Thinking briefly about ‘impact’
The ‘season’ for job applications is homing into view once again. Lots of prospective middle and senior leaders will be furiously writing their personal statements detailing their various accomplishments and their suitability for the new roles they are going for. One of the trickiest things to write about can be in terms of your ‘impact’ — and this is only going to get trickier in a secondary-ed world where we’ve not had exam results for the past two years.
Normally, for the prospective candidate, exam results were the ideal way to show impact. They were an example of concrete numerical proof of your involvement in improving something meaningful — the qualifications achieved by students that provide them with valuable currency moving forward in their lives. However, the TAGs process of the last two years (with still, I think, the potential for a third year of disruption looming ahead) has now robbed people of this firm evidence of their impact. There will potentially be candidates applying for their first steps on to the ladder of middle leadership without any exam results behind them at all. So how will they prove their worth in the application process?
Probably, the concept of ‘impact’ will now need to be thought about a little differently — and personally I think that’s a good thing.
First of all, an individual teacher’s (or Head of Department’s) impact on exam results in itself is not quite as concrete as we’d like to believe (especially if we’ve got stacks of good results behind us). A lot depends on the context in which we work. It’ll be far easier for a teacher in an already high-achieving school to show that improvement than for one in a struggling school with high levels of disadvantage, parental disengagement and so on. You can take a high performing teacher in one setting, and dump them into another, and all of a sudden they might not be so high performing anymore, even though they are still the same person.
Secondly, as with any set of statistics, it is fairly easy for candidates to cherry-pick the available information to provide the best sheen for our numbers. Schools do it all the time, and it should be no surprise to see individuals do it as well. Indeed, the measures we have for what good exam results look like in specific departments are still pretty ropey. If my History class increases their results from 50% 9–4 to 75% 9–4, that sounds good, but is it? It might be that the expectation was that 90% of students in this class achieved 9–4. It might be that 75% achieved the 9–4, which was good, but not many got above a 7, which was not so good. It is very easy to people and organisations to throw out a bunch of numbers that can make ourselves sound impressive — I do it, and I’m sure we all do when we’re applying for more senior positions, but there can be some degree of disingenuousness to it.
Thirdly, it’ll be good to start to recognise the wider impact people have on their colleagues, their students and their workplace environments more generally. The tricky part is that this is difficult to quantify — it can appear quite nebulous to talk about the impact of the training session you ran on effective questioning, or the impact of your mentoring of an ITE student (beyond them passing their placement), or the set of assemblies you led on cyber-bullying, but these are potentially hugely valuable contributions nonetheless. The trouble is that, in education we have this dilemma that we want everything to be quantifiable and measurable, and it’s not always possible to do this in a meaningful or reliable way with lots of the work that is undertaken.
So, good luck to those out there considering their next move over the coming weeks and months. It’s always exciting to think about those career next steps, and don’t forget that the impact you have in your organisation likely goes significantly beyond the numbers and letters opened up by students in those envelopes in August, as important as that obviously is.
