The last of five posts this week about who assures the quality of leadership in schools, and what happens when nobody does.
I was at the O2 in London last night watching Ariana Grande, which isn’t how I expected to open the final post of a week about leadership quality assurance.
At one point in the show she is lifted into the air above twenty thousand people. There is no real staging beneath her. Nothing but light, a bit of smoke, and a very long way down. Everybody has their phone up. It looks completely effortless, which is the point.
It is, of course, the least effortless thing in the building.
Somewhere out of sight are the people who load-tested that equipment. There will be certificates. There will be a crew whose entire job is inspecting things that will almost certainly be fine, and then inspecting them again this afternoon, and again tomorrow in a different city in front of a different twenty thousand people. Nobody in that industry says the rig has been fine all tour, leave it alone.
I stood there thinking about that, which is possibly not what the ticket was for.
Why that assurance exists
The reason live entertainment assures its rigging so obsessively is not that the industry is unusually virtuous. It’s that the consequence of failure is immediate, visible and catastrophic.
If the rig fails, it fails in front of everyone, at once, on twenty thousand phones, and by morning it’s a news story. The feedback loop between the failure and the consequence is about a second and a half long.
That is the shortest feedback loop imaginable, and short feedback loops produce rigorous assurance. It’s why aviation is safe. It’s why operating theatres run checklists. When failure is fast, obvious and attributable, systems build the machinery to prevent it.
Which brings me to the problem I’ve spent this week describing.
The bill
All week I’ve been writing about leadership quality in schools and where it goes unassured. Subject leaders. Phase leaders. The school office. Site managers. Senior teaching assistants. Governors. Twenty or thirty people leading something in an average building, and almost none of it ever looked at as leadership.
An absence is easy to shrug at. If nothing visible is going wrong, it’s reasonable to ask whether the gap really matters.
So this last one is about the bill, and who ends up paying it.
Staff pay first. People do not usually leave schools because of children. They leave because of how they are led, and most of the leading that a teacher experiences day to day is not done by the headteacher. It’s done by a phase leader, a subject leader, a SENCo, a line manager two rungs down from the top.
Somebody who has never been taught to lead a team doesn’t cause a scandal. They cause a slow accumulation of small costs. Meetings that generate work rather than removing it. Feedback that lands badly because nobody ever showed them how to give it. Conflict avoided until it becomes a formal process. A good colleague who quietly disengages over eighteen months and then leaves for reasons they describe on the exit form as personal.
None of that appears on a dashboard. All of it is expensive.
Then the school pays. Turnover costs far more than the recruitment advertisement. There’s the process, the time of everyone involved in it, the risk that in a tight market you don’t get anyone good, the induction of whoever arrives, and the eighteen months before they’re operating at the level of the person who left. There’s the institutional knowledge that walked out and the family relationships that have to be rebuilt from nothing.
In a small jurisdiction like ours there’s a further cost that bigger systems don’t feel as sharply. The pool is finite. Every good person who leaves the profession here is not replaced by an equivalent from somewhere else. They’re simply gone.
And in the end children pay. I want to be careful not to overstate this, because it would be easy to reach for something dramatic and it wouldn’t be true.
Weak middle leadership does not produce a catastrophe for children. What it produces is the difference between an adequate year and a brilliant one. A child in a settled team with well-led adults gets teachers who have energy left for them. A child in a churning, anxious team gets teachers doing their best while carrying something heavy. Both classrooms look similar from the corridor. They are not the same experience.
Multiply that across a school and across years and you have a real difference in what children get. It will never show up as a headline figure, because it’s diffuse and gradual and there’s no measure pointed at it. That doesn’t make it less real. It makes it invisible, which is worse.
So, back to that rigging at the Ariana Grande concert…
Here’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about the O2.
That rig gets assured because failure is instant, visible and attributable. Leadership failure in a school is none of those things.
It’s slow. It surfaces two years later in somebody’s resignation letter, or in a team that has quietly stopped taking risks, or in a school that always seems to be slightly short-staffed and nobody can say why. By the time it shows, the cause is far enough back that nobody connects the two.
It’s diffuse. The cost is shared out between a dozen people in small amounts, none of which looks like a crisis on its own.
And it’s rarely attributable. It almost never arrives labelled as a leadership problem. It arrives labelled as recruitment difficulties, or workload, or morale, or bad luck.
So it never triggers the response that a visible risk would. There is no moment where somebody says, right, we need a system for this. There’s just a slow bleed that everyone absorbs.
The strange asymmetry
We assure almost everything else in schools.
Safeguarding has frameworks, audits, statutory duties and training requirements. Finance has audit. Health and safety has inspection. Curriculum and teaching quality have decades of research, professional standards and external judgement. The fire alarm gets tested weekly and logged.
Leadership quality, beyond the headteacher and the senior team, has almost nothing. No framework, no assurance, no shared definition of good, no external eye.
Leadership is, on the evidence, second only to teaching in its impact on what children get. And it shapes whether the teaching can be any good in the first place, because leaders set the conditions in which teachers work.
That’s a strange place to have a gap.
Why the gap exists
I don’t believe anyone decided leadership quality doesn’t matter. Nobody sat in a meeting and concluded that middle leaders needn’t be any good at it.
It exists because leadership is hard to describe, harder to measure, and because everyone reasonably assumed somebody else was looking at it. Heads assumed the system was. The system assumed heads were. Governors assumed the head was. And in the middle of all that, twenty or thirty people per school lead every day without anyone ever asking how well.
That’s the gap. It’s the thing I’ve spent a long while working on with another colleague, and it’s why LANDMARK exists. It looks at leadership across the whole of a school rather than just the top of it, and it goes live very soon.
I’ll write about it properly another time. This week wasn’t about that. It was about the problem, which is real whether or not anyone ever considers a solution to it.
One thing to take away
Go and count the people leading something in your organisation. Not the ones with leadership in their job title. The ones actually holding a team, a budget, a system or a decision.
Then ask who is responsible for making sure they’re any good at it, and how anyone would know.
If the answer is nobody, that’s worth knowing. It’s the beginning of every useful conversation about this.
Thanks for reading this week.
Manx Maxim is the website and blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership. Happens to do it in schools.
