The third of five posts this week about who assures the quality of leadership in schools, and what happens when nobody does.
Picture a school office at ten past nine on a Monday.
There’s a parent at the desk who is angry about something that happened on Friday. There’s a child who has been sick and needs collecting. The phone has rung four times. A contractor has arrived without an appointment. There’s a payment run to authorise, a governor asking for a document, three staff absences to cover, a letter to go out to a whole year group before lunch, and a safeguarding referral that has to be logged properly and now.
And somewhere in there, a member of staff who has just been told bad news is standing in the doorway looking for someone to talk to, and the person behind the desk clocks it immediately and makes time.
That is a school administrator, or an office manager, on an ordinary morning.
I have never once seen that role described as leadership. It plainly is.
What the job actually contains
Strip it back to competencies and look at what’s being done.
Judgement under pressure, continuously, with incomplete information. Prioritisation across competing urgent demands. Discretion, in the proper sense of the word, about confidential information affecting families and staff. Financial responsibility. Communication on behalf of the institution, in its voice, to hundreds of people. Managing relationships with external agencies, contractors and suppliers. Emotional regulation of a public space, which is a real skill even though it appears in no job description.
In a great many schools, that person is also managing other people. And they are almost always holding a substantial amount of institutional knowledge that exists nowhere else in written form.
If you described that list of responsibilities without saying which sector it was in, nobody would hesitate to call it a leadership role.
Why we don’t call it that
Partly it’s history. Schools grew up with a professional hierarchy in which leadership meant teaching leadership, and everything else was administration or support, words which quietly signal secondary.
Partly it’s language. The phrase support staff is limiting. It positions a whole category of people as auxiliary to the real work, when a fair amount of the time they are the reason the real work can happen at all.
And partly it’s structural. Career pathways, development programmes, appraisal frameworks and leadership standards in education were built around teaching roles. Everyone else fell outside the architecture, and once you’re outside the architecture you’re invisible to every process the architecture generates.
What follows from that invisibility
Three things, all of them costly.
We don’t develop them. There is a serious professional infrastructure for developing teachers into leaders. There is almost nothing equivalent for a school administrator, a site manager or a senior teaching assistant who is leading people. They learn on the job, from whoever happens to be around, or they don’t learn at all.
We don’t assure the quality. Nobody assesses whether a school’s office is being led well. Everyone finds out informally, of course. You can tell within ninety seconds of walking into a school whether the front office is well run. But it isn’t part of any judgement anyone makes about the school’s leadership, which means a school can be judged well led while a significant part of its leadership is struggling.
We don’t plan for succession. This is the one that bites hardest. When a long-serving office manager leaves, schools routinely discover that a decade of accumulated knowledge, relationships and workarounds is walking out of the door, and that none of it was ever written down or shared. That is a leadership failure, but it is a failure caused by never having treated the role as a leadership role in the first place.
Not just the office
The same argument applies to several roles.
Site managers make decisions daily about safety, compliance, contractors and spending, and frequently manage a team. Catering leads run a small business inside the school, with staff, budgets, regulation and hundreds of customers a day who cannot go elsewhere. Senior teaching assistants often direct the work of colleagues and hold detailed responsibility for children with the most complex needs in the building.
All of them lead. None of them appear in the leadership structures we assess.
This was the point, in the work I’ve been describing this week, where we had to make a decision. It would have been simpler to look at the teaching leadership and leave it there. Including business managers, support leaders and governors made the framework considerably harder to build and harder to assess.
It also felt like the only honest option. If your claim is that you’re looking at leadership across a whole school, you cannot quietly exclude a third of the people doing it. What surprised me was that this felt like a bold choice at all. It shouldn’t.
The test
Here’s a question worth asking about your own organisation.
If you listed everyone who leads other people, holds a budget, manages risk or makes decisions on behalf of the institution, how many of them appear in your leadership development plan? How many have ever had a conversation about their leadership rather than their tasks? How many would be included if somebody came in to assess how well your school is led?
In most schools the answer is a fraction of the true number.
The difference between a well run school and a stressful one is often not the quality of the teaching. It’s whether the machinery around the teaching is being led well, by people we have decided not to describe as leaders.
Tomorrow: the people with the power to appoint and remove a headteacher, and how little assurance sits around them.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.