The phone rang just after seven pm.

“Now, I will need you to give me an answer before I tell you which school it is,” said the sombre Head of Education and Skills for the LA.

“Mike?” [not his real name] repeated my good mate, and fellow Headteacher, Phil “Arrested?”.

The June rain pattered on the back room window.

Three days earlier the country, in a collective act of (in my view) madness, had voted to leave the European Unions and the world already felt strange and unanchored, even before this.

Mike had danced drunk in my kitchen at my 40th birthday. Phil and I knew him well, and called him a friend.

It turned out we didn’t know him at all.

Lessons I learnt about Executive Headteachering.

Before this year, I had three times been asked to act as an Executive Headteacher. If I’m honest, I didn’t really enjoy any of those roles, stuck between the school community’s expectations of a Headteacher to call their own, and my ‘home’ school’s resentment at suddenly having a part time Head.

Yet this term I embarked upon it once again – and I absolutely love it.

So what’s different this time? I guess that the three ‘dress rehearsals’ taught me a few things about how not to do it. Here are my, again – blindingly obvious, reflections on what I’ve learnt.

1. You’re not the headteacher

I first became an Executive Headteacher in 2016. Three days after receiving the phone call from the LA officer informing me that a fellow Headteacher, and friend, had been arrested and had admitted to a horrible crime which took place on the school premises.

I was given 24 hours to make a decision. My wife didn’t want me to do it – knowing the media storm which would batter the school when the news broke. I told my Chair of Governors that I wanted to do it and he had to make a decision for the school in the space of a couple of hours. My SLT couldn’t know until the decision was made, given the sensitivity of situation.

Three days later I walked into the school as the new Executive Headteacher. It was a school utterly broken and bewildered by the shocking events which had unfolded. I would end up being there a year.

And the first lesson I learnt was that an Executive Headteacher needs to understand, along with the whole school community that he or she is not the operational headteacher.

In the rush to get in and steady an understandably devastated community, none of this was thrashed out beforehand. What’s more, the role was a relatively new one so there was no training, and little in the way of guidance to chart a path for me and the two schools.

The result? I tried carrying on being the operational Head of Blackhorse (the school I’d led by then for 5 years) with my experienced and very capable DHT leading when I was at the other school. The other school, with a newish (and naturally shocked) DHT expected me to take on the role of operational Headteacher.

This was impossible. I struggled to be the leader on the ground that the new school expected with the new school’s CoG wanting me to take assemblies and be a figurehead for the community. As any new Headteacher can attest, even in the most settled schools, it can take months, sometimes years, to gain the trust of the school community as the new leader. To try and do this part time, at a school which had just suffered a terrible breach of trust, didn’t work.

Fast forward to this year and the new partnership between two local schools, with myself as Executive Headteacher, couldn’t be more different.

I am not the operational headteacher of either schools; I have two experienced DHTs who have moved up to ‘Heads of School’ to fulfil this role. The school community was briefed about this change well in advance so that staff and parents understand that it won’t be me leading assemblies and being the visible face of the school (something which I have found hard at Blackhorse, having been that person for over a decade).

2. Plan for a potential partnership before it happens – and take advice.

There was a familiar pattern in the first three Executive Headteacher positions I was offered. The phone would ring one evening and the LA’s Head of Education would ask me to fill in at this school or that. The school’s were all in difficulty and I was expected to ‘steady the ship’ until a new substantive Headteacher could be appointed. My Chair of Governors would then receive a sheepish phone call from myself asking permission to upend Blackhorse so I could get another local school out of a bind.

There was never any pre-planning done to prepare for me suddenly becoming a part time Headteacher at Blackhorse, and there was never any strategic thought given to the scope of the role at either school.

Again, this led to a ‘crisis management’ approach to the role, which led to short-term fixes at both schools.

This changed 18 months ago when the governors at Blackhorse recognised that I was likely to be asked to become an Executive Headteacher again and, aided by a proactive LA, supported our request to plan for future where the school would partner with another, as yet unknown, school in the long term.

So we began creating a detailed partnership strategy. It outlined exactly how the school would operate should we be asked to partner with another school.

I spoke to, and learned from, local federations which had been successful, notably the St Helens/ St Marys Partnership led by Andy Spens, and the brilliant Forest Hill Partnership, led by Ross Newman – who went on to write his Masters dissertation on the role of Executive Headteacher, and who I used as inspiration for much of the new partnership plan.

What emerged was a plan which covered not only the basic practicalities of any new partnership (such as the leadership structures at both schools), but also articulated a much bigger ambition for two schools working closely together to improve teaching.

It also sought to address all the problems which we could now anticipate having done this several times before without hindsight and clear planning.

This time, when the phone rang, we’d be ready!

3. Be clear about what you want to achieve

In previous partnerships where I’d taken on an Executive Headteacher role, the exact purpose of the union were often ill-defined. In practice this resulted in the only real point of collaboration being with me as the Exec Head.

We’d seen from local partnerships what could be achieved if the purpose was explicitly articulated. So the partnership plan made it very clear what areas we’d seek to collaborate on, and also which would be left to the individual school’s character.

This made it much easier to engage with a potential partner with concrete plans and helped us ensure that we were on the same page from day one.

4. Build up leadership capacity before you need it.

Having a long term plan allowed us to start to deliberately build up leadership capacity in advance of needing it.

This started by recruiting more experienced staff into teaching roles than we would have otherwise done. At interview, we thought about a candidate’s future leadership potential and how they would be developed to allow the school to partner with another without damaging Blackhorse. As a result, we took on teachers who we knew were ready for leadership roles, even though at appointment we didn’t have any to offer. The risk was that we’d only keep these staff for 2-3 years before they would move on and get promotions elsewhere, but this was nothing the school couldn’t plan for.

We also started developing the leadership potential of existing staff, exploiting the (now free) NPQ’s and putting all staff who were no longer RQTs onto these routes. I completed the NPQEL which was invaluable in giving me formal training in how to lead across more than one school. My DHT and AHT were both signed up to the NPQH so they’d be ready to step up when the moment came. The most senior phase leader was put on the NPQSL so that they too were ready to move into a new role in the future.

Whilst this now seems like a no-brainer, it was something which we hadn’t considered previously. The difference it made was beyond our expectations, creating an oasis of talent and leadership potential which we could readily draw upon.

5. Put your house in order

Creating a new learning partnership invariably draws attention away from the core business of school improvement in the instigating school. We knew that we would have no credibility if we did not know the minutiae of how Blackhorse was currently working prior to seeking a partnership with another school.

So we spent about a year examining everything about the school. Taking stock so that we knew what kind of shape we were in. Admittedly, this was complicated by the fact that we were coming out of the pandemic and all the chaos that had wrought. But still, we were able to look carefully at the work of the school so that we really understood our strengths and weaknesses.

If anything, it made us more humble and less prone to believing our own hype. There are at Blackhorse, like all schools, things which we need to improve. For use it helped us understand what we needed a potential partner could do for us, not just our offer to them.

7. Take a fresh look at your systems.

Sir David Carter’s excellent book ‘Leading Multi-Academy Trusts – why some fail but most don’t‘ talks about how systems and processes are quickly exposed as inadequate when a school tries to scale them up.

Often schools develop systems which work perfectly well in a small setting where a small number of people can find work-arounds for the lumpy bits which don’t always work. However, once a school tries to scale these up, all the warts and imperfections come into full view.

Over the summer I read ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, which further underlined the importance of strong, scalable systems. One term in, we are still working our way through which systems need to be updated. However, we deliberately re-designed our School Development Plan, based on research from the EEF, so that both schools had new approaches which were fit for purpose.

This ‘letting go of the past’ has allowed both schools to look afresh at things which we’d done the same way for years, but which had gradually lost effectiveness. This also had the added benefit of making the new systems ‘partnership approaches’ not linked to one school or another, but co-created.

8. Decide what kind of school you want to partner with.

Now, I’m aware that this is a luxury which may not be possible in many Trusts or LA’s. But in writing our partnership plan we identified what sort of school would make a good ‘fit’ for the school.

We decided that they had to be local. Geography matters. For schools to have common cause, it helps if they serve the same community. It also allows staff to travel easily between schools, which makes collaboration flow more easily. The Forest Hill Partnership saw two schools 2 miles apart work successfully, increasingly viewing themselves as a single team. So we planned for a potential partner to be local – ideally no more than 4-5 miles away from Blackhorse.

As it happens, when the partnership opportunity arose, it was with a school which we knew well and which was a 4 minute cycle (or 13 minute walk) away.

It also helped greatly, that we partnered with another school which was already ‘Good’. Again, I know this is a luxury which often crisis situations don’t permit. However, all too often the power dynamic isn’t equal – with a ‘successful’ school supporting a ‘school in difficulty’. Whilst this can share good practice quickly, it also fosters resentment and a feeling that one school is the ‘giver’ and the other the ‘taker’, which is never conducive to collaboration if allowed to embed as a culture.

Interestingly, that first school’s biggest fear was that I would try to ‘Blackhorseify’ it, and simply bring in ‘the Blackhorse way’ of doing things.

Again, understanding these fears allowed us to address them directly when pitching for the latest partnership. We even had a slide depicting a Viking ship crossing the Westeleigh Road, making the point that we weren’t coming as a Blackhorse raiding party!

9. Decide on brake points and a minimum length for the partnership.

The temporary nature of the previous three ExHT roles meant that at best I was a caretaker, at worst a lame duck.

All three schools were in crisis and were desperate for their ‘forever Headteacher’ to come along and start writing their new narrative. With the first school, where the previous Headteacher was in prison, they worked with me until the new substantive HT was appointed in the following Spring, at which point I felt my influence draining away as they (understandably) increasingly looked to the Headteacher-in-waiting for their future.

So when we sat down and wrote our partnership plan, one non-negotiable was that, whilst both schools had scheduled opportunities to opt out if things were going wrong, there would be no Headteacher recruitment in the new school in the first year of the partnership.

This allowed the partnership time to grow and breathe. And for a sense of permanence to set in.

10. It all comes down to trust.

It takes years to earn the trust of a school community. It takes at least a year to earn the trust of the staff.

In the school where the Headteacher had just been arrested there was no trust whatsoever. The school had just been betrayed in the worst possible way and the staff, understandably, didn’t trust anyone.

I think I gravely under-estimated the impact of this at the time. I assumed that because I was liked and perceived as competent at Blackhorse, then all that ‘cash in the bank’ would just get transferred across to the new school. This wasn’t the case at all and assuming levels of trust which could never exist given the trauma that the school had just suffered led to some mis-steps and errors on my part.

Whilst this was an extreme example, it was something I noted at all the schools I supported as Executive Headteacher.

So once we’d started to discuss in earnest a partnership with Emersons Green, we explicitly built in opportunities to build trust.

This was helped by the fact that the Head of School (then DHT) was my previous KS1 leader when I was first a Headteacher. She had also worked with both my DHT and AHT in the past so the trust at this top level already existed. That said, we organised a number of sessions between the two school’s leadership teams well before the partnership had been agreed to allow mutual trust to develop.

With staff we pointed at the elephant in the room: the understanding that many would find this change challenging and unsettling. But again, by planning for how people would react on an emotional level, we were able to anticipate possible barriers to building a climate of trust between the two schools, and plan in opportunities to address these. Again, geography played a part here, allowing us to have the first day back’s INSET at Blackhorse in the morning and Emersons in the afternoon. On the surface, there was no need to move between schools at lunchtime, but it sent out an important message that both schools were equal.

Identifying SDP priorities for the two schools with both SLTs working together also built trust and allowed for open dialogue about each school’s strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, out of the three priorities in each school’s SDP, two were the same for both schools which allowed a single plan to be written for these two areas and joint staff development to quickly become commonplace. It also helped that the top priority for each school was different (Reading at Blackhorse and Maths at Emersons) with both school having some expertise and success in the other’s area of need.

The new partnership also coincided with some wider work with a bigger group of schools on leadership behaviours. Whilst this is only an area we are beginning to touch on, from the work of the Forest Hill Partnership (where they have defined and codified how leaders will behave), we can see the benefits of being explicit in this area as a way of fostering trust and transparency.

And without trust there is nothing.

Of the many mistakes I made taking on that first Executive Headship, at the school which was in the midst of trauma and crisis, the greatest was to see the schools purely in school improvement terms. A series of puzzles and challenges to be solved.

Urged on by a twitchy LA, who worried the school was soon to add a failed OFSTED to its litany of worries, I tried to push too hard on improving teaching and learning before I had any mutual trust on which to draw. I didn’t spend enough time thinking about the people working in the school. Not their professional needs and well-being; I thought I was giving that all my efforts.

But I wasn’t.

I was trying to promote happiness when the staff weren’t ready to be happy. Trying to build trust in traditional ways without unpacking the breach of trust which they had experienced. Without being comfortable sitting with the discomfort.

Perhaps the situation at the time was always going to be impossible in this regard. And, whilst I feel I steadied the ship, I think it took the new ‘forever headteacher’ to start for the healing to really take root.

Interestingly, I showed this blog to the current HT and the then DHT of that first school in crisis to check hey were okay about the chill being mentioned. The DHT felt that the push on standards was both necessary and correct – despite the traumatic baggage which the staff had to carry with them that year.

The new normal

As the Academy agenda has shown, I think school partnerships will increasingly become the norm in the future, with schools increasingly working in small groups with a unifying leadership structure. The enormity of the role if Headteacher is increasingly leading would-be Heads to think twice about betting the farm and taking on a school in difficulty as the sole leader.

But with little in the way of formal standards for the role of Executive headteacher, it is still a role which the profession is still defining, but which has the potential for system-wide impact.

And what of that first school in crisis? Well, their ‘forever Head’ started the following September and a few months ago it was praised as a Good school by OFSTED. They along with the other two schools which I led in the Executive HT role for a short time, are also joining Blackhorse (and the Forest Hill Partnership, and a group of other schools) in formally consulting to form a new MAT.

So I guess those earlier relationships may have led to new connections after all.