I’m coming to the end of my fourth year as a Head of Department, and feel that perhaps for the first time, I’m starting to really understand the nature of my role – both in terms of what I want it to be, and what I can feasibly and realistically do. I can’t claim any sense of knowledge about how this applies to pastoral leadership – would Heads of Year, or Housemasters feel the same, I wonder?

In the academic leadership context, middle leadership is often described as the “engine room” of the school: it’s where policy and practice intersect with the classroom, and where the vision of the school is translated into real outcomes for students. But I think that engine room isn’t what I expected it to be from the pre-Middle Leader days – and I was reading Tom Sherrington’s “Learning Rainforest” – and considering what I have learned from my leadership so far.

Let me start with my fundamental assumptions about the academic experience, which can be challenged!

1. Most schools do best when there is a shared sense of structure and routine. This means that we can’t have ten different structures of learning, purposes of homework, classroom styles, in ten different Departments. There has to be some coherence and “whole school”, and much of this has to be directed by the vision and ethos of the school, as translated by Senior Leadership.
2. It is the job of Middle Leaders to be subject experts, and to fight for (or defend) what is best for their subject and their Department. They may choose to take on whole school thoughts and perspectives, but their job is subject focused.
3. Change is positive; but too much change is damaging. There is a sense of confidence and self-assuredness that comes from doing things that have been done before; and a sense of institutional memory – understanding what has happened, and how it can be edited, tweaked and improved – is important for the well being of staff, and the long term growth of an institution.
4. There are lots of ways to do education. These can be accessed in a variety of methods, including twitter, and blogging, and reading and engaging with post-graduate professional learning. These combine to bring professional experience and the generation of new ideas – everyone comes with their own.

These lead me to propose three models of “middle leadership”, ranging on a scale of autonomy and how welcomed it is.

Model 1: Leadership from the Middle:

In this model, the middle leaders are engaged, bright and enthusiastic about their role as leaders, and are supported to pilot, test and develop new ideas: to lead, and not just manage. They may do them quietly, within their own departments, or publicly, by leading CPD sessions and training for whole staff – but there’s a sense of ownership and collegiality amongst the middle leadership ‘team’. Meetings are purposeful and share great ideas and discussions without judgement. Good practice is brought in, and identified and shared at this level. Ideas that are thought to be valid for the whole school are then picked up, explored and tested, and – if successful – become school culture. This kind of cultural alignment is welcomed and shared, and middle leaders are celebrated for doing it, without generating an expectation (or demand) that they move to Senior Leadership.

Model 2: Swimming against the tide:

Middle leaders may be engaged, bright and enthusiastic, but their input is not quite so welcome. Some Departments may have autonomy to experiment with minor variations in their practice, but overall, they can only make small changes within the large school context. Suggestions are listened to, but not actively sought and engaged, and often the “middle leaders” are disparate and act without collegiality. Each Department does things slightly differently, and innovation is viewed as risk-taking rather than an expected cultural norm.

If this model is a long term one, then it’s likely that there will be high turnover of middle leaders – as they will seek to find a better cultural fit elsewhere, or will “burn out” their frustrations of having good ideas not accepted more widely. They may also feel that their only ‘solution’ is to be promoted on to Senior Leadership, which although allowing them more personal fulfilment and the autonomy to act on their ideas, does create the potential for a leadership vacuum or lack of institutional memory at the middle leadership tier.

Model 3: Executing a (shared?) vision:

There are two options here – but both come down to the same practical outcome. Middle leaders are not generating ideas, they are executing an overall plan that has been communally agreed. It’s possible that this is a top-down structure which is universally imposed without discussion, but it’s also possible that a group – whoever that might be – comes together and generates a single vision that is then uniformly adopted. This might be a cultural education landscape, e.g. “we all use booklets and visualisers”, or a shared behavioural practice, e.g. SLANT from Doug Lemov or similar expectations, but the individual Middle Leader is expected to manage the Department under a vision that is directed, rather than self-generated and experimental.

There are, I think, advantages and disadvantages to all of these models, and I think that people will recognise elements of each of them in their own school. To an extent, that’s natural – I don’t think all components of what we do can ever be exclusively one leadership model or another. However, I think there are big “names” out there in the Edu-Twitter world where the perception of the leadership structure would align with some of these models more strongly than the others.

What I’m interested in is the discussion of the following questions:

1. Is there any evidence that any one of these models is “better” than others? Is there a correlation between top performing schools/Departments and leadership styles, and is that genuinely causative, or just accidental? I know what I think the answer would be, but it might be anecdotal at best!
2. Should we, as middle leaders, seek out these different environments *before* stepping up to Senior Leadership? If I go from a Model 1 environment to being Senior Leader at a Model 3, then I will be wholly out of my depth. Would I be better off going from a Model 2 to a Model 1, and rebuilding my portfolio of skills? Is it helpful and beneficial for me to have experienced a different middle leadership culture, rather than transitioning to Senior Leadership as a way of ‘escaping’ a cultural misfit?
3. How do you learn about the culture of middle leadership from the outside of a school? What signs, signals and symptoms would you pick up on?

What have I forgotten or not thought about?

Geography is a broad discipline, and at the secondary level, tends to be an amalgam of Human Geography and Physical Geography topics. For many of the students I teach now, there’s typically a preference for one or the other, and the sense of excitement (or relief?) when they learn that they can study either a Human Geography or Physical Geography degree specialism at university is palpable.

It was the same when I was an undergraduate. Except, we had some compulsory courses – one of which was known as the “Philosophy, Nature and Practice of Geography”. At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated the aim of the course – which was to tell the story of Geography as an academic discipline of people and ideas that changed through time. Reading Said on Orientalism, or Johnson’s Anglo American Geography, or even Kuhn’s Structures of Scientific Revolution don’t make you a better Geographer immediately – and I think my undergraduate self didn’t grasp that fully. But what they do is tell you the story of the tectonic plates you’re standing on in terms of the philosophy and approach of your discipline; and help you to understand the way they have shifted through time.

As an A Level student, and even as an undergraduate to a certain extent, we are taught ideas and asked to critique the concept/how it’s been applied – but how often do we critically examine the narrative that has shaped them? To understand that we went towards x idea as a reactionary move because of the problems that y caused doesn’t help a better understanding of either x or y independently, but it certainly helps you to see how and why the shift has happened and to be able to contextualise within the wider field of learning.

Like Geography, education and teaching is an often contentious subject that has trends and disciplinary thinking and change. It meanders between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘skills’, and makes assertions about research, privileges certain voices, and creates disciplinary factions and coherence to greater or lesser extents.

But I don’t think we really ever study or tell that story. It’s been a while since I did my teacher training, I’ll readily admit, but that was a time of learning ideas and principles (we weren’t too research focused at that point!) and then our narratives were all about how to best apply them to the classroom in front of us. I never learned about the progression of one set of ideas and thinkers to the next; never knew the story, never really could understand why my older colleague loved a particular method of teaching, but my other friends on my placement thought it to be completely outrageous. 

Increasingly, as the professional focus on curriculum and narrative sharpens, we are starting to have this conversation in understanding subject-specific and disciplinary story telling. We must, to build the best curriculum possible, understand why certain elements come to the fore, and others do not. In various articles, Grace Healy (@GraceEHealy) has argued for this narrative in Geography curriculum development, and for this to be a focus for subject teacher development and coaching. Elsewhere, Christine Counsell (@Counsell_C) has argued for this as part of her work as an historian, and then as a curriculum leader. And yet, we don’t seem to shift this conversation as part of Initial Teacher Education as a whole. I cannot claim to know what goes on in all providers, but we don’t seem to have a coherent narrative – and to teach, assess and get people to understand our collective and collaborative story.

Every profession has – or, I believe, should have – a story of their discipline. An understanding of where they’ve come from – how the tectonic plates have shifted through time, how the different trends of approach and style came about, and what moved them. Knowing the forces and knowing the process – these aren’t critical to the students in front of us on a daily basis – but they help site our philosophies and approaches in a way that is grounding and professionally beneficial. They help us to understand where we have come from as a discipline, to help contextualise why certain people work and think in a particular way, and perhaps to heal some of the divisions that can exist between different philosophies of education.

There will never be, and arguably, never should be, “one vision” of what is ‘right’. But surely, knowing the stories helps us to understand each other better – and that can’t be a bad thing?