You can't turn off the machine: investing time in school leadership

Top takeaways

• Schools can't "pause" to fix issues. Unlike businesses, schools must juggle daily demands and long-term improvements simultaneously. This makes innovation challenging but necessary.
• You can't do everything. Both leaders and teachers face an overwhelming variety of tasks, from strategic planning to immediate problem-solving. Recognising limits and embracing the unpredictability of school life is crucial.
• Prioritise your time. Identify your key goals and align your daily actions to move them forward. Use quieter periods strategically for big tasks and stay mindful of the rhythm of the school day.
• Meetings aren't always the answer. Evaluate the necessity of meetings and explore alternatives like shared documents or messaging systems to save time and streamline communication.
• Flexible leadership works. Empowering teams with autonomy and flexible working arrangements can improve retention, decision-making, and overall effectiveness – part-time senior leadership is possible with the right structure.

Listen to the recording (25 minutes) or read an edited version below. 

Caroline Doherty is Head of Public Affairs at Ark. 

You can’t turn off the machine

Liz: You’ve had a varied career journey, starting out as a teacher, working in charities and in research, and at The Key as Head of Education – very much championing the school workforce, but in a commercial organisation. Now you’re within an academy trust, as Head of Public Affairs at Ark. I wonder what are some of the things that you’ve noticed, or surprised you, about being in the school environment? 

Caroline: I’ve had a squiggly career journey! I had been on the voluntary and public sector side of things until spending seven years at The Key, in a variety of roles. Towards the end of my time there I was spending a lot of time with some trust CEOs, and really getting a sense that this is where innovation is coming from in the education sector. 

In trusts, you have people who’ve come up a very pure education journey – teachers, headteachers, directors of education. And you've got people who have come from very different professional backgrounds, increasingly specialists or technicians from specific areas. 

Then you get this really interesting interplay between those two groups. People from outside education can give a broader perspective on how we do people and operations in commercial settings. And what can we learn about that and apply to education? 

Schools are very different to businesses. We don't have an option not to do things. We can't specialise to the degree that you would if you were running something commercial. We’ve got to do all of the subjects, all of the sports and other things. 

We can't turn off the machine and reboot it. We can't redesign our factory. We can't stop production, or stop taking children while we just rewire everything. 

So, how much of your time is taken up with business as usual activity, the things that you have to do, and how much thought are you giving to innovation and improvement? What’s the balance between the two? 

You can’t do everything

Liz: Schools are very much about relationships, with a huge number of interactions taking place on a daily basis. And sometimes those interactions are very important, aren't they? You've got the opportunity to make a difference to a child's day in how you react to something. Or taking that time to have a conversation with a parent now might save a more serious complaint further down the line. 

Caroline: I think it's about knowing when to have a sort of a system and a process for things and knowing when you just have to jump in and do it anyway. 

I think that's what I find really fascinating about the role of a school business leader. One minute you could be dealing with millions in your management accounts, and the next moment, a bit of the roof has fallen into the playground, and you're just going to have to get out there and sort it out. 

Sometimes that can cause stress and anxiety: people might be doing things they feel are not their jobs, or feeling a personal failure because they didn’t get to do the thing they intended doing. I think you have to embrace the variety and the nature of it!

The same is true with teachers as well. Teachers are having to do a lot more pastoral work to help children and families in different ways, but being constantly told that they shouldn't be doing that is part of what creates the tension and the distress. It's not possible to do everything to the degree you might want to. 

Where do you need to invest your time?

Liz: If time is one of our most precious resources, how do you go about working out what's the best use of your time at that moment? 

Caroline: I think that's a really great question, and I have to caveat this by saying I'm no expert in productivity. But I think there is an important balance to be struck.

And again, this speaks to the fact that you can't turn off the machine while improving your systems and processes. Where do you need to invest time? Is it in researching practice from other places, doing professional learning, taking time out to think about that? 

Spending that time can save me time or money further down the line. So ring fence that time and make sure it isn’t the thing that drops off your to do list every week. 

We know finance is really difficult to budget beyond the here and now in lots of cases. But I think particularly for leaders with more of a strategic responsibility, taking that time, having that plan, is really important because it can be very motivational as well to see a shift as a result of that thoughtful, high level work. 

Understanding the rhythm of the school day is important. Obviously, the unpredictable can happen at any time, but we do know the parts of the school day where things are more likely to happen. 

But, doing a task at that moment that you can easily stop and wade into whatever is occurring, is better than trying to do something urgently that has to be done today at the same time as five people are shouting at you.

So there's definitely something about working with the pattern of your day and the rhythm of the year as well, for example having that more structured time in the holidays when you might be supervising construction projects or doing whatever else is needed in the building. Think about how you can optimise your quieter time for those bigger tasks. 

For motivation, I tend to have just one, two or three things that I have to get done that day. They might be big, they might be little, but know that when you do find the time, that's the thing you're going to prioritise. So when you sit down at your screen again, you’re not saying, ‘Oh, what was I supposed to be doing?’

And at the end of the day, tick. I've done something, even if I've done 20,000 other things, I got something done that I wanted to get done. 

Think about the things that you really need to be doing, your objectives, the things that you really want to move forward on, and work out what percentage of your week you should be spending on that, then what percentage of your week are you spending on it, what is stopping you, and who else could be doing that work?

Yes, of course there are times when you just need to muck in and help with what’s needed. But, if you’re a school business leader, you know as much as anybody about what everybody’s getting paid and who is doing which work and why. 

Think about your senior leaders: what can they spend their time on that will make the biggest difference? Can you justify what they’re spending time on? 

Do you really need that meeting?

Liz: It might be an interesting exercise at some point to tot up the value of a meeting or the cost of a meeting in terms of people time. 

Caroline: Absolutely. Face to face meetings are really important and necessary sometimes, but look at different kinds of models for exchanging and sharing information – because that’s what a lot of meetings start with, isn’t it? 

What if instead there was a document or instant messaging system, like Teams, where people could put ‘here are five things I did last week and here are two things I’m worried about this week’ or whatever, and you could get cracking on that straight away.

There’s also the associated faffing that goes with meetings – somebody changing the time and then all of the emails that fly around. That’s something that was definitely a change, coming from a commercial organisation to a multi-academy trust – a lot of email. 

Sometimes emails can give the illusion of stuff happening, but if people are responding on the fly, aren’t fully focused and addressing every point, then you can unleash a whole load more emails!

Flexible working in practice

Liz: You’re also a Chair of Governors in a local authority school, which is quite a different sort of context. With one headteacher responsible for everything, I imagine that it’s very easy for the flow of the working day to be disrupted!

Caroline: We're a local authority school in Hackney and we have quite a lot of additional funding for SEND. We have a really high number of children with EHCPs, a very complex cohort.

We have a large leadership team and from a budget perspective, we're able to offer them all flexible working which has made a huge difference. And our head is four days a week. The deputy is substantive head on the day that she's not in, and will by and large just deal with everything.

If you have a structure like that, you can definitely make people feel empowered to take decisions. We’ve done a lot with both the governing board and leadership team to give people confidence. They know that the head is still there to check in with, but are happy to just get on with things. 

And I think that makes a difference if you can genuinely give work away. It's hard, particularly if you're in a school business leadership situation, and you feel responsible for a lot of compliance issues and you want to reassure yourself that things have been done, and they've been done to the highest standard. But genuinely making people feel that they have some autonomy, they can make decisions and that they have your trust, will be much better for them and much better for you in the long run.

Liz: It’s great to hear that you’ve got flexible working on the part of a senior leader, a headteacher in fact, working in practice. One of the things I feel I'm hearing from the profession is that there's still a perception around that you can't be a senior leader and work part time.

Caroline: Again, I'm sure people will be wondering how this all adds up. We are relatively well-funded per head. We’ve got 50% pupil premium students. We’ve got a really high incidence of children with special educational needs, and strong leadership input is key to how we manage that complexity of the cohort.

Our model is adaptive. Sometimes we need more people, more time in the classroom, some more time on leadership. And, it's been a really important retention strategy for us. We've got great retention among senior staff as a result of it.

But it isn't necessarily an option that people feel is available to them and there is a cultural piece. Because if the head wasn't in a position where she wants to work flexibly, it might be quite different. I think people do have to see it to believe it.