How can school leaders demonstrate competency, knowledge and skills in leadership?

This month, we’re focusing on the importance of demonstrating competency, knowledge and skills in leadership across the education sector. With many of our senior leaders shouldering the weight of a vast number of different functions – be that HR, finance, procurement, infrastructure, teaching and learning, or all of the above – we sat down with CEO Stephen Morales to talk about demonstrating leadership in today’s challenging climate, and how we can support each other to unlock the full potential of leadership.

Good morning Stephen, and thank you very much for sitting down with us today. We’ve talked previously about the need for leadership oversight internally and what good leadership looks like, but why is it important to be able to demonstrate that to other senior leaders in education, as well as your staff?

It's enormously important to be able to demonstrate good leadership, and that you’re making big decisions for the right reasons. That’s key. If we go back to the previous conversations we’ve had about the importance of moral and ethical decision-making, you want to make sure that this underpins your approach to leadership – making the right decisions at the right time to benefit the most people. Being able to clearly articulate the drivers and motivations for your actions is going to be the difference between getting the support you need and not.

So, the question is how do you provide other leaders, other colleagues and stakeholders with that assurance? You need to be clear. On the surface, it might appear that you're taking a particular course of action or you're advocating for an approach or even a policy because it serves your particular interest. You’ve got to take the time to demonstrate how that is not the case!

If you’re confident you’re making decisions for the right reasons, you need to be able to demonstrate that and build transparency into your leadership. For example, if you’re embarking on the growth of your trust and you're telling your community that this is because you believe this action will deliver better outcomes for your pupils, it’s up to you to make that case and make it with transparency.

A key part of leadership is communication. When it comes to demonstrating leadership externally, do you think there are particular communication skills you need to be comfortable with?

Absolutely – I think while the core principle remains the same, the style and the detail you provide different stakeholders may differ. The people closest to the problem you’re solving will understand the context much more intimately than, say, a wider stakeholder group who are more detached on a day-to-day basis.

Let’s say, for instance, you’re the chief executive for a multi-academy trust of 40 schools –you’re an important hub in the community. When it comes to discussing changes and putting together improvement strategies, how you talk about your plans with different groups is going to differ, quite significantly in some cases. You’ll need to discuss things with parents, staff, students, and the wider community, potentially including politicians and other school leaders who could be impacted by the decisions you make. The language you use, the tone and the emphasis will change according to the audience. As a leader, you need to be able to adapt and empathise with your audience.

Is there a benefit for the wider education sector when leaders are able to have those conversations and be confident in demonstrating good leadership?

Leadership is most definitely a well-trodden path, and there are plenty of examples of good – and bad – leadership out there. It’s easy to identify the characteristics that make up a good leader. A key element is the ability to inspire, to develop trust, to have a clear vision and unrelenting ambition with compassion and empathy.

Sometimes, these things work against each other – particularly if your ambition is driving you forward. Running full steam ahead might mean you leave some people behind, and that's not always good. Other colleagues might be a bit more nervous about the journey; perhaps they aren’t as confident or can’t keep pace, and that could be holding the momentum back. And that’s where you’ve got to be able to slow down and build trust, confidence and capability so that you can lead a wider group forward.

Looking at our fragmented education system and the variety of settings, we’re just beginning to acknowledge the level of complexity and the numerous functions that now exist within a school or trust. School leaders are asked to be experts in numerous different areas, often well beyond their own experience and background, and sometimes, this all falls on a single head.

So, the question becomes how do we lead across all these complex areas, and how are we sympathetic to the needs of each of the teams supporting them? How do we create more cohesion across the organisation?

My recent research, Barriers to joined-up leadership, tackles that very subject, and I think when it works well, the leadership pillars of pedagogy, business and governance all interact seamlessly and better understand each other's role.

You mentioned your research into barriers to joined-up leadership. What were the stand-out barriers and challenges that you found during the course of that research?

If you go back to the mid ‘70s when Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and soon after became Prime Minister, her approach was to move the responsibility for education delivery away from central government and local authorities into the hands of local head teachers. With that came a set of aims and expectations that teachers would be able to manage not only teaching and learning, but budgets, premises and all those other things. That’s a huge ask for head teachers to be highly knowledgeable about complex areas of business operations, essentially, and while they were supported by some industries, they were very much in the driving seat and expected to be fully accountable.

That’s an incredibly tough and probably unrealistic expectation to place on teachers. There was a phrase often bandied around, the ‘superhead’, who was supposed to be able to manage schools out of financial difficulty at the same time as improving people's outcomes and transforming children’s life chances.

I think we’re now starting to come to terms with the fact that if you don’t have the training and experience in those areas – HR, finance, procurement, infrastructure – that’s going to be a very difficult task to accomplish.

What the joined-up leadership research uncovered and helped us, sector bodies, think tanks and other school leaders to recognise is that if you have the right workforce in place, and you’re all complementing one another, it actually releases head teachers to do much better work.

We cite the NHS as an example in the paper, and they went through a very similar journey. You’d have medical professionals asking senior administrators how they could possibly understand how to run a hospital if they’ve never worked as a trained clinician, while the senior administrators would be posing a similar question by asking how doctors and surgeons run a hospital operation if all they know is medicine.

Over time, they have reconciled their differences, and there is now evidence of a better, more collaborative relationship between hospital leaders and their clinicians and a mutual understanding and appreciation of the professional skills and experience that both senior administrators and medical consultants bring to the table.

I think in education, we’re not quite there yet. Perhaps in some schools and trusts, the approach is a little more mature and more embedded between school business leaders and pedagogical colleagues. I think we do still need to recognise that a disconnect often still exists, and work to improve the situation rather than perpetuate this siloed working should continue to be an important priority.

How do you think the education sector can start to address this and begin to build more collaborative leadership between senior leaders?

There are several initiatives ongoing across education at the moment. For instance, we’ve been involved in the School Resource Management Adviser programme for quite some time, and the focus is to reflect on the approach to school resource management and, in particular, financial health and governance. 

We also piloted a CFO mentoring initiative that went really well and involved very capable CFOs talking to aspiring or new-in-post CFOs to create a learning journey over a period of six months. The feedback has been excellent, so we’ll be looking to roll that out in the coming weeks or months.

The ‘Academies regulatory and commissioning review’ was also published earlier this month, and that has set out three broad ambitions: to reform the regulatory system, to embed a clear definition of a quality trust, and to strengthen departmental support. Emerging from this, there’s a CEO development framework that will soon be out to tender, and providers will be encouraged to develop a curriculum and training programme against the development framework. 

An important part of this is the finance section. We’re encouraging the Department for Education to make sure the programme moves away from the historic approaches to developing senior leaders and includes an important focus on areas such as finance and HR and the ability to competently oversee and in some cases work alongside CFOs and COOS.

I think as a result of three key initiatives – the CFO pilot, the new CEO development framework, and the School Resource Management programme – we’re in a much better place to be able to respond to the growing complexity of our school system.

What advice would you give to someone looking to improve their leadership and begin addressing the concerns we’ve talked about today?

Engaging in those three initiatives would be my first piece of advice. They’re a great way to get involved in the conversation and start building better leadership throughout education.

At ISBL, we’ve also recently broadened our offer to include groups of schools – it’s referred to as the Trust Group offer, but it includes any school that is part of a federation or any other kind of formal, collaborative structure. In essence, it means that any part of your community – from any school or location – can access the support on offer at ISBL for a modest add-on if they already have a full membership.

By inviting everyone in the trust or group to participate, we hope to do two things. The first is to start to develop a succession pipeline and build talent that can perform more senior roles within the organisation over time while providing resilience, too.

Alongside that, we’ve recruited a group of expert consultants who are ready to support trusts with complex decisions and changes. It could be that a trust is contemplating acquiring more schools or considering whether they have got their central services provision right. It could be a question related to how the trust is developing its people and how to improve talent management.

As an institute, we hope to be able to provide access much more easily to highly capable individuals who are perfectly placed to be able to support trusts through challenging times. So, if you are struggling, reach out to us, and we can discuss the challenges you’re facing and provide you with everything you’ll need to be able to overcome them.