overarching ambition or incredible impact that takes them there so young. Most colleagues I know, who have been appointed to the SMT, have about ten years’ experience under their belt, although I have detected a trend in inner-city schools for dynamic younger candidates to get assistant headships in much less time. The one compelling skill that they have all demonstrated is being good at crowd control with challenging pupils. Although it is undoubtedly an asset for all senior managers to command a presence with pupils, it is only one of many skills needed to do the job well.

In my opinion, you are ready to think of applying for senior management when you have at least three’ years middle management experience and have led a team of teachers through a range of situations, leaving a ‘mark of improvement’ on the way they work. But you increase your likelihood of getting into the SMT if you consider the other important criteria for getting shortlisted for a senior post. These criteria are discussed below under the following headings: Knowledge of educational issues; Getting a further qualification in education; Showing that you have experience of planning, implementing and evaluating at middle management level; Getting a taste of whole-school management experience; and Working out your own educational vision and measuring everything you do against it.

Knowledge of educational issues

A competent and convincing candidate for senior management will have significant knowledge and opinions about all the big educational issues of the day, even if they are not necessarily applying for a job that demands a detailed appreciation of every one of them.

One thing to comfort yourself with as you try for senior management is that the central issues don’t change, even though the initiatives to address those issues do. Over the last thirty years, the key issues could perhaps be grouped as follows:

improving the exam results and the basic quality of education of the school population;

thinking about whether the way education is organised and qualifications are structured is the most effective way to get the best out of youngsters;

managing the behaviour and motivation of all pupils better, but particularly those disadvantaged by their home background or ‘negative stereotyping’ about their race, gender or social class;

trying to get education and social services to work more effectively together to solve some vulnerable young people’s complex problems.

The initiatives around these issues have become increasingly government led and controlled. The Ofsted inspection system aims to ensure that schools and local authorities do not avoid the priorities of central government. As governments come and go, so the political emphasis on tackling the key issues change and initiatives see-saw from one educational dogma to another. As an aspiring senior manager you need to keep up with this debate and keep your eye on all the new educational initiatives, measuring them against your own set of beliefs and practical experience about what does and doesn’t work in schools.

At the moment, the initiatives are focused on the following areas:

changes to the post-14–19 curriculum and proposals for major reform to GCSE and A level. The issue of alternative vocational qualifications is also in the spotlight;

changes to the way that higher education is funded;

issues around the ‘inclusion’ of physically disabled youngsters and emotionally challenging pupils in the mainstream, rather than in special schools;

drives on improving literacy and numeracy levels through high-profile government initiatives aimed at 11- to 13-year-olds;

schools taking on a subject specialism and some inner-city schools being converted into ‘academies’ through public/ private funding, with new state-of-the-art buildings and the promise of a more flexible curriculum;

different learning styles being integrated into pupil schemes of work;

measuring pupil progress, using value-added data.

These initiatives are currently paramount, but there are many others I have not mentioned and the sheer scale of change...

Table of contents

• Related titles from Routledge
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Getting into senior management
• Part 2 Building the vital relationships
• Part 3 Developing essential skills and survival strategies
• Conclusion
• Index