Having leadership oversight of how a school or trust is run is critical to generating – and maintaining – successful outcomes across the board. Earlier this month, we caught up with CEO Stephen Morales to discuss what good leadership looks like, and the vital role that leadership oversight plays.
Stephen, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today. Firstly, why do you think it is so important for schools and trusts to have effective leadership oversight?
So the first thing to say is I've never come across a school or a trust where there's poor leadership and fantastic outcomes for children. It’s just never been done.
Oversight is crucial because if you look at the raw data your school collects, that will tell you a story. It will tell you the progress that's been made even if your starting position was very low – your school may have a high proportion of students who are disadvantaged or have high need requirements.
Without that oversight and without the proper leadership, that is very, very difficult to achieve. I’ve never personally come across a situation where fantastic progress is being made under poor leadership. If there are occasions when that happens, it won't be sustainable, particularly as the organisation grows. The foundations will become more and more unstable, and the outcomes will start to suffer.
So what does good leadership in education look like for you, and are there certain characteristics that are more important than others?
First and foremost, there's a big difference between leadership and management. Management is really about oversight of tasks or functions, whereas leadership is about setting the vision and strategy – it’s about looking ahead and thinking about where you want to be and how you’re going to get there.
In terms of the key components of good leadership, I think we should think carefully about three fundamental areas. Firstly, culture is really important, and this includes the values that your school or trust is promoting, both internally and externally. It's also about the ethos of the organisation, and it’s important that it is clearly articulated and you have buy-in across the organisation.
The second pillar is people. The way you treat your people, the way you nurture talent, and the way you encourage and motivate your teams is absolutely essential – it’s the people in your organisation who are going to build and maintain the culture you want, so how you approach people management and the relationships you have with your people is vital.
The final element is structure, and that's the way that you deploy people and how you configure your teams so that you get optimal outcomes. Are the teams you’ve got working together well, and are they working towards your organisation’s strategic aims? Are you using the talent and skills you have at your disposal in the best possible way?
Most importantly, you have to recognise that those three components are working together and supporting each other. If they aren’t, chances are you’re going to run into problems. If you imagine a stool with three legs, if you take one of the legs away, the stool will fall over. If you cut one of the legs in half, the structure becomes wobbly. All three elements are of equal importance, and good leadership will pay attention to all those well.
You mentioned that it can be easy for education leaders to mistake management for leadership, or even just get bogged down in the day-to-day logistics of management tasks. What advice would you give school leaders in this position to help them move away from management and toward true leadership?
It's easy to get bogged down in an almost compliance mentality, where you've got a list of tasks in front of you and you’re just getting through those tasks to get the list off your desk. You’re almost running a sort of conveyor-belt approach.
For instance, in administration, you make sure you’ve responded to all of the regulatory requirements, your financial returns are up to date and on time, you’ve done all of your health and safety checks, make sure you’re compliant with any building regulations, and so on. But when you take a step back and look at how effective you are, there’s no proper financial plan, you could actually be running a deficit budget, and you’re going to run out of cash quite quickly.
To achieve successful leadership, you need to be able to step away from the day-to-day task-driven management and gain an understanding of the bigger picture. It’s about identifying if and where there are better ways to do things; can you support your staff and students better through technology? Is the way you prepare your students for exams the best way forward in the long term for the wider student population, or can you improve further?
Ask the bigger questions and innovate where you can.
If we take a step back for a moment, what in your opinion does a good leader look like?
Firstly, it’s important to remember that leadership is a privilege, and with it comes enormous responsibility that’s not to be taken lightly, not only in the functions that you’re carrying out and the levels of accountability but also to the people that you’re leading. We talk a lot about ethical leadership, and as leaders, I think we’ve got to keep asking ourselves tough questions. Is what I’m doing contributing to the greater good? Am I using my influence to make things better? Is this the right thing to do to support the people I’m looking after, not just now, but in the future?
In terms of what successful leadership looks like, good leaders create the space to think ahead and innovate. They give agency to their teams so that they can prioritise the bigger picture and create the space to think creatively about improvement. At its core, this is a culture issue.
It’s easy to say, of course, and much harder to implement when things are tight; we know that funding and resources are quite often scarce in the current education climate. But it is true what they say: if you’re not planning for growth, you’re planning for failure. The catch that puts so many people off is that in order to embark on innovation and change, there’s inevitably going to be a period of turbulence that people don’t want – but it’s so important! While it can feel painful to pause and create the space to do things differently, the rewards are enormous – and in relatively short order.
You mentioned today’s education climate. We talk a lot about the economic and political challenges in education at the moment. Do you think in light of the issues around funding and staff recruitment that being a successful and effective education leader today is becoming more complicated than it has been in the past?
I think in a bizarre sort of way it's almost easier to define yourself as a leader now because it is challenging. I think the question comes down to what we mean by good leadership. If everything's rosy in the garden, we've got loads of money and great kids and really super supportive parents and loads of time, then you almost don't have to be a great leader for things to work really well. In that context, you can just throw money or people or time at it, and in an environment where things are really straightforward, we could make the mistake of saying, well that was a really great leader because the outcomes are fantastic. No, they weren't great leaders, they just had a brilliant environment to work in.
But now the environment is incredibly challenging, so when we get fantastic outcomes, that's because there's been great leadership because it’s come about despite the fact they are constantly battling against their environment, not benefiting from it.
True leadership is always challenging, but I think it’s in times like these that we see great leaders really step up and show decisiveness and courage. It’s about being able to support and get the very most out of people in difficult times, and so yes, it’s challenging, but it’s also quite exciting because you can really make a difference. If you’re really passionate about what you do, that’s when you can change fortunes and change people’s lives, both your staff and your pupils.
Last question: how do you see ISBL helping school leaders to gain that crucial leadership oversight, and what are you doing to support them on that journey?
The professional community of school business leadership is incredibly diverse, both in terms of the settings that they support and also the role that they are performing. Within our membership, we’ve got administrators aspiring to be school business professionals and new entrants into the profession, as well as colleagues on pathways between junior SBPs all the way through to deputy CEOs. It is the responsibility of ISBL to provide a platform for everyone in our profession to have their voices heard, and over the coming months, we’ll be publishing a series of articles and live-streamed events to showcase the diversity and wealth of experiences right across our membership and the school business profession.
We know that as you move through your career journey, the focus shifts from undertaking tasks to managing entire functions or teams of people. Eventually, you get to the point where you are leading strategic plans and visions for a team or teams of people.
For us, given our membership is so diverse and everyone is at their own point in that journey, we have to be sensitive to the fact that our profession looks different for each member – the role they have, the way in which they work, and where they are in their leadership journey. It all comes back to our key reference point, which is our professional standards.
These standards tackle this really well. Each member will be on a different tier under our professional standards, and the support they receive from ISBL is uniquely tailored and sensitive to this – from the functions that we describe to the knowledge base you need to carry out the function and what you need to be able to progress to the next tier.
The first thing I’d say to any school business professional is engage with our professional standards. Have a look at where you think you sit on the journey, and we’re here to help and support you in your progression from tier one through to tier four. Even if you’re operating at the highest level already, there are ways we can help to stretch you further, whether that’s getting involved in government consultations, participating in research, or even starting to think outside of the education sector and using industry standards to improve practice. There are so many different opportunities available, regardless of your starting point.