Whittling all the great howlers of my early career down to just five was not an easy task, I can tell you, but it has made for a valuable morning’s reflection and I hope this can benefit the aspiring HoDs out there. Here goes, in no particular order.
1. Unrealistic ambitions
Don’t expect it all to happen at once. After my PGCE I taught for four years before my first HoD role aged 27, and as far as I was concerned by 28 I was going to be running Britain’s flagship Classics department. There would be detailed differentiated schemes of work, groundbreaking advancements in ICT, a comprehensive speaker programme, day trips for each year group, an oversubscribed annual trip abroad, massively increased pupil uptake, spades of Oxbridge classicists, the best value added in the school, and so on, and so on.
Needless to say, it all took rather longer than that, and rather longer than it needed to – because I failed to prioritise. Even if you’re convinced you’re going to set the world alight, and you want to be applying for assistant headships in three or four years with a cover letter showing how you’ve revolutionised your department, I think you need to accept that some things will be a slow burn no matter how hardworking, charismatic and efficient you are.
I don’t mean just sit back and see how it goes either – having a vision and short to mid-term development plan is no bad thing. So ask yourself:
- What needs to be done right now? And how labour-intensive is it?
- How long will each of my dreams for the department realistically take (so I don’t get frustrated when it’s not there overnight)?
- How much of it must I do myself and what / how much can I reliably delegate? This is something you need to be patient about until you really know your team.
- Which of your methods in previous schools will work with these kids, this school culture, this school structure.
2. Ambushing the head
Heads are by definition successful, ambitious people and like it in their staff – but on their terms. The heads of my first and second schools were drastically different personalities, with rather different attitudes towards Classics in their schools, and I grasped that the hard way when I booked in to see the latter after a month and “told” him what I was going to do and what I needed to do it. He told me differently…
Plus, does the head care as much as you do about your department? I mean, they’ll want you to lead it well but that does not necessarily mean they value Classics per se as a priority for the school. Where does this head sit on the spectrum that ranges from “I’ll tolerate small classes and an expensive department for the image of us being a ‘proper’ school as long as they get good results and some Oxbridge” to “Classics has genuine academic value and I want to support the HoD in every way I can to deliver an excellent department?” Try to work that out (if they’re nearer the first they probably won’t tell you!) and handle them accordingly. Oh, and beware the classicist head (though I have yet to work for one myself) who will probably be very wary of being perceived as over-indulgent of your department.
- What is this particular head likely to respond best to?
- How much does this head actually want to hear from you about it, rather than take their own view on the state of your department?
3. Micromanaging the department
Managing teachers is like herding cats and I learned not quickly enough that personal relationships matter far more than policy documents. One of my weaknesses is that I am too much of a micromanager, and not a great delegator, but in truth most capable adults prefer to be left alone and will respond better when they are. My current department is mercifully populated by capable low-maintenance classicists but you always have to ask: are you striking the right balance between excessive micromanaging and being too laissez-faire?
- Who needs the most attention? The answer is unlikely to be as simple as the NQT needing more than the veteran. How do you keep the veteran fresh without them feeling patronised?
- How do you get the best out of teacher A as opposed to teacher B?
- How much detail do you really need on paper about policy X?
- How long do those schemes of work need to be? Are we being honest with ourselves about how closely they’re followed? (Especially if they’re ridiculously long – for me that’s the best guarantor that people will ignore them, even if they’re pretending otherwise.)
4. Avoiding the frontline duties
You cannot be the fac totum but it’s a lot easier to persuade people to buy into your vision if you are seen to be leading from the front. If there is extra work to divide out, make sure it’s clear that you’re doing your fair share (if not a bit more than).
I’ve witnessed HoDs incur deep resentment from their teams over perceptions of hogging the nicest teaching which is why I make a point of personally teaching as much of the GCSE Class. Civ. as possible as this always attracts a rather broader church than the languages!
At Warwick we are in the fortunate position of offering Greek all the way up the school. As well as generally inviting bids I now have a system of defining all groups into “nice” (6th form Latin and any Greek at all), “less nice” (Y8 Latin and GCSE Class. Civ.) and then the rest. I try to allocate evenly – though these things can never be an exact science – from all three categories and send the end result round as early as possible so people can physically see that they are being treated fairly.
- Is there something akin to this that you can apply so that nobody feels hard done by?
- Is what you’re doing completely transparent? (I find it very rarely needs to be anything else.)
- Does your team share your view on what is fair?
- Does your name appear enough but not too much on the “staff involved” part of the annual development plan you’ll have to kick upstairs?
- Does your team agree with your view on what are the most important uses of their time?
Maybe it’s an obvious point but beware management speak. Actions very much speak louder than words. There’s a lot of paperwork that comes with the territory of HoD, but make sure to reflect on whether you’re being a leader as well as a manager.
- How much of your time is being spent seeing to the day-to-day operation of your department and how much is going on your bigger picture of where you want it to be five years from now?
5. Neglecting your own classes
It’s insultingly obvious, but it’s all too easy to decide you’ve “cracked” teaching, or at least that you’ve got the bread and butter sorted to the point where you can coast a little, especially at the many and not always predictable pinch points a school middle manager will experience.
But it can actually be very demoralising, looking back at a week and knowing in your heart that for whatever reason most of your lessons have been “acceptable.” Yes, you will cut corners – experienced teachers will always do this when busy, and hopefully your promotion was at least partly the result of convincing someone you could cut it in the classroom – but it’s all too easy to get into the habit.
And it’ll invariably always be the younger non-exam groups who lose out. That might not matter in terms of their results which you don’t have to justify each year, but if you personally are not seen to be “getting it right” in your own classroom, you can expect your department’s uptake to suffer. And amid all the sea-changes in schools currently, and ephemeral fads which come and go with ever-increasing alacrity, I have yet to be convinced that Classics departments depend for their survival on much more than numbers and results.
On the other hand, if you were the young-un who would get excited by some brand new idea every ten minutes and had plenty of time to explore each and every one of them, you’d better accept that those days are over. Even if your teaching reduction looks reasonable, it’s a false economy. Now your job is to encourage others to do all that and I advocate coming to terms with that as soon as possible.
So there are my thoughts – a selective but substantial five. Let me know your views in the comments section below. All contributions heartily welcomed!
