An Assumption Of Incompetence

I’ve been a teacher for a long time so maybe I’m bound to write this, but teachers are brilliant. Most professionals who have also been involved in education for a while (and not necessarily as long as me) would probably say the same thing, I suspect. Many teachers enter the profession already as enthusiastic and highly-skilled people on a mission à la John Keating in Dead Poets Society but it really doesn’t take long before they have developed personal and professional attributes on the job that those who chose to pursue other careers take years to gain. Very quickly, teachers become resilient professionals who are accustomed to withstanding an almost constant deluge of criticism and challenge from both within their organisations and via external sources; they develop an ability to think swiftly and clearly in order to manage the myriad of metaphorical plates which they must keep spinning in front of them at all times; their time-management skills reach levels of efficiency that put colleagues in most organisations to shame, because there is no other choice and the alternative is to not do some of the essential tasks required of them which would mean the whole multifaceted teaching thing that they do just not working at all. The problem is, however, that for some genuinely inexplicable reason not everyone sees the brilliance of teachers, especially UK journalists and certain political commentators who particularly enjoy a spot of lazy-teacher bashing, and perhaps worst of all, some of these people are either school leaders or even higher up the chain and in leadership positions in either local or central government or in one of the many MATs which hold a considerable amount of power in the current educational climate.

Writing as one myself, a bottom line for me is that leaders must absolutely trust the teachers in their schools as professionals. There can be no middle ground here – you either trust them to do a great job in the classroom and to fulfil any wider professional responsibilities well, or you don’t. For too many and for far too long, in my experience, this has not, however, always been the case. Indeed, it has often seemed that many leaders begin from an assumption of incompetence on the part of their teachers which leads to a great deal of micromanagement becoming the norm. In such climates, it’s not unusual to find highly prescriptive lesson observation schedules with make-or-break judgements subsequently hung around teachers’ necks and appraisal processes in place which seem designed to distract teachers from the thing that they’re actually employed to do well (teaching, in case you’re wondering.) The thing about saying that you trust someone in a professional sense, however, is that if you do make this announcement then you really have to both mean it and prove it with your actions. It’s no good spouting off about how a teacher is trusted just before you put a six-week support package in place for them. As noted by Steve Munby in Imperfect Leadership, “If there is a disconnect between our rhetoric and our behaviours, then trust is lost and the organisation is in trouble.”

When you break a great school down to its most important parts it is almost always about great teaching (and thus great teachers!) and great leadership. Leaders need to present in a simple and clear format what is expected of the teaching in terms of quality and standards and then it’s very much up to the teachers to play to their own strengths in order to meet those expectations. Simple. On the flip side, leaders should also not assume that their teachers are so great that they don’t need to be told what is expected of them, but it would similarly go too far in the other direction to tell them and constantly check that they’re doing everything perfectly. Make it clear what you want and then let them get on with it with the right amount of monitoring in place. Of course, if a teacher clearly isn’t up to the required standards then leaders should support them to improve until it’s obvious to all that there is nothing else that can be done to help and then find someone else who can do the job well, if necessary. But all the way through this process it is vital that leaders trust their teachers to do a great job and, perhaps even more importantly, that teachers know that they are trusted by their leaders.

The high-accountability systems that exist in UK schools and which have been both the norm and the preferred means of operation for so many for such a long time now are clearly based on mistrust rather than trust. When either inspectors arrive at a school or the senior leaders who have become convinced that this kind of power trip is something to emulate conduct their learning walks or deep dives they are, let’s be honest, all too often starting from a negative position which translates as something like prove to us that you’re not inadequate. My biggest problem with this approach is that a hugely disproportionate and damaging amount of time is spent by middle and senior leaders creating dossiers and compiling folders simply to ward off accusations of not being very good and which do very little to actually improve either the professional development of the teachers or, crucially, the academic performance of the students in their care. Instead of asking teachers and school leaders to plot everything on a graph and to justify everything using whatever the preferred edujargon of the week is (retrieval practice, anyone?) just trust them to do a great job, even if this causes those who have become indoctrinated to worshipping at the alter of high-accountability to spit out their triple venti half-sweet non-fat caramel macchiatos onto their overly-priced Next brogues.

Radical, perhaps, and it would certainly represent a break from the power-walking norm but I genuinely believe that instead of high-pressured scrutiny by data-driven leaders what teachers need more than anything to perform to the best of their abilities is the time they need to do their jobs and the trust of their leaders that they will do them well. Clearly, as stated earlier, leaders also need to be certain that there are no teachers on the staff body who are not meeting the agreed expectations so monitoring systems do need to exist, but lesson visits can be designed to be about teachers learning from each other so that individual and collective improvements can be secured rather than so that single teachers can be graded, criticised and made to feel like they’d rather work in Tesco instead because they only ticked ninety nine of the one hundred boxes that can be found on the unnecessarily complicated observation sheet which was designed by a highly ambitious AHT during one of their many PPAs. Just like how plants grow in the right conditions, so too do teachers when their school is focussed upon ensuring that professional improvement is at the centre of everything that takes place. There are very few teachers who either enjoy being told that they’re not good enough or who flourish under conditions where trust is clearly absent; what works better, in my experience, is when teachers know that their leaders are happy for them to build upon their strengths at the same time that they can work upon their weaknesses by learning from those around them. Remove the pressure and replace it with trust and a commitment to learning, which is perhaps exactly what Sir Alex Ferguson meant when he wrote the following in Leading: “There’s nothing more reassuring for a manager than to feel that he has the support of his boss. It’s as true for young people taking their first job, who are at the bottom rung of an organisation, as it is for a leader wanting to know that he is backed by his board of directors.”

It also goes without saying that trust works both ways. Leaders trusting their teachers to do a great job in the classroom should definitely be the preferred position for schools but it’s also vital that teachers trust their leaders to do what is right for them. This doesn’t always mean, to be clear, that teachers will get everything that they either want or feel that they need in order to be successful but rather that they know that their leaders are constantly making the right calls for the right reasons. Tough decisions are often inevitable in schools and there are frequently colleagues who have to go without their perfect timetable or who have to do something that they’d rather not do, but there should still be trust present that those at the top are doing what they can to make the whole organisation more effective, even if this does mean that some people have to do things a bit differently every now and then.

Currently, of course, we find ourselves as a global educational community in the midst of a pandemic which has forced schools everywhere to operate under very different circumstances, at least in the short-term. In almost all countries, school leaders and teachers have needed to come up with systems that enable their educational provision to continue but without students and teachers actually being on site. The necessary online teaching and learning models, although they have taken many different forms, have been effective (wherever this is actually the case) because school leaders have trusted teachers to be innovative in terms of either using their subject knowledge to create appropriate independent learning tasks for students or using emotional intelligence to develop a range of sessions that are right for the needs of the classes and the students who they know so well. Where they haven’t worked is in schools where leaders have insisted upon a much more prescribed way of doing things, where a tickbox approach has remained because those in charge honestly seem to think that this is how things should be even when there’s a global crisis to contend with. Teachers have stepped up and proved their brilliance and their value to society like never before, even if certain entrenched attitudes of the media have continued to make their way into articles about teachers not wanting to go back to work (even though schools never really closed in the UK anyway), and they have proved just how vast and diverse their skillsets are in having to operate almost entirely outside of their normal environments. Knowing that someone trusts you makes you more confident and nearly always makes you do better, right? For school leaders everywhere, this simple approach is one which I would suggest is adopted at all times.