The Whole Culture Eating Strategy For Breakfast Thing

Culture, as I’m sure we’ve all read at some point, has a penchant for eating strategy for breakfast. Personally, for a fairly lengthy period of time during the early part of my professional career, I took very little heed of this statement and just assumed that it was simply another one of those platitudes that people more senior than me tended to display on flowery slides at the end of their INSET sessions. Once I took on my first school leadership role, however, and particularly when it was suddenly pretty much down to me to try to determine the culture of the schools I led, I began to realise just how important it is after all that – above all else – the culture of any organisation is one in which professionals can flourish.

Lots of people continue to underestimate the importance of culture within a school setting, however. Leaders may acknowledge it vaguely on SEFs and other pre-inspection documents or they may add throwaway lines to glossy prospectuses, online posts or the aforementioned inspirational presentations, but when you spend any time with them you very quickly realise that they actually view all talk of culture as some kind of fluffy, airy-fairy nonsense that has no real influence upon how effective the schools they lead actually are. To such people, a school’s culture is a sort of ethereal nothingness that those who’ve kind of lost their grip on reality harp on about and what really matters are meatier and more tangible things like exam results, putting students into detention for uniform transgressions and how many teachers you’ve put onto support plans this term.

The point about cultivating an intentionally positive culture and securing outstanding academic progress for students in a school that many professionals within the education sector seem to miss entirely, however, is that these things are most certainly not mutually exclusive. In fact, in my experience, actively pursuing the former often very much helps you to achieve the latter. Just because you give significant priority to establishing a climate which supports wellbeing, wellness and everyone generally being happy each day, this doesn’t mean that you’ve somehow gone soft or that you aren’t interested in either academic rigour or ensuring that high standards of teaching, learning and assessment are in place. Instead, working hard on having the right culture and climate in a school suggests to me that a leader is experienced enough to know that if you let things slip and the school you lead becomes a place where no one likes to be anymore then those exam results you’ve been chasing all year will probably end up nowhere near where you want them to be.

It’s the quality of human relationships in a school which make the biggest difference to whether or not it’s successful, not policies, processes and procedures. All elements are important, of course, and you can’t just do away with the vital rules and ways of doing things which make schools tick, but if you aren’t supporting the vital component of putting people first then most things don’t work very well at all. In her wonderful Talent Architects book, Mandy Coalter suggests that all schools should not only have what she terms a ‘people strategy’ but also that this policy needs to be the one which sits above all others: “Education is fundamentally a people business, and every school leader ought to be completely invested in their school people strategy.” This, in a nutshell, is the whole culture eating strategy for breakfast thing: if, as a leader, you’re not interested in looking after the colleagues you work alongside each day, then your school just isn’t going to be as effective as you’d like it to be. Culture really isn’t a fluffy nothingness that you’d should place on your list of pointless practices near to homeopathy and new-age crystal worship, it’s a vital part of school leadership and you should dismiss it at your peril.

In some school contexts, the culture is chaos, but not because there’s nothing that anyone can do about the external factors at play. Instead, such situations emerge because leaders feel comfortable in chaotic circumstances, often because this is all they’ve ever known during their time in education. When leaders ignore establishing a positive culture and focus solely instead on chasing higher and higher academic outcomes, no matter what the cost, then they essentially become very adept at creating very stressful places in which to work. Again, and we really need to stress this point (pun sort of intended), it is possible to help students to achieve excellent exam results by firstly developing a happy and positive climate in a school and it really doesn’t have to be the case that culture is forgotten about or even trampled all over in the pursuit instead of academic rigour and excellence. When the development and upkeep of a positive culture is overlooked in a school, leaders tend to spend much of their time fighting fires instead of thinking strategically and as a result all sense of enjoying working in a school – which really can and should be an overwhelmingly enjoyable experience – is lost. Leaders in such places may present as powerful and dynamic individuals from the outside looking in, but often what they’re doing is setting aggressive, adversarial behaviour as the norm and once all colleagues begin to copy these approaches and professionals are set against each other frequently, the culture can turn very negative very quickly indeed. Toxicity, here we come.

I’ve worked in places like the one described above, but I’ve also worked in and led other types of schools. There is, quite frankly, another way to the commonly prescribed approach of acting tough and hammering colleagues into the ground, one which supports both the wellbeing of all members of a school’s community and the achievement of outstanding academic outcomes. Again, mutual inclusivity is not necessarily something we need to worry about here. The basic building blocks of any successful school, both of which aid the development of a positive culture, are teaching and learning and student behaviour. You can have any number of fancy-sounding initiatives and impressively-titled programmes running in your school, but if you haven’t got excellent teaching and learning happening in classrooms and students behaving well most days, your strategies are going to be very much eaten for breakfast once again. To get both, you need to look after your teachers and other professionals, because if your teachers are either exhausted from the pressure you’re putting on them or they feel like you’ve not been treating them with the respect they deserve, they will have neither the energy nor the inclination to ensure that their teaching is of the highest standard or that students are supported to behave well.

Sometimes, it just takes a bit of experience to understand that there is a great deal of simplicity built into effective school leadership. There really is no need to overcomplicate things or to look to make your mark as loudly as possible with super-impressive strategies, instead it pays to keep things simple and to remain as positive as you can when supporting your colleagues. Just like how plants won’t grow in harsh climates, processes and initiatives tend to fall flat on their faces in schools where the culture isn’t right. When professional behaviours such as trust, kindness and a willingness to put others’ needs ahead of your own aren’t present and where leaders don’t model the positivity which is essential for cultures to thrive, schools can become very challenging places indeed, and plans can eventually fail. You can forget about your strategies if your culture isn’t working, because the latter needs to be fed.