Why do History Departments struggle? What can you do about it? Part 1 — The Departmental ‘Revolving Door’
First of all, this is my first proper blog post on my own site. So hurrah for that. My general aim is to post about things that I’ve learned on my rather undulating career path so far. In particular, I want to focus on issues that new or experienced Heads of Department and other middle leaders may encounter on their own career journey. If you would like to read more about that — please go here — https://www.new-voices.co.uk/Home — and check out the two blogs I wrote on surviving career failure that formed the basis of my talk at the New Voices event in London in October.
The first areas I wanted to post about relate to some key issues new middle leaders may encounter when first taking up their position. In particular, many new heads of department may find that they walk into less than desirable situations. I’ve done this a couple of times now (different issues in each case) — once as HoD and once as a mainscale teacher after having stepped down from an SLT role. Aspiring Heads of Department, working in very successful schools and departments, may find themselves surprised at some of the difficulties they encounter when they take up a new post in a place that maybe hasn’t been so successful. I thought it might be helpful to go through a few of these problems one-by-one to identify how they happen, how they manifest themselves, and what you might be able to do about it.
The first problem I’m going to focus on is what you might come up against when inheriting a department that’s been a ‘revolving door’ in terms of staffing.
This is something I’ve encountered on more than one occasion in my career. One particular occasion stands out — I’d stepped down from my senior leader position and took a job as a classroom teacher in a different school. The school was Requires Improvement according to OFSTED, but the Head was still only a couple of years in post and made promising noises about the way forward when interviewed — and in fairness things were clearly moving in the right direction but unpicking and then fixing these kind of problems takes a long time.
It was clear even on interview that one of the big problems facing the school, and the department I would end up joining, was staff turnover. Most departments had been affected by lots of people coming and going. The History Department was no exception to that. The Head of Department, himself fairly new in post was the mainstay — he’d been there for a couple of years but was clearly an excellent teacher and respected by the students (I’m now very fortunate to consider him a very good friend). Unfortunately one of his other teachers had left the school mid-year, and the other main History teacher had changed role and been dragooned by the English Department to help deal with similar problems there. There had been a lot of change before his arrival in the school as well. This meant that for nearly a year the Department had been propped up by temporary supply teachers and cover supervisors with limited-to-no experience of delivering History GCSE or A-level in any way effectively.
I’d seen this kind of thing happen in other departments in schools I’d worked in but it was the first time I’d experienced it first-hand ‘on the ground’ as it were and it was a tough old year.
It’s only when you inherit a Year 11 class that has had this kind of disrupted experience of learning that you realise really how problematic this can be. Here are a few that spring to mind:
- The students won’t know very much
Well — obviously. The problem is how pernicious an effect this has on their confidence and self-belief. It also adds to the challenge for the new person trying to fix it. I came in having fully researched the specifications I was going to teach, knowing the assessment framework for it and with some of my lessons pre-planned going into the year. The aim was to get off to a smooth start, establish student confidence in my abilities, get them loving the subject again and moving forward from there. I was going to be teaching the old OCR B Paper 2 sources investigation on 19th Century Popular Protest — not a topic I knew that well but one I’d done enough cribbing up on to feel confident enough. Unfortunately, it was very quickly obvious that my aim for a smooth start was not going to happen. Students, having had two years of not really being challenged in the subject and having had the revolving door cast of thousands in front of them, were not too thrilled to have me coming in and banging on about the Luddites and the Rebecca Rioters (their loss). The removals from class started to pile up as I battled to try and get these students to listen and do the work. They had little interest in the content and couldn’t really see why I was so bothered about getting this taught properly.
A bit later on I thought I’d try and explore a bit more about what the students knew of the previous content they’d been ‘taught’. I tried to find a set of past exam questions to give them as homework — something fairly easy that I thought even the ones that found History hard would be able to have a go at. I thought I’d found the answer — a set of proper exam questions that were so open anyone should be able to have a go. They included beauties like ‘Describe the contribution of one individual of your choice to changing crime and punishment through time[5 marks]’ and ‘“Government was more than important than religion in affecting crime and punishment.” How far do you agree with this statement?[8 marks]’. Literally they could use examples from any time period in their answers — surely they’d be able to write something!
Unfortunately, my classroom may as well have been the Potemkin in 1905 and I was Golikov making his soldiers eat the maggot-infested food! Not good times and I think about three people handed this work in out of a class of 31. I thought I’d just be teaching the Paper 2 and revising the Paper 1 in Year 11. Unfortunately, I’d be teaching the Paper 2, re-teaching in a hurry as much Paper 1 (just all of Crime and Punishment and the American West, no biggie) and trying to sort out some unfinished controlled assessment as well! This, if it wasn’t apparent already, made me feel decidedly uneasy about their prospects that June.
2. Students don’t care who you are and what medals you might have won previously.
Unfortunately when you move school, it’s not like when a new manager is appointed in football. Tottenham Hotspur can bring in Jose Mourinho as a new manager and everyone has a pretty good idea what that’s going to look like and some degree of confidence that, at least for a while until he alienates all the players, he might win a few trophies. Unfortunately teachers changing school isn’t like that. Jim White isn’t there on Sky Sports News announcing a breaking rumour of a new arrival in School A’s Science Department, and there are no hack reporters waiting outside School B with a mobile phone checking which big name new English Teacher from the rival School C has rocked up in the car park. When you’re new in a school — especially one where the front of the classroom has been a revolving door — the students don’t care who you are or what you’ve achieved in the past. You might have achieved +0.2 average point difference compared to FFT20 with your last GCSE class, and well done to you if you did, but shockingly these students in front of you aren’t too bothered. Reputation counts for nothing and you’ve got to start establishing yourself all over again. Even worse, they start saying that they preferred the old teacher because they did ‘fun lessons’ (ie they let them watch a video with their head on the desk or tolerated them having a chat with their buddy for an hour rather than answering questions about the problem of vagabonds in Early Modern England). I personally thought the Match Girls Strike of 1888 was ‘fun’ to learn about all on its’ own but apparently I was mistaken on this.
3. The student confidence level is pretty low when you start scratching beneath the surface.
The trouble when you start going in with proper teaching after students have had a few years of ineffective supply cover (not a knock on supply teachers and cover supervisors who do an unbelievably difficult job for not much money — but clearly we want subject specialists in that classroom wherever possible) is that it exposes very quickly that the students are way behind. A few of your brighter ones, if they have a good attitude, will welcome your arrival. They’ve probably suspected there’s a big problem looming and someone coming in who looks like they know what they are doing will provide a degree of relief to them, and they may well have the independent study skills to be able to take what you can give them in a short space of time and catch up. Unfortunately, many of your students may well feel depressed about their lack of knowledge and preparedness being exposed (which will happen at some point no matter how much you might wish to maintain an illusion that all will be OK) and they may well start to give up the ghost. Mock Exam papers come back empty (although the student would still always write their name, candidate number and centre number on the front). The inevitable U-grades home into view for the August results’ days.
Unfortunately History is not like English, Maths or Science as a core subject where societal expectations mean most students have some sense of its’ future importance for their career paths. Increasingly more and more of our History students have ended up in our classrooms not because they were desperate to understand the intricacies of the US conquest of the West, or the power struggle for the throne in 1066, but because it was either that or Geography and that was a pretty invidious choice for them. That’s the joys of the EBacc for you (which broadly speaking I think is a ‘good thing’ implemented in a flawed way).
4. Turning round behaviour is a challenge.
I always think a good indicator of a school is to see what happens in cover lessons. No one is expecting miracles when they set cover and sometimes coming in to school with all of your glue sticks in the box with the lids on and not attached to the ceiling is a result. However most school systems will creak and groan when significant numbers of lessons are being delivered by long-term supply and cover supervisors. This means that standards of behaviour get lower and lower and this is not surprising — students have a right to be a bit miffed that they do not have an expert teacher in front of them helping them achieve towards their all-important qualifications.
When you start, the students may well consider you the next short-term temporary fill-in to try to test to see how long you’ll last. It may take a year or so before they’ve clocked the fact that you’re there to stay. In the meantime of course, precious learning time, already in short supply because you’ve got so much to catch up in so little time, is spent battling to try and get some order in your classroom. Hopefully you can count on some effective whole-school systems to support you in doing this — but the real world of schools in 21st Century England is that we know this is often, sadly, not the case. You might even find that scrutiny starts falling on you as the numbers of removals rise in your attempts to instil some discipline and boundaries in a way that it didn’t when problems were being kept inside the classroom away from prying eyes.
So what can you, the new Head of Department, do about this?
Well it’s clearly not easy. The first thing is to be realistic about the fact that unpicking the legacy of these problems may take at least a couple of years. You have a juggling act to balance in terms of crisis management with Year 11, but wanting to ensure your Year 9 or 10 (whichever will the first cohort you see all the way through their GCSE) get off to a good start is also going to important for you personally. I do think History is a particularly difficult subject to have those dramatic turnarounds in a year that you sometimes see touted about on social media, because those knowledge gaps don’t have a quick-fix solution.
You may well have to do a bit of expectations-management with SLT colleagues. They will probably be understanding of this (establishing the situation about the department with them early doors is very important clearly) but especially if they don’t have a History background they may not appreciate the particular difficulties. If you’re required to predict grades — be dead cautious about this and don’t go swaggering in thinking you’re gonna magic three grades improvement per student (make sure your team are clear about this too). Play it cool and hopefully you can moderately outperform those expectations in the summer (or at worst meet them).
It’s also really important to have a good plan going in for the year ahead. Think carefully about what you can realistically achieve in one year with Year 11 and try and achieve that. Map out half-term by half-term what content and assessment you need to cover and do your best to stick to it. Make clear that plan to your team and have trust in them to implement it for their classes. Where changes need to be made in light of experience, communicate these clearly. I make a half-termly grid for my team for each year group so they know roughly where they ought to be and how long things ought to be taking them so we’re all somewhere near the same page.
Backing your team and having faith in them is also important. If they’ve been buffeted about by the winds of change they may feel a bit demoralised or like it can never get better. You’ve got to go in there with a calm and clear approach and ensure that they are supported (and actually supported, not ‘supported’ in the way it can sometimes mean in education where you support someone before you sack them) in terms of behaviour management, workload and planning as necessary. If you can build some sense of team spirit and unity (easier said than done — food, thank yous and approachability both help but it’ll work differently for different groups of individuals) then this is a good start.
If a number of doors are still revolving around you then looking after yourself is going to be extremely important. Setting endless cover is a time-consuming and difficult task. Visibility around and about those cover lessons will be important but you also have to establish yourself with your own classes too. Beg whoever you need to (SLT, pastoral leaders, other Middle Leader colleagues) for a bit of presence in those lessons if possible and reciprocate where you can. Your school may have good systems for managing these problems but many do not and may find yourself having to come up with those plans and implementing them yourself.
I think that’s enough for now. In my next post I’ll explore some of the issues you may inherit in terms of your History curriculum and ways through that situation.
