In this episode, Claire meets with Andrew Midgley, headteacher at Raynville Primary School and interim headteacher at Carlinghow Primary School.

Andrew talks about how, initially, he had no interest in a teaching career after seeing how much work his parents, who were both teachers, had to do as he was growing up. However, this changed after he began helping his girlfriend’s son who was falling behind at school. This motivated Andrew to pursue a PGCE at Bradford University after which he ‘never looked back’.

Andrew reflects on how difficult a start he had with his first teaching appointment: a year 6 class with 35 pupils, no teaching support assistant and whose previous class teacher was off ill for a long period of time. On top of this, Ofsted visited to inspect the school and judge it as inadequate in Andrew’s first week. However, from that turbulent beginning, Andrew talks about his journey moving from a class teacher role to deputy headship to being seconded to one of the most challenging and worst-performing schools in Calderdale. Here, he turned around the school achieving good with outstanding features and even receiving an award from the Department for Education recognising the school as one of the top 50 schools in the country for sustained improvement.

From there, Andrew worked in a multi-academy trust followed by supporting leaders and working as a consultant, but eventually moved back to Leeds as a headteacher.

With Claire, Andrew discusses the challenges he has faced in his varied leadership roles and shares his experiences of helping to turn around schools in difficult circumstances. Within these discussions, he talks about the different strategies he has implemented and shares his thoughts on what has been successful.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Being a new headteacher can be lonely.
  Leadership roles – particularly at the top – can be lonely jobs and, as a new headteacher, there can be very few options for support. Having a mentor or close links to other experienced headteachers can be vital giving you someone to discuss difficult situations or decisions with. Nobody, even at the top, has all of the answers all of the time.
• Always be looking to learn from others.
  This is something teachers generally do anyway, but can particularly useful for anyone aspiring to be a leader in the future. Take time to look at how the best leaders interact with others, what decisions and actions they take and why they take them.
• If a task isn’t beneficial, ask why it needs to be done.
  ‘Because we’ve always done it that way’ cannot be a reason to continue doing something that serves no purpose. Tasks done for this reason alone can unnecessarily take up teachers’ valuable time. Leaders can help improve workload by periodically reviewing what staff are asked to do and question the benefits of doing them.
• Look for opportunities to gain more experience.
  Where you can, look to gain experience of teaching in different year groups, particularly if you aspire to lead a school in the future. While you don’t have to work in all phases of a school, it can really help to have experienced teaching in at least several different year groups as you will learn about the differences in approaches and structures which can be valuable in understanding how schools work and for building your own vision for a school.
• Always look to make use of other people’s expertise.
  While having first-hand experience of teaching across a school is very useful, many teachers and leaders have not done this, and it isn’t essential. Few leaders would say that they are experts in all phases of education and the best leaders actively seek out others who are experts in their phase and make the most of their knowledge and skills.
• Trust and communication are key to a good life/work balance for staff.
  Communication between leaders and staff about key events and ongoing aspects of their lives outside of school can really help. Coupled with trust and an understanding that some people, for different reasons, might need to start and end days earlier or later than others, or might work in different ways that suit personal circumstances, can really boost morale and help everyone feel more valued and settled with how they work. But different schools work in different ways and what works in one environment might not work in another.

BEST MOMENTS

“All new heads need some kind of stabilisers – like you do when you’re riding a bike – and that was vital to me because I was thirty-two and thrown into the most challenging school in the authority.”

“One of the biggest helps was learning from some fantastic headteachers that I’ve worked for. I like to see myself as an amalgamation of a few different headteachers: the good points that I’ve picked up and put together.”

“If I wouldn’t put my daughter in that room or with that teacher then I need to do something about it. First and foremost, what can I do to support the teacher to help the teacher to improve things?”

“It’s about ‘eating the frog’. Which is, if you had to eat a frog every day for the rest of your life to survive, when would you eat it? Well the answer is first thing in the morning because otherwise it just grows and gets smellier and sweatier. You get on with it. These difficult jobs, you have to do them, just do them.”

“The workload is always going to be of a particular level in a school, but it’s about making sure it’s appropriately manageable. Not having a meeting because on Thursday you always have a meeting. If there’s nothing to meet for that Thursday, do not have a meeting, because time is one of the most valuable commodities in a school.”

“Sorting out that respect, attitude and behaviour is a key thing. I started as the interim head the week before we broke up for Christmas. I was kicked, punched, spat at, all sorts of things. Not because the children were like that, but because the children had been allowed to behave like that for a period of time.”

“By valuing people, by acknowledging things, and by saying ‘I believe in you, what can you do for me, what can I do to help you?’ and letting them know that, hopefully helps the morale of the people there.”

“I don’t want teachers spending hours marking, I want teachers being ace teachers. It’s that simple.”

“Technology is great, but a lot of kids, even in my community, have got iPads, tablets, iPhones and whatever. I think real life experiences and people who can talk, getting these authors, getting these charities, getting these people into school … would give them so many wonderful experiences.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/

Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/

Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/

LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/

ABOUT THE HOST

Claire Riley

Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.

Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff.

Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend.

The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.