Mini series: Whichever Way You Throw Me (Episode 1)
This week on Manx Maxim I am doing something different. Five posts, five days, five stories. Each one is a moment from my own career that helped make me the leader I am. The series takes its name from the Manx motto – Quocunque Jeceris Stabit. Whichever way you throw it, it will stand. Every Manx child grows up knowing those words. I have spent a career finding out what they mean. This is episode one.
In 2014 I was appointed to my first headship, at Dhoon School on the island’s east coast. If you have never been, Dhoon is small in the way that matters least and mighty in the ways that matter most. A school of that size cannot hide behind systems or scale. Everyone knows everyone. Every child is known by name, by story, by family, often by generation. When something goes well the whole community feels it, and when something goes wrong there is nowhere to stand except in front of it.
I inherited the school from the head who came before me. That word, inherited, is the right one, and it took me a while to understand why. A first headship arrives with a certain amount of ego attached whether you want it there or not. You have plans. You have ideas about what you will change and what you will build and what will carry your fingerprints. Then you walk through the door and discover that the school already knows exactly who it is. It had an identity long before you arrived and it intends to keep it.
The head before me had done his work well. The routines held. The relationships held. The community trusted the school, which is the hardest currency to earn and the easiest to spend. My job, I slowly realised, was to add to what was there rather than to prove I could replace it. Some of the best decisions I made at Dhoon were decisions to leave things alone. Nobody puts that on a leadership course. It might be the most useful thing I learned in my first two years.
I led Dhoon for eleven years. Along the way my role grew – Laxey joined in 2017, Willaston in 2023 – but Dhoon was the constant, the first school, the place where I learned the job by doing the job. Eleven years is long enough to see children arrive at four and leave at eleven, more than once. It is long enough to appoint staff, watch them flourish, and celebrate them moving on. It is long enough to stop being the new head and become simply the head, part of the furniture, part of the story the school tells about itself.
Then, in 2025, the story took a turn I could never have written. My role changed. I took on the executive headship of Scoill yn Jubilee, and Dhoon moved out of my group of schools. The headship was advertised. Applications came in. And among them was a name I knew well, because it belonged to the man I had inherited the school from eleven years earlier.
He applied. He was appointed. And the school I had been handed in 2014 passed back into the hands that gave it to me.
I found that moving, and I still do. There is a version of leadership thinking that would find it uncomfortable, as if a predecessor returning somehow unwinds your years in post. I felt the opposite. It seemed to me like the completion of something. He had given the school to me in good order. I worked for eleven years to hand it on in good order. And the person it went to was the one man on the island who could measure exactly what those eleven years had meant, because he knew precisely what the school was when he left it.
There is a thing every headteacher carries around and rarely thinks about. A set of keys. You get handed them on your first day, you use them for years without a second thought, and one afternoon you put them on somebody’s desk and walk out. Mine went back on a desk in 2025 and were picked up by the man who had handed them to me.
That is what the job is. You are looking after the keys. The building was there before you and it will be there after you. The community was formed long before your interview and will carry on long after your leaving do. The children belong to their families and to themselves. None of it is yours. You get a stretch of years in which you are trusted to look after it, and then you pass it on and somebody else does the same.
I believed something like that in a vague way when I started at Dhoon. I believe it concretely now, because I have seen the keys go round in a full circle.
Most small schools have a version of the same saying, the one about how once you have been here you are one of us for life. It gets said to children at leavers’ assemblies, usually with a lump in a few throats, and I always took it as a lovely thing to tell an eleven year old on their way out of the door. I did not expect it to apply to headteachers. Then I watched a man walk back to a desk he thought he had left for good eleven years earlier, and I understood that it runs in both directions. A school holds on to the people who held its keys.
Here is what the story left me with, and why it opens this series. Early in your leadership life you think the job is about what you build. Later you understand it is mostly about what you look after. Every school I lead now gets something my first headship gave me: the knowledge that I am a chapter in that school’s story rather than the other way round. That knowledge shapes my daily decisions more than any framework I have studied. It makes you braver in some ways, because a school’s interests get clearer once your own get smaller. And it makes you gentler in others, because everything you are thinking of changing was built by somebody who cared about it.
Whichever way you throw it, it stands. The school stood before me, stood with me, and stands after me, in the care of the man who cared for it first. I was only ever looking after the keys, and I am glad of who has them now.
Tomorrow: two schools, two deputies, one amalgamation, and a return ticket I did not know I was holding.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.
