One Year In: What I’ve been working on in as a new Assistant Principal

When I last blogged, back in June, I was a mere half-term into my new role as Assistant Principal for T+L in a school in Bradford. I had hoped to be able to keep up regular blogging but for various reasons that hasn’t happened. However, I have a spare 30 minutes and am keen to get writing again so I thought I’d run down what I’ve been up to in my new role, and hope that this might prove useful for anyone about to undertake a similar journey in the upcoming months.

Learning the school

A lot of my time has been spent trying to learn as much as possible about my new school. Obviously this includes getting to know students, staff and the community. But it also involves learning about the operation of the school on a day to day basis. There were a lot of different routines at this school compared to other places I have worked, such as the use of line-ups, that I needed to get to grips with pretty quickly. Even though my role is Teaching and Learning, as a senior leader it’s important to have some knowledge of other areas such as behaviour, safeguarding and data so getting some sense of familiarity with how routines worked in this area was extremely important.

In particular, this school’s demographic is really different to other places I’ve worked. The school sits in one of Bradford’s most deprived neighbourhoods with all the attendant challenges that brings. Things like school attendance, not part of my remit, is something I need to develop more knowledge of working here, as I develop my own leadership experience.

What was also new was working within a large Multi-Academy Trust that has schools up and down the country. Working with trust leaders who have over-arching responsibility for different subjects or areas like curriculum and pedagogy was new to me and navigating those relationships and the interplay between the school and the wider trust has been an interesting experience.

My core business is Teaching and Learning so I’ve made a point of getting into as many lessons as possible. I started at Easter, so my first terms was about getting to know the strengths and areas of development of different subject departments and the individual teachers. Building a strong relationship with Middle Leaders has been important — having previously been a Head of Department prior to joining has hopefully given me enough insight as to what it’s like to be on that side of the table during meetings, and, therefore sufficient empathy and knowledge to earn their respect.

Teaching and Learning

More specifically, I’ve had to get on top of the Teaching and Learning brief. I felt like my knowledge of the area was pretty good going on, the tricky bit is about the implementation. Our trust uses Steplab as a key tool, so being all over this has been important. I need to be the person that understands this tool better than anybody. This started by increasing our use of the Drop-in function both by myself and other leaders in the school.

More recently we’ve needed to re-launch instructional coaching. This is not something I’d been involved in prior to taking up the role, although I was aware of how it’s meant to work through being active on Twitter. The school had tried to roll IC out before with mixed success, and so trying to revamp this to give people a better experience of the process has been important. We’ve adopted a phased approach — pairing staff up to do drop ins on each other first, then bringing our Middle and Senior Leaders into coaching at Christmas, before re-launching for everyone else after the upcoming Easter holidays. We’ve also put time onto the timetables of staff to enable this to take place.

I’ve also designed a basic lesson structure — nothing overly restrictive, but an attempt to define some core principles about how teaching works at the school.

More recently I’ve been meeting with our NPQ candidates for the next cycle — an opportunity to get to know some staff a little better, support their career development and give them an opportunity to contribute to areas of school improvement that we need more capacity on.

ECTs and ITTs

My role also has oversight of ECTs and ITTs. We have some work to do to develop our ITT provision and hopefully my trust’s links with the National Institute of Teaching will move that forward in September 2023. The ECT process again has been new to me — the challenge here has been getting a handle on the associated bureaucracy, dealing with the DfE and Ambition Institute’s systems as well as that of the Appropriate Body. As the previous person who oversaw this left in the summer, I’ve kind of had to learn this on the fly as I’ve gone this year and that’s been tricky. The challenge is again one of implementation and the navigation of national frameworks to ensure other people are set up for success. To be honest this bit has been a bit of a pain at times as unexpected bits of work come at you that you didn’t see coming because you’ve never done it before, but as my stepson would say, “that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Assessment, Marking and Feedback

My role does not cover ‘assessment’, but marking and feedback does sit within my T+L area. I’ve been involved in organising booklooks and giving feedback to departments, while also trying to make more use of some of the data we collect (such as Effort grades — an often overlooked aspect of school data collection that I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about before) and improve the quality of this. I’ve had significant input into the reshaping of our marking and feedback policy to try to make that a little bit more workload friendly.

Literacy

As part of my line-management roles, I have oversight of the Whole School Literacy Co-ordinator. Literacy is a massive challenge for us — our school has a significantly higher than average proportion of children who are low-attaining, who are weak readers, and who have English as an Additional Language. I’ve never had a formal role in this area before, so I’ve had to do a lot of work to upgrade my knowledge in this area. Books like James and Dianne Murphy’s Thinking Reading and the ResearchEd Guide to EAL have been enormously useful as part of this development. Getting a handle on some of the baseline and screening tests like NGRT and WRAT have been important to enable better identification of the state of play. I have been liaising with an external provider about support that can be offered for our EAL pupils.

I think this bit of my role has shown me how crucial knowledge is to the role of a school leader. You can have all the vision and ambition and charisma you want — but you’ve got to know your stuff, and sometimes as a school leader that means developing knowledge of a new area pretty quickly!

Line Management

Currently I line manage English, Science, Humanities and MFL, and am SLT link for Year 11. Quite a hefty demand here — I’ve really enjoyed the chance to get out and learn more about subjects outside of History. Again, my knowledge is pretty sketchy (unusually for a historian — I lean much more towards Maths rather than English based on my prior qualifications and enjoyment of subjects) but the chance to get under these big subjects has been valuable, as well as working with subject experts and trying to support them to put their teams in the best position to succeed. All I can do is ask some good questions and probe their thinking and try to crib up on developments in their areas — this has meant getting stuck into the OFSTED Science review this week, for example.

Learning the MIS and Microsoft Excel

This is perhaps seen by some as the boring bit of leadership, but I’ve had to get much better at using our MIS (Bromcom) and understanding what information that system can generate. Also being able to use Excel a bit more competently (I’ve learned how to do a VLOOKUP and a Pivot Table, so get me I guess!) has also been really helpful to speed up some of my own work. More recently I’ve had to get to grips with PowerBI to pull some data out of the system to ensure we’re holding our own in terms of various metrics looked at by the trust.

Teaching

Oh yeah, I have 10.5 hours of History to teach every week as well, including learning a new KS3 curriculum that is taking me to some places like Mughal India and medieval Constantinople that I’ve never been before, let alone my Year 7 class with literacy levels more akin to those of Year 3 and 4 pupils! Trying to hold my own with that has been a challenge for sure, as well as getting to grips with student behaviour (a challenge for any new teacher no matter what level you join a school at). I think I’m starting to win but it’s taken some time on that account.

Overall, it’s been nice to reflect on the journey of the last year since my appointment (and there’s a lot more I could have talked about but we all have lives to lead, right?). I have to say, my job satisfaction is as high as it’s ever been. I’m never bored, and the job throws new things at me every day. I like to think I take the job seriously, but not too seriously, and it’s been good to work with like-minded people and laugh and cry about some of the bonkers things that happen every day. I hope for any prospective new senior leaders out there you get a sense of how helpful it is to have a broad range of knowledge and experience, and to be willing to chip in to support areas of the school that may not directly fit into your remit.

Being adaptable, open to change and hard-working are really important qualities to bring to bear along with your vision, ethos and charisma that you’re probably selling on interview!