The playground was eerily quiet. The parents collecting their children stood in shocked silence. We’d seen it on the TV, in other places, first far away. Then closer, as the storm blew in from the east. But when it arrived it caught us all off guard.

As a staff we had begun planning for a possible closure a fortnight before. We’d even managed to write a plan and hold a staff meeting on digital learning. But that was theory, role play, some mad critical-incident task that would never come to anything.

“We’ll be closed a fortnight at the most… Just until after Easter.” I confidently declared to the staff, moments after we watched the Education Secretary announce schools would close on Friday.

On the playground that Friday parents looked into my eyes for reassurance which I couldn’t give.

That week’s newsletter told parents that I promised we would get everyone back soon.

It would be 118 school days before we met again.

Leadership lessons learnt in lockdown

I have no exceptional wisdom on this subject and no doubt most of you will have equally valid reflections on a time like no other. However, having had the summer to process the last five months, here is what I, as an experienced headteacher, have learnt:

1. We need more action and less dither.

48 hours. That’s how long we all had to move learning for all our students online. 48 hours.

Now, I’m not saying that was ideal – it was absolutely not! But nor was it impossible.

But the rate of decision making, change and innovation, which took place in that moment in time, far outstripped much of what we would usually do in many months of careful planning. As an SLT we spent 2 hours hatching a plan, we discussed it with staff for an hour and then we all, as a team, made it happen.

There were no carefully crafted action plans, discussed at length at numerous governor’s meetings and re-written numerous times. There was no agonising about whether we’d picked the best approach (nobody had the faintest what the best approach for digital learning during a pandemic was).

We identified the problem we had to solve and the risks of not solving it well, then we, as a team, came up with a workable plan and set about making it happen.

And I don’t think our plan would have been any better if we’d spent a month discussing it numerous times and fiddling and dithering.

Interestingly, at a (Zoom) meeting with Sir David Carter during the lockdown, he echoed the same observation from his work with schools nationally. He reflected that, in ‘normal times’ schools often over complicate action planning to the point where actual action is secondary to creating clever-sounding plans and convoluted implementation models with the result being that very little actually changes.

When all this is over, let’s remember that we can make real change happen without the dither and delay. Plan by all means, but don’t make clever planning the end goal.

2. Let your team fill in the gaps.

I have long laboured under the misconception that staff like a fully formed plan or approach with which to work from. I have been wrong in this.

The urgency with which we as a school had to move all our learning online meant that there simply wasn’t the time for the school’s senior leadership team to work out all the detail. Instead we presented the problem, defined the parameters of what successful home learning would look like and then got out of the way.

The result of this was an explosion of creativity and innovation.

This is not to be confused with providing no leadership or guidance. We gave staff clear expectations about how much home learning and direct video-based teaching we should aspire to each day. We were clear as a team as to what subject matter could and couldn’t be well taught remotely. We presented the problem very clearly. But what we didn’t do is provide a fully formed teaching approach which teachers would have to administer (in 48 hours it wasn’t possible).

But having given staff (our teaching assistants did more than their fair share – so to the admin and site teams in their own domains) this clarity of purpose, they were given ‘freedom within the frame’ to fill in the blanks themselves.

And as a result innovation spread like wildfire. First came the videoed lessons hosted on the school website (900 by the end of the lockdown), followed by live zoom lessons and increasingly detailed written resources (delivered to the doors of those child without access to printers or the internet). Teachers quickly shared effective approaches organically in a way which would have been impossible had the SLT tried to organise this into some formal network.

So come September I will lead differently in this regard. I will continue to provide focus and frame the task in hand. But I won’t fill in all the gaps. The staff do this better themselves.

3. Don’t underestimate the support staff

Throughout the lockdown, another group which showed how much untapped potential they had was our team of Teaching Assistants and Admin staff.

The traditional role of the Teaching Assistant up is that of supporting the teacher, usually through directed tasks. However, the lockdown meant that they had to find other ways to support learning.

Again, as with the teachers, we defined the problem and gave them key areas to support. Our Reading Assistants made it their mission to keep the children reading: ringing parents, checking and managing the online book activities and, as time went on, hearing children read in their homes via Zoom! Other TAs took on similar roles, often supporting parents with SEND concerns and leading small group working, again via zoom. They played a key role in supporting vulnerable children and their families, sharing the load with the teachers in speaking to anxious parents. Where necessary, anxious children received a visit from the TA who stood at the end of their drive and spurred them on.

They also, as a team, we’re thirsty for training opportunities and for the chance to attend the same webinars and online activities as the teachers. It highlighted to me how much talent and potential we had previously overlooked by not giving the TAs the same training as the teachers.

4. Invite everyone to the staff meeting

Like most schools, our staff meetings were fairly traditional – after school on a Wednesday to the teachers, and fortnightly before school for the TAs. However, this sometimes led to training being uneven and communication sometimes getting confused.

However, the lockdown and the rotation of staff meant that this traditional staff meeting format no longer worked. Instead, we (like many) moved to video conference meetings which didn’t require staff to physically attend the meeting.

A key barrier to inviting all the TA’s and Admin Staff to the traditional staff meeting was that many finished work earlier in the day so would have to return to school. However, via video conference the support staff could all attend, whether they were working in school or at home, and this allowed the complete team, including support staff, to attend a single meeting.

The impact of this was that the Teaching Assistants and Admin team felt better informed about what was happening in school and were able to make suggestions at the point where decisions were being made (whereas previously many decisions had already been made before their meeting the following day). It also allowed more inclusive and richer CPD which drew on the experience of the whole team – not just the teachers.

As we move beyond the crisis, we aim to keep running the meetings with a mixture of staff physically present and some attending via the video link. One meeting, with one discussion and one outcome is most definitely the way to go – and now we have the technological know-how to make it happen.

5. Get ready for a future of online meetings.

Back in January, video conferencing and webinars seemed strange and exotic. Now they are a part of our daily lives.

This has led us to reconsider how we attend training and whether sending staff across the city in rush hour to spend an hour in a crowded room is always the best approach.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that there will always be a place for face-to-face meetings and training. We are social animals and sometimes need to socially interact in order to work and learn.

However, I think the future will now contain many more webinars and video conferences which are often more efficient and much better for the environment. Indeed, in June we spent £500 kitting out our main conference space (part of our IT Hub) with a proper meeting-quality wide-angle video camera and multi-directional desk microphone connected to the large interactive screen. This has allowed us to have blended training and meetings where we can have training both in physical groups and via webinars and video conferencing. We plan to add this capability to most classrooms in the future as we believe that, just as adults benefit from bringing experts into training remotely, so will children.

So don’t rely on a crap webcam mounted on a laptop – get kitted out for the future which is already here.

6. We need to do appraisal and training differently.

This is something that we as a school had begun looking at prior to the lockdown closure, but the importance of which has been highlighted by this period of enforced change.

Prior to lockdown, our appraisal and associated training followed a traditional, linear path: 3-4 targets were set (a pupil progress target, a whole school priority target, a subject leadership target and (for UPS) a second leadership target. Whilst well established, even before lockdown we were becoming concerned that teachers complained about the lack of agency and choice in their appraisal and training process and we were no closer to achieving a more evidence led approach with teachers engaging in research and reading.

My first ‘moment of clarity’ in this area occurred just before lockdown when I was lucky enough to hear Dr Kulvarn Atwal, Executive headteacher at Highlands Primary School in London, and author of the excellent ‘The Thinking School‘ speak at a conference. He advocates a system of staff development which is focused entirely on teachers as researchers. In his book, he outlines how giving teachers time and encouraging them to complete research and formal study (all his staff are completing their Masters) he has transformed outcomes and learning.

Closer to home, another federation in my Learning Partnership, the excellent Forest Hill Partnership, had already begun this approach and was seeing positive impacts on teachers’ motivation, innovation and engagement with research.

However, it was not until I saw with my own eyes the impact of a more staff-led approach to appraisal targets and training with my own staff during the lockdown , that I knew that this was something we had to look at.

At the beginning of lockdown, knowing that staff were likely to be at home for an extended periods, we bought every teacher a copy of Roshenshine’s Principles in Action by Tom Sherrington. We knew that we wanted to sharpen are understanding of the key components of excellent teaching and knew that this book made the case for five key aspects of teaching and learning which research has proven to be effective. But at that moment in time that is all we knew.

What happened next is what surprised and encouraged me the most. The staff did indeed read the book. But in addition to this, given the time and permission to do so, they then began voluntarily signing up for webinars and online training linked to this and other areas of their role. They enthusiastically shared webinar information and more and more staff took part in more and more training which they themselves had agency over. Indeed, one group that was the most hungry for this training was the Teaching Assistants who eagerly took part in webinars alongside the teachers displaying potential which had hitherto gone untapped.

So next year our appraisal targets and training will be very different. We will still focus on whole school priorities (it can’t just be a free for all) but there will be ‘freedom within the frame’ with staff choosing which aspect of Roshenshine’s principles (so excellently exemplified in Tom’s new book ‘Teaching WalkThrus‘ – a copy of which will be waiting for every staff member, TA’s and teachers, at the start of term) to research and become experts in within their own practice.

And with agency and ownership, we hope to develop staff in a way which we simply didn’t consider before.

7. We need to think differently about digital and home learning.

We have all just had a crash-course in digital home learning, which has forced us to learn how to use all those digital tools which we thought could be useful to our learners but always got dropped to the bottom of the ‘to-do’ list.

This baptism of fire gave us an (albeit unwanted) once in a lifetime opportunity to reflect on how digital learning can be used. We will never again get the opportunity to practice over such a long period an entirely digital-learning based approach.

Like you all, we discovered plenty of approaches which had little impact, and a few which showed real potential and it is essential that we don’t waste this learning.

For example, prior to lockdown, making tutorial web-based videos seemed a time-consuming faff. By the end of lockdown staff made these in minutes (a total of nearly 900 by the end of term 6). And for some procedural learning (especially phonics, grammar, maths etc) these videos allowed children to watch and re-watch the process or input multiple times. Likewise, parents could see exactly what was being taught and how to support their children.

So we must now ask ourselves whether this shouldn’t become a mainstay of homework, augmenting the written tasks we set so that children, instead of trying to complete low-grade learning at home having forgotten how to do something, are instead re-watching the teaching and then practicing those skills in a more focused and effective way.

8. Maybe some timetabling changes should stay.

Opening schools to essential workers’ children, and then to more year groups post-June, has forced us into completely re-organising often long-established timetables and routines.

However, like many schools, this enforced revolution has made us think differently about how we organise learning and play.

Like most schools, our children had a fairly standard timetable and a single, often overly-busy, lunchtime break, with all the associated arguments etc which often spilled back into lessons.

But during lockdown – where children were made to play in zones with a set group of children, with set resources and a single supervisor who got to know their personalities and quirks – these arguments didn’t boil over and instead became learning opportunities where the supervisor could guide the children to a resolution.

Likewise, our ‘bubbles’ have forced changes to start and end times which would be unthinkable in normal times. This year, our Year 5 and Year 6’s will be starting at 8:30am – again unthinkable six months ago. And my Y5/6 teachers LOVE the idea! They see three longer, high-quality lesson spaces when the children are at their best. And whilst this is currently a temporary measure, if it proves successful, we would be mad not to think of capitalising on this accidental improvement.

Again, we will never again be given the opportunity to experiment with timetabling in the way we are now. We need to make sure that any improvements are kept and built on. The past need not return.

9. Relationships with parents have changed forever. We must keep these at all costs.

The relationships we have forged with parents in the midst of a terrifying pandemic have changed how we work in partnership forever.

Back in March, giving parents the teacher’s email addresses felt like a dangerously reckless move. By April staff chatted to parents constantly, always on first name terms. Parents opened up about their fears and insecurities. Staff, whilst always professional, showed a little more of themselves in these interactions. We judged each other less and understood each other more.

We became a team.

We now know our parents better than ever before and this can only help children’s learning and welfare. Indeed, all the research from the EEF and others suggests that good parent/ teacher relationships has more impact than almost anything else.

As we try now to catch up a generation of children who have missed 118 days of schooling, our only hope is to work in unison with parents. We simply can’t afford to give this special new relationship up.

10. We were good enough for what has passed and will be for what lies ahead.

In the final week of term, we ignored the DfE’s dictat and brought all the children back to school (albeit just for a day each and in small groups).

The music (fittingly Frank Turner’s ‘Next Storm – the soundtrack to a special video we had made chronicling the last 118 days) boomed out across the playground and the children rushed back into school without a backward glance. Some parents wept – not in sadness, but in relief.

And like your school, they all thanked the staff for holding the school together during an impossible time. We had showed as a school community what we were capable of when forced into an impossible situation. We felt a tsunami of warmth from the parents whom we had got to know so well. And we felt proud of what we had achieved.

So as we head back to school with uncertainty all around and the task of catching up a generation of children who have not attended school for six months, we must remember this: we have the skill and resolve to make this next impossible task possible.

Sure, we will have to work harder, better and differently. But it is a task we have all showed our communities that we are more than ready for.

I believe that schools have never been better led, nor children better taught than they are right now. If ever there were a group of professional more prepared for this task – it is us.

Have a great new term.