Mini series: Whichever Way You Throw Me (Episode 3)
Episode three 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.
I have lived in Onchan all my life. I went to school there as a boy. I live there now, a few minutes from where I grew up. On an island of circa eighty-six thousand people this is not remarkable, and it is not something I have ever thought much about. It is just the shape of my life.
Then came March 2020.
The Isle of Man closed its schools along with everyone else, but the model the island adopted was distinctive. Rather than every school opening its doors a crack for the children of key workers, most schools closed completely and a small number of hubs were established across the island. Children of key workers went to a hub. Staff were rostered to run them, drawn from schools all over, working with children they had never met, in buildings that were not their own.
My schools were designated as closed, and headteachers across the island were put on a rota to staff the hubs. There was nothing noble in it. Everybody took their turn, the same as everybody else, and the rota decided where you went.
I went to Onchan. I blogged about it at the time.
There is a particular feeling in walking through the gates of the primary school you went to as a kid to take your turn on a rota at the age of forty-something during a global pandemic, and I have never found the right word for it. The building was familiar in the way a smell is familiar, immediately and without permission. I knew the layout before I was shown it. I knew where the hall was, where the corridors turned, roughly where the classrooms sat. Nothing about the place had to be explained to me. I had simply never seen any of it from this side.
It was quiet. That is the part people who were not in schools during those weeks find hardest to picture. A primary school with a handful of children in it makes almost no sound. No bell worth ringing. No queue for the hall. The children who were there were the children of nurses, police officers, carers, shop workers, the people holding the island together, and they came in each day into a version of school that had most of the fixtures and none of the noise.
At some point during those weeks I found myself standing out on the school field. I do not remember what took me out there. What I remember is looking up, and seeing the house I grew up in over in the distance, and the road my own house sits on, and realising that everything I have ever been was visible from where I was standing.
The boy who ran around that field. The house he went home to. The road he lives on now. The school he was standing in that morning.
My whole life, out there for anyone to see, and all of it inside a two mile radius. Now that was small.
That is the sensation I have never quite shaken. Small as in contained rather than small as in diminished. My whole life, which from the inside has felt like a series of decisions and moves and appointments, was sitting there in one view, and you could take it in without turning your head. A field, a house, a road. Forty years.
I am wary of turning a strange morning into a leadership lesson, because some experiences are just experiences and the world does not need another headteacher extracting five bullet points from a pandemic. But that morning changed something in how I think about the work, and it is worth being clear about what.
The first thing is roots. There is a school of thought in leadership that treats mobility as ambition, that the serious leader is the one who moves on, moves up, moves away. I have never been that leader and I stopped apologising for it in that field. Everything I know about the communities I serve comes from being of them. I know what it means to grow up on this island. I know the roads the children travel, the families they belong to, what they will be judged for when they leave and the pull that brings so many of them back. That is not a limitation on my leadership. It is most of the material.
The second thing is scale. Standing there, the whole story of my life took up about two miles of coastline. It is a useful correction. Leadership can inflate your sense of the importance of the things in front of you – the inspection, the meeting, the disagreement that has kept you awake. Seeing your entire existence contained in a single view does something to that inflation. The work matters enormously and I am a very small part of it, and both of those things are true at once.
The third thing is about community, and it is the most practical. Those hubs ran because dozens of people did jobs that were not their jobs, in buildings that were not their buildings, for children who were not their children. Nobody’s contract described any of it. It worked because the island’s education system, when everything else was stripped away, turned out to be made of people who would show up. I have never needed a stronger argument for investing in staff than the memory of that spring. When the structures fall over, the culture is what is left standing, and the culture is just what people are willing to do for each other.
I took my turns at Onchan over a matter of weeks and then the world moved on, hubs closed, schools reopened and the enormous business of catching up began. But I still drive past that field. I see it most days.
The motto says that whichever way you throw it, it will stand. I had always taken that as a statement about resilience, about landing on your feet. I think now it is also a statement about roots. Some things stand because they are anchored to a particular patch of ground, and they cannot be thrown far because that is where they belong.
Tomorrow: the first headteacher on the island asked to lead two schools, then three, and the day I had to decide where to stand.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.
