Mini series: Whichever Way You Throw Me (Episode 2)
Episode two of Whichever Way You Throw Me, a week of stories from my own career and what each one taught me about leadership. The series takes its name from the Manx motto, Quocunque Jeceris Stabit.
In 2011 I was appointed deputy headteacher of Murrays Road School in Douglas. A junior school, Years 3 to 6, single site, with a separate infant school called Ballaquayle a short walk down the road. Two schools, two headteachers, two staff rooms, two identities, serving what was in truth one community of children who moved from one to the other at seven.
The decision was taken to bring them together. On paper an amalgamation is an administrative act. You merge two school rolls, agree a structure, choose a name, print new letterheads. In practice it is one of the more delicate pieces of work a school leader can be asked to do, because you are asking two communities to give up something they love in order to become something that does not exist yet. Nobody hands their school’s name over lightly. Staff who have given fifteen years to a place do not want to hear that the place is being replaced. Parents chose one of those schools deliberately. Children are rightly proud of the identity their school gives them.
What happened next was, as far as I know, unusual. For a year the two schools remained legally separate while we prepared to become one. I was deputy of Murrays Road. The deputy at Ballaquayle held her own school in the same way. And rather than each of us guarding our own patch until the day the doors joined, we were both appointed deputy of both schools. She held Murrays Road with me. I held Ballaquayle with her. Two deputies, two schools, one shared responsibility for all of it, a full year before the amalgamation was formal.
I have thought about that year more than almost anything else in my career, because it did something I did not appreciate at the time. It made the merger real long before it was official. You cannot spend a year walking into a building as its deputy and still treat it as the other school. You learn the names. You learn which corridor floods, which class needs watching, which member of staff will tell you the truth when you ask how something is really going. You start to be trusted, and trust is the thing that actually amalgamates schools. The legal date is just the paperwork and the admin catching up.
We became Scoill yn Jubilee. A Manx name in recognition of the late Queen’s Jubilee anniversary, a new badge, and a new identity built out of two older ones. And in 2014 I left, appointed to the headship at Dhoon School, which is where episode one of this series began.
That should have been the end of the story. I was there for the hardest part, I helped build the thing along with many other others, and then I moved on and it ‘belonged’ to other people. That is how most of these stories go, and there is nothing wrong with it. You leave, the school carries on, and it stops being your story.
However, in September 2025 I walked back in as executive headteacher of Scoill yn Jubilee. Eleven years away. The same school, now well established under a name that once felt brand new, on more than one site, with a generation of children who have never known it as anything else. Some of the staff who were there when I left are there now. Some of the children I taught are old enough to be sending children of their own.
There is a strange feeling in returning to something you helped create. You get to see the answer to a question you had to abandon halfway through. Was it the right call? Did the thing we build hold? I spent 2014 leaving with the amalgamation still fresh and largely untested, and I spent September 2025 walking through a school where that merger is simply the past. It had held. Whichever way it was thrown, it stood.
The other half of that year came back too. The deputy who held Murrays Road with me while I held Ballaquayle with her is now a co-opted governor at the school. We sat around the same table again, more than a decade on, in different roles, with the same interest in the same children. I am so glad she agreed to come back. There are people who understand the DNA of a place because they were there when the DNA was written, and there is no substitute for that knowledge.
Here is what the amalgamation taught me, and what I have carried into every restructure, federation and change programme since.
Structural change does not create unity. It creates the conditions in which unity becomes possible, and then people have to do the rest. The year of two deputies holding two schools worked because it forced relationships to form before the structure demanded them. If we had waited for the legal date and then introduced ourselves, the merger would have taken years longer and cost far more in goodwill. Every time I have led change since, I have looked for the equivalent of that year – the thing you can do early that makes the eventual change feel like a formality rather than a shock.
The second lesson is about ownership. I could have spent that year protecting Murrays Road. It would have felt loyal. It would also have been the surest way to sink the whole project, because a merger in which both sides are defending is not a merger. What we did instead was hand each other the keys. It felt uncomfortable and it was the right thing.
And the third lesson is the one this series keeps circling. You do not own the schools you lead. I was part of the team that helped build Jubilee, I left it for eleven years, and it did not need me in order to succeed. It got on with it. The best evidence that you built something worth building is that it works fine without you, and if you are very lucky, you get to walk back through the door years later and see that for yourself.
Tomorrow: a field in Onchan during the first lockdown, and the strangest morning of my career.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.