It’s The Leadership

It’s the leadership.

You can work as hard as you like, but without good leadership, it’s almost always wasted effort.

It is a truth rarely acknowledged that a literacy problem in search of a solution needs a good leader. Most people genuinely seem to believe that adolescents struggling with reading is a simple issue and all that is required is to give teaching assistants a programme, and the problem will disappear. It’s simply not true. ‘Literacy’ problems are problems of pedagogy, politics, organisational culture and psychology. They are not easily amenable to solutions.

In organisational settings, like secondary schools, most of us see the problem as: a child not being able to read very well. However, the problems to be solved are much more complex.

First, the child. They need to be persuaded that despite years of failure, despite pep talks, ‘nurture’, disability labels and boiling frustration, they can learn to read with good teaching. Bad strategies need to be identified and unlearned. New habits must be formed, new attitudes to grow.

Second, the teacher. The teacher needs to have a great deal of skill in a number of different domains – principally skills in diagnostic and formative assessment, pedagogy, interpersonal relations, coaching, unwavering determination and persistent optimism in the face of meltdowns, sulking, tears, despair and helplessness. They need deep representations of the content that they will teach the student, and detailed knowledge of the right communication strategies to use, depending on the nature of the content they are sharing and the responses of the child whom they are teaching.

Third, the culture. If the organisational culture is that emotions trump all else, the child’s emotional displays will be enough to stop the teacher providing any level of challenge, and the child will not learn. If the organisation’s culture includes beliefs that some students can’t learn, the organisation will ensure that those students do not learn. If the organisational culture is built on a narrative of deprivation, of a low-aspiration community, of parents who don’t read to their children, teachers will not expect their students to learn, and the students will not learn.

Over all of this, for good or ill, stands the leader. Not just the leadership team, but the person who has the responsibility to make sure that children catch up no matter what. The person who deals with reality, not the illusory phantoms of culture and narrative. The person who has chosen that the buck really does stop with them. The person who sees it through without fuss.

Leaders like this are transformational without any of the hype that usually surrounds the term ‘transformational’. They simply do what needs to be done. They have optimistic expectations of what can be achieved, and they communicate these to their team. They hold their team to the same expectations. They do not accept alternative narratives that will lead to students not learning, not catching up. They challenge without intimidation, and manage without interference. They are pragmatic that difficult problems require challenging solutions. They don’t look for a ‘quick fix’.

I recall training a school where the staff, who had been assigned to deliver the mission of ensuring that all students would catch up on their reading, were openly negative about that expectation. They insisted that ‘their children’ would not be able to cope. The programme was too much work. It required preparation time! The leader responsible simply told them to prepare as directed. He had to do this several times. After two weeks of preparation, they set to work, and after eight weeks, they were observed meeting every training standard and their students were making remarkable progress. The staff were somewhat surprised by this outcome but were happy to accept accolades for the students’ progress. In fact, it was the leader’s calm, steadfast insistence that meant that they got on with the job and produced results.

Contrast that with a school where the leader, who had been very vocal about their commitment to the mission, repeated several times a concern that ‘not enough students are getting through the programme’. Although they agreed several times that this was because teaching assistants were only teaching one student per hour when they should have been teaching two, the leader bluntly refused to require that their staff did an hour’s teaching for an hours’ pay. “They have to walk too far to their next lesson,” they explained, without irony.

We also discussed rates of student progress. Clearly, teaching assistants needed to deliver lessons with greater pace and provide more challenge. This too was understood, but there was no follow through. Nothing changed. Eventually, that leader left, as did two year groups where only a portion of those who could have been helped had been reached. Not because it was impossible, but because the leader would not challenge their teaching assistants and would not hold them to account.

The point of these illustrations? That leaders are vital. That they influence many destinies, for better or for worse, but that their influence is never neutral. That we should not believe all we hear or are told, but should work in the real world, with a commitment to truth and the data to tell us how well we are doing. That we should choose the right path for our students, even when it may be harder than the ‘quick fix’. Even with willing students, diligent tutors, and effective teaching programmes, good leaders are always needed.

Be that leader.