Putting Staff First
Overall verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★
Why this book?
This book is, as the title suggests, about putting staff first. But do not be fooled; that does not limit this book to leadership and CPD. After all, to genuinely put staff first is an all-encompassing aim that permeates every element of school life. The best way to articulate the importance of this book is through a short story. Here goes.
On the first day of my first teaching job, I sat in the hall for the day and was bombarded with information about how school life would work for the rest of that academic year and how we were to be prepared for the supposedly imminent OFSTED inspection. Three years later I left that school and guess what? OFSTED had not visited. There had been no inspection. And yet every inset day, every meeting with SLT and most CPD sessions were dominated by readying ourselves for an anticipated inspection.
It won’t surprise you that I left that school and have since sworn never to end up in one similar again. It saddens me to think back to it and spending three years of professional development time aimed solely at meeting the ‘needs’ and (perceived) wants of the inspectorate. It saddens me to think back to having new initiatives thrown at us termly with the aim of consistency. But this was not consistency to help the workload and teaching environment for staff; this was consistency for the benefit of the outside visitors. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the piles and piles of data analysis, flight paths and tracking girds. Anyway, I learnt a huge amount from that first school and have vowed never to lead a department, a faculty, or perhaps even one day a school, in that way.
To achieve that aim, I need to read books like this (and so do you!). The book covers everything from the recruitment of staff to curriculum development to behaviour management; giving practical examples and personal reflections on how to best do this with staff at the fore. After all, we must remember that without happy and motivated adults in a school, it shall not succeed. Whether you’re a department leader, a senior leader or a classroom teacher wanting to reflect on what good school leadership is, this book will be of interest. My three key takeaways below will give you a tiny insight into how this book will help me on my quest to avoid repeating the situation above where staff were not put first, by any measure.
Three key takeaways:
1. As a school leader, at any level, your role is to remove barriers. Be it barriers to a healthy workload, barriers to good behaviour or barriers to improving teaching practice, to name just a few.
2. In many schools, discussing behaviour can be seen as the last taboo in education. We need to make conversations about behaviour the norm and we need to be relentlessly consistent with whatever behaviour system we take- to help put each other (the staff) first.
3. If you are truly putting staff first, the impact of this is felt from the moment the job advert goes out to the moment that teacher leaves the school (and well beyond). Thus, it is well worth doing.