We need great teachers in school, and we need lots of them.
We want as many top-tier educators to flood our classrooms and inspire our children as humanly possible. How can we create an environment that will attract and retain them?
Culture, rightly, is a building block of school improvement. It can’t be detached from a school’s mission statement, ethos, vision, values, behavioural approaches, curriculum, approaches to staffing, teaching and learning, etc. because culture underpins all of these things. By the same token, all of these drivers are part and parcel of a school’s culture.
School culture examined
A lot is made of culture. Who drives it, where it comes from, whether it is some sort of invisible entity, whether it is amorphous… The list goes on.
My view is that culture is anything but amorphous; it’s not some sort of abstract ideal. I’m yet to work in a school where if a headteacher says ‘no’ to an initiative or idea, it subsequently happens.
The head, as per the headteacher standards, should set the school’s culture. All leaders have a duty and moral responsibility to support and defend the culture that the head sets.
Culture is a fundamental cornerstone of the headteacher standards and with good reason. Therefore, culture is a manifestation of the head’s values, morals, ethos and educational beliefs. Leaders should embody this culture and defend it.
A few questions to ponder on when considering your culture are:
- What is it like to work and teach in your school, all day, every day?
- How often do you focus on and celebrate the positives within your school with your community?
- To what extent do you create a sense of belonging?
- Do you support teaching and learning so that feedback both enables and empowers staff to positively drive the curriculum?
A visible difference
Anyone visiting a school should be able to both feel and identify a school’s culture from the moment they drive into the school grounds. This culture should then manifest itself in the shared beliefs, routines, norms and traditions that are visible across the school.
The overall level of expectations and how people – all people – behave is another important representation of the culture generated in a school. The artefacts across the school serve as a visual representation to reinforce the culture.
It’s important to consider the following questions:
- What do you want the culture of your school to say about the type of school that you are?
- What do you want people to think your school stands for?
- How will you ensure that your culture is lived and breathed?
That last question is critical. Whilst arguably you can flip a school on its head quite swiftly, and for the better, it takes time to develop, teach and embed the culture that you want. Culture drives so many elements of school life.
A positive culture will support learning, wellbeing, workload, positive behaviour, character and attendance. Crucially, it has a huge impact on pupil attainment.
Real-world considerations
Whilst we can argue that school life is more than a set of academic outcomes, we also need to be realistic. A strong set of GCSEs and post-16 outcomes serve as an invaluable set of keys that open up the doors of opportunity for our children.
It also goes without saying that schools where pupils consistently achieve strong outcomes across multiple subjects invariably have teachers who consistently adhere to and uphold the culture of the school.
So, a challenge for leaders is to consider how clear, purposeful and easy to understand the culture of their school is. In short, do people get it?
A positive culture should allow teachers to teach, ideally disruption free. It should allow pupils to learn and for the social norm to positively shift. Crucially, though, it should inspire everyone to be proud of the school and demonstrate great pride that they work for and/or attend your school.
The other reality of a positive school culture (just like a negative one) is that it is infectious. It accumulates. You are able to build on it, year on year, and assuming you maintain an upward trajectory of positivity, you will find that your school gets better and better and better.
This is where the restless school analogy, courtesy of Roy Blatchford, really comes into its own. As you build your school, and both behaviour and the curriculum are able to take their grip, you can then look to really sharpen your school improvement saw.
Putting on the brakes
It’s equally as important as a leader that you know when to say no. What actually needs doing, what is twaddle and what serves as a major distraction from your goals?
I would recommend taking some time to consider the working week ahead and write down ten things you know you have to do. Then consider carefully whether those ten things help you to achieve your goals and/or actually need doing. Are they actually relevant? If not, ignore them.
This is challenging for us all because as teachers we do not like to say no and often feel hugely guilty when we do. As Dylan Wiliam says, ‘If we create a culture where everyone believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.’
In order to do this, the key thing you need to do is lead with care.
Sam Strickland is the principal of a large all-through school and has helped to guide its results from the bottom 20% nationally to the top 20% at GCSE level, and into the top 5% for A Levels. He has written a number of books, including They Don’t Behave for Me and Is Leadership a Race?.
