Case Study: Was it something I didn’t say?
Was it something I didn’t say?
As an experienced Head with two schools under my belt, one of which I took from special measures to Good in a relatively short period of time, I was ready for a change. I was approaching 50 and reassessing my working future and felt I either had to stay where I was until I was ready to be put outto pasture or have one more move. So, I took the plunge and applied for a new position. The school I applied for was inner city with all the challenges that come with that. The previous inspection report led me to believe that there was a good team in place and despite the rock bottom outcomes for children, it looked like it just needed some fresh eyes and some tweaking to improve. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview process and honestly felt for the first time in my career that I genuinely had the answers, no blagging, no flannel. Leaving my previous position wasn’t easy, I had built up a great team and a good reputation, but I was excited by the challenge ahead and keen to bring what I had learned to a new post.
Within days in my new role, I knew that the challenge ahead was considerably more than just a tweak. With little infrastructure in place, few policies, a crumbling building and a staff who really didn’t want a new Head, it was always going to be tough. The results from the summer were the worst in the authority and by October, we had a letter from the RSC telling us we were a ‘Coasting School’ and I needed to tell them why we were and what we were going to do about it. This came as a massive shock to the senior leaders and Governors - the inspection just 18 months before had told them they were a good school with outstanding leadership. The evidence was that the school was far from this judgement. With little to no admin support, a senior leadership team in shock and a staff that didn’t want any change, I set about trying to win hearts and minds, after all, we all wanted the same thing, the very best for the children in our care.
It was in this context that I was then faced with trying to build a leadership team who had the confidence to tackle underperformance. I joined forces with other local schools inan alliance where we agreed to be each other’s critical friend. It was good to have feedback from another very experienced local Head who said that she could see the big changes and improvements that we/I had made. However, the report from afull Teaching and Learning Review with the senior school improvement advisor and an Inspector stated that we had a long way to go to ensure the school was no longer deemed to be ‘at risk’.
Tragically, at the beginning of the summer term, a parent was murdered and subsequently two other parents were arrested and then convicted of the murder. Dealing with the fallout of this tragic event was all consuming from managing the grief of the children, staff and community to protecting the school from the media to safeguarding the children in the families of the victim and the perpetrator. Looking back, I now see that I underestimated the impact this had on me. I made sure staff had access to the crisis team and got emotional support, but I didn’t access any myself. Even when I then had to go through a domestic homicide review, I didn’t access the support, I was too busy making sure everyone else did.
Throughout this time, I had several periods of significant illness, enough to end up in hospital twice that year. This should have been a warning. My family certainly took it as one, but I just felt that giving the job my all was what had to be done to get the school where I hoped and prayed it could be.
Over the next year, we took on some interesting projects. What followed was what felt like a good year, one of team building in my own school and learning from another school.
We started the next academic year with some new staff and some changes in approach and it was at this point that we reached what would be described by Tuckman in the phases of team development as the ‘Storming stage’. I wouldn’t expect anything else in the stages of managing change, other than it had taken a bit longer for us to get to this point than I would have expected.
However, I began to feel weighed down by the increasing pressure of the many day to day occurrences; parental complaints to Ofsted, staff complaints about each other, staff complaints about decisions made by the senior team, and a small group of very challenging pupils who were having a big impact on the day to day running of the school. The building was crumbling around us, the roof was leaking in many places (including my office) and the hall regularly flooded. Not forgetting that we had to demonstrate significant improvements in outcomes for children.
I knew at this point that I really needed help. The HR team that I had been working with were really supportive but there were so many issues that I started to feel utterly swamped. It was like a relentless wave of daily challenges, on top of the day job of running a fairly large organisation.
I did start talking to people. I was very open and honest with my new school improvement advisor (who had been appointed for a term). I was very honest with my SLT. And their response was that I was doing a good job. I responded to an email abut booking a free session with a coach for Head Teachers but missed the appointment because I was dealing with something.
And then we were inspected. A new framework was about to be implemented and we seemed to be being inspected with a hybrid of the old and new. One of the inspectors even said to me, “what a shame, we’ve come a year too early”. I had been the Head for two years and two terms. I was experienced enough to know that the school still had a lot to do but there were green shoots of improvement – which the inspectors agreed that they could see. But apparently it wasn’t enough and not quickly enough. This was the point that I reflected on many times after the judgement. Was there something I didn’t say that I should have? Would it have made any difference?
What followed were the hardest few months of my professional life. I had support from my MP and entered into correspondence with the Minister of State at the DfE. I prepared pages and pages of information for Governors, parents, staff and the local authority. This was cold comfort when the judgement remained the same. It was soul destroying to repeatedly have to acknowledge that the report said my leadership was inadequate. The stress of this is immense. I ended up physically ill again, shingles, heart palpitations and severe anxiety.
By the end of October, I knew the fight was pretty much over. An academy order had been issued and the RSC were discussing what was going to happen next.
One lunchtime, I went into my school business managers office, and she made a kind remark about what a good personI was to work for and I started crying and didn’t stop for many hours. Such was the level of my distress, I frightened myself and my family.
This is when my timeline gets a bit muddled. I now know I was weeks, if not days away from total burn out and break down. I was fortunate to have amazing support from my GPand I was signed off the next few months. I researched schools who had been in similar situations to see what action they had taken and then stumbled upon James Pope and the HeadsUp organisation. There were so many parts of his narrative that resonated with me. I wish I had contacted him then, but I didn’t.
I went back to work far too early, but I really wanted to be in school for the due diligence meetings with the incoming academy group.
And then there was Covid. I spent the next two terms managing the crisis that unfolded with staff bubbles, school open for the vulnerable children throughout the holidays and days and days of delivering food to our families in need of support.
As we started to get children back into school, involvement from outside started to increase. I found myself feeling like I was taking part in a very long interview. Every meeting I went to, every document I prepared, I felt I was being assessed as to how well I could perform. I have read other people’s accounts of how it feels to be gaslighted and I recognise those feelings. The daily questioning of yourself and in response to suggestions and instructions for school improvement, I just wanted to say, “Don’t you think I’ve tried that” or “Don’t’ you think I’m doing that”.
The next part of my journey can’t be shared other than to say, by the beginning of the next academic year, I was no longer the Head.
It was then that I contacted James through the form on the website. I had a rapid response offering me a confidential conversation. I poured my heart out to him, and between sobbing and trying to put words together that made sense, I had the opportunity to share my story and for him to share his… there is always someone else who’s had it worse!Through his empathy and coaching I began to see that there was nothing I could have done or said differently at the timethat would have changed what happened. It was a set of circumstances that came together that led to a result over which I had no control. He also helped me to realise that it wasn’t my personal failings or ‘inadequacy’ that led to the judgement. Sadly, it also appears that my story is not uncommon. All of this helped me to get on the road to recovery.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had been able to access support from people like James and the HeadsUpteam when things first started to unravel. On reflection, it might not have changed the series of events but I am in no doubt it would have helped me to respond to the situations differently and also help to prevent me from becoming so personally scarred.
There is a happy ending to all this. Despite the immense sadness of making the decision not to return to being a Head, I’m glad to say that again, through coaching, I haverecognised that there are many transferable skills that lead to a life after Headship, but perhaps more about that another time.
Physical and Mental Wellbeing: I even tried hypnosis to cope with stress
When asked about my job, I sometimes describe being a headteacher as similar to being in an emotionally abusive relationship. I read a definition once, which described it as ‘a consistent pattern of abusive words and bullying behaviour that wear down a person’s self-esteem and undermine their mental health.’ And without diminishing the terrible experiences of people who have been in emotionally abusive relationships, I can’t help but find a correlation between the cycle of emotional abuse and the cycle of experiences I have working in education.
Some days I feel like I can handle it, and on others I feel completely crushed. No one in teaching needs me to tell them that being a headteacher isn’t easy. The past two years have added another dimension of difficulty to an already tricky job. The chances I used to have to refill my resilience-cup have dwindled and so, all it takes at the moment to make me spill over in despair is one more complaint from *that* parent, one snide comment from someone about how little teachers work, or one more child or family remaining un-helped by Social Services, CAMHS or one of the other over-burdened support systems out there.
There are delightful bits, of course there are, my passion for pedagogy and bearing witness to a child’s development are the bright spots in my working day. I enjoy assemblies, hearing children sing, chatting to the children in class and on the playground, reading stories and just having the chance to love the little people for who they are. Sadly, this is being buried in the putrid swamp of outside pressure and lack of funding. New curriculum, over-testing, new inspection frameworks, less funding, less support, less resourcing. At times it feels overwhelming.
I never would have described myself as a political animal, but the current situation has certainly forced me to be more aware and to speak up against the injustices being done to school staff, school budgets and the families and communities we serve. But, it is hard to stand against the continued media barrage against teachers, the head of Ofsted criticising us for helping children and families eat when no one else would, and the endless and ridiculous amount of information that is shovelled at us by the DfE.
My job as headteacher is to be a protective umbrella over my school, taking care of the bigger picture so my teachers can teach, my teaching assistants can assist, my children can learn and my families can flourish. In my 12 years as a head, I have faced tough times, deficit budgets, bonkers parents and challenging children. I have had death threats levelled at me and I have had a mentally ill parent actively try to strangle me (I was saved by a wonderful teaching assistant who held a door shut with her bodyweight so I could escape and call the police). I have had parents formally complain to the Local Authority about me for ridiculous reasons. I have had so many Ofsted inspections (including one from an inspector who brought a pink silk corset with honest-to-god nipple tassels on it into my school in her briefcase!) from which I have learned nothing about my duty to school, although I did learn a great deal about my capacity to cope with stress and keep a straight face!
I coped with all these things. I cried sometimes, I comfort ate my way through barrel-loads of junk food sometimes, I ran miles and miles, I composed and deleted my resignation letter, I even tried hypnosis to cope with the stresses. The thing is, these tough times would pass and I would have a chance to recognise the joy in my job, find my equilibrium and come back stronger and more positive.
Lately, however, it feels like there is no let up between the punches- I’m not able to fight back, I have no recovery time between blows… I feel like I’m being bludgeoned into a paste. I have put on weight, I hardly sleep, when I do sleep I grind my teeth so badly that I shattered a molar, I don’t exercise, I cry in my car on the way home but I can’t seem to explain exactly what it is that has tipped me over the edge. I feel like I shouldn’t feel like this. I have a job, a home, a family. I have so much to be grateful for, and so much that brings me joy. My staff are wonderful. They are amazingly supportive, genuinely good people. They try so hard and do their work magnificently. My governors are great and do so much to help me. They ask me how I am and how they can help me. They are the spokes in my umbrella, keeping me up and open over my school but my fabric is being torn to shreds.
I would love to do something else- at times I wish I could do anything else- but I am so worn down and burned out that I believe it when I think there is nothing else I know how to do. I’m trapped in this relationship, waiting for the good times that seem to be fewer and further apart.