Headship

Education is fundamental to all of us, our children and the society we live in.

In this book I have given my views, anecdotes and feelings from an inside point of view. It is highly readable and you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy it. It is controversial and real!

Here’s the foreword:

Foreword

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and killed by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and Writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students more human.

Haim Ginott

Leadership is about empowerment. If a leader doesn’t empower their staff to take risks and grow they aren’t worth their salt. For a leader to succeed all those working with them should reach their potential. That is good leadership.

A school is like an ocean liner. It builds up a head of steam and gets carried along by its own momentum. It cannot stop or change course abruptly. You have to guide it and plan each change of course well in advance. It takes all the sailors working as a team to run smoothly.

A Headship is like a race down a steep snow run on an old tin tray. You have limited control and your journey is perilously at the mercy of events and obstructions that cannot all be foreseen.

A Head sets the tone for everything that happens in the school.

The art of Headship is to sell your vision so that the whole community is pulling in the same direction.

Paradoxically a Head is largely impotent. As a Head you have far-reaching responsibilities and limited power. There are good things about this. Many Heads have proceeded to Headship out of a desire for power, control and money. They are ambitious and can be overbearing, ruthless, vicious and self-centred. At least the system prevents them exerting their regimes of fear and control to such a huge extent. The downside is that it stops you dealing properly with poor teaching. The kids deserve better but on the whole having restraints is better than tyranny.

You always find when you reach the top that you’re actually in the middle. A Head is in the middle of everything.

It is said that the fact that someone wants to be a politician should automatically ban them from standing; the same thing is true of Headships. Those that think they know what they are doing are usually the worst. If a Head starts their Headship by asking for more power or money they can be guaranteed to be doing the job for the wrong reasons.

The only reason to become a Head is that you have a passion for trying to make the world a better place, to make people happier and to see education as the only way of achieving this. After all, it has to be better than war, religious hatred and sectarian violence.

Then we approach the thorny subject of the purpose of ‘Education’. Education is all things to all men. To politicians it is a way of maintaining social order, reinforcing class or enabling mobility and addressing the economic needs of the country. To many it is purely about careers while to others it is about expanding minds, opening horizons and creating wonder. I’m very much in the wonder and awe camp. I am also of the repairing damaged kid’s persuasion. All my students were equally important and equally valuable. I hope I succeeded in making some of their lives better. That’s what I set out to do. Their chosen career and economic value was secondary to their self-esteem and happiness.

Before starting this I checked on ‘Rate my Teacher’, a scurrilous website that has given a voice to some rather dubious individuals, but one which reflects a series of views of how some others see you. It offers a modicum of objectivity. It was a little unsettling to see oneself described as an obese penguin from the CIA but on the other side there was the recognition of the care and respect. It showed a career that was not entirely wasted.

I worked in Education for thirty six years and prior to that I was largely a victim of it for twenty years. My experience of schooling gave me the impetus to get involved and work to change it. My disgust at Gove and the Tory attempt to belittle all the achievements of recent decades and drag education back to the appalling 1950s is my main reason for writing this. Children should be valued as human beings and not economic units. Education that is not developing all aspects of humanity and expanding minds is not only wrong it is disgusting. Most leading fascists have been highly educated after a fashion. It was their empathy, compassion and warmth of spirit that was allowed to atrophy. Any education system that fosters elitism and the smug arrogance that stems from it should be resisted by all caring people. A system that ignores the promotional of human feeling, sound moral and ethical values in order to focus on exam league tables and economic performance is flawed. The society created would be cold and bitter. It is a vision I have fought against all my life. I am for the warmth and light.

In my teaching experience I have known students with little intelligence, destined for poor grades, but possessing such a range of immense qualities that they are humbling. I have known highly intelligent individuals, destined for top jobs, who were vicious and mean spirited and likely to create misery. My job was to bring out the best in both and my hope that both types left school better equipped to make a positive contribution to society.

Education is a nebulous thing. We are building the future and the future is not only concerned with careers and wealth; it is also about families, societies, relationships and supporting those less fortunate. How to build a better world should be our curriculum. How we repair damaged children should be our imperative. How we foster positive human values should be our main aim. Teaching and Learning, Exam results and league tables are superfluous in the face of such paramount challenges.

This is why I believe the most important subject, and the most difficult to teach, is PSHE. All too often it is poorly taught, pushed to the shadows and taught by reluctant exponents who happen to have some free space in their timetable. This is a travesty. PSHE is about life, about preparing students for a better world, dealing with the big issues of responsibility, respect, tolerance and empathy. PSHE, like the Pastoral system, is about guidance, interaction and development of those qualities that raise the sensibilities. It should be given centre stage, pride of place and only taught by the very best of teachers with the most advanced skills. Anything less is short-changing the future.

The only way to address the world’s problems is good education.

As a probationary teacher I set about taking on the hierarchy of the school and changing the beast. I wanted a revolution. You don’t have to be in Senior Management to have a power base to promote positive change. I fought and managed to bring in a number of improvements. However, after twenty years of influential input from a lowly position, I realised that the best way of changing the beast was from the top and seized my opportunity to move into Senior Management.

I did things my way. I did not follow the rules. I was the grit in the Vaseline. The Senior Team found me a major problem. I refused to compromise. I did it the way I felt was right for the students and my own philosophy. Yet the method was highly successful. In the whole of my time in teaching I did not have a single report or inspection putting me below excellent. On the schools first Ofsted inspection, in which it achieved Satisfactory, all my areas were Outstanding. Over the next three Ofsted inspections, two as Deputy Head and one as Head, all my areas of responsibility were deemed outstanding. Being a maverick and not following the rules does not necessarily mean you cannot gain recognition. Risk Taking is a big part of the game. Covering your back is a weakness and a flaw. Doing what is right, even in defiance of the orders from above, is an imperative.

Duke Ellington supposedly first said that there were only two kinds of music: good and bad. The same is true of education. Bad education is destructive to minds, spirits and society. It should be banished even when it seemingly produces results. My Maths teacher always got 100% pass rate. I passed Maths from his class. Yet nobody was more successful at destroying a subject. To a man we came out of there hating Maths.

I have always questioned the education system. It seems crazy to put groups of people together grouped by age. That never happens in normal social interaction. It is asking for trouble, particularly during teenage years when hormones are rampant and brains are melting and becoming rewired. It reinforces lots of negative behaviour patterns. It is almost as bad as grouping people according to ability, but not quite. I think we need to bring our best minds to bear to find a better way forward. What Mr Gove proposes, a plunge back to the dark days of the 1950s emotionally challenged society would be a disaster. It has to be better than that.

I only served five years as a Head. It is something I regret. I was never personally ambitious and was severely lacking in self-confidence when it came to formal situations. One thing that was obvious was that there were going to be many formal situations and they came with the post. Consequently I came to Headship too late. I got used to the formal situations, overcame my anxiety attacks, and grew into them. One thing I have learned from life is that you should always push yourself and try to extend your reach. To not do so is to leave yourself with an unsatisfied life. You’d never know what you could have achieved. I guess I’ll never know. I would have liked to have served as a Head for longer and really got things going as I would have liked. The school was motoring. My cherished beliefs, that I had spent thirty six years establishing, were bearing fruit. The atmosphere inside the school was warm, friendly and buzzing with energy. We were a positive, can-do, all inclusive community. There was a lot of love.

If you review the full panoply of responsibilities involved with Headship, as with many other jobs, it becomes obvious that it is not possible to carry out the role successfully. You are responsible for everything twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. You have to know every rule and regulation inside out. You are expected to represent yourself without legal representation. To achieve this you would need to be in ten places at once, have a myriad of skills, be super intelligent and be able to read and hold in your memory a mass of legal documentation sufficient to fill a library. As with all such roles you learn to prioritise, deal with the pressing, delegate and relax into the knowledge that you are always exposed and could flounder at any moment from circumstances largely beyond your control. The stress is enormous. I was threatened with prison three times during my short stint. You can go two ways. You can become anal and try to nail everything down, creating a bureaucratic mediocrity or you can hold on tight, guide the tin can over the bumps and away from the trees, experience a spectacular journey and enjoy the adrenaline rush.

Outstanding can only come as a result of going for it and reaching as far as your spirit will allow. All the checklists in the world cannot create a single spark of originality or flash of genius. Inspiration comes from passion.

Headship is a lonely place but it can be exhilarating when you have the support of the community you have helped create. Sometimes it all comes together and is transcendental. Those are the moments we live for.

As far as I was concerned mediocrity should never be an option.

What follows are my views on education and the mechanics of how the school came to become Outstanding while prospering as a friendly, supportive community in which everyone was loved and valued.

I believe with all my heart that we can mend broken kids, soften the arrogant and aggressive, and use education to change the world into a tolerant, peaceful place that works in harmony with nature.

When education is done properly it soars. It should work to take humanity out of the morass of war, poverty and religious intolerance into a new age.

I look forward to a new world, risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the old, where selfishness, greed and violence have been banished.

This is no idle dream of a helpless romantic idealist. This is the true product of education.

Chris Goodwin 16.11.2012