LEADERSHIP


say, 10 years ago? I know hundreds of teachers who would say the


best professional development of their lives was when they uprooted from school and transplanted themselves in a completely alien environment for anything from a couple of weeks to a year.their experience is supported by research which shows that one of the most powerful ways of stretching leadership capability is to step out of your comfort zone. I realised how true this was when, as a deputy


Stretching yourself W


HTI’s secondment programme, which sees school leaders experience leadership and project management in business and industry, is 25 years old. Anne Evans introduces the programme, now called Stretch, and we hear from some of the school leaders for whom it has been revolutionary


hat Was the best professional development you have ever had? What lessons do you remember? are you still experiencing the benefit of professional development you received,


Annette France


sinceannette’s secondment to National Grid in 1993 she has moved from vice-principal to two headships and is currently headteacher at Chipping Camden school in Gloucestershire. “It was the best year of my life, I learned so


much. My mentor said at the end that I’d made the transition from education into industry really easily, but he doubted whether his leaders could make the transition into leadership in schools. that’s very good for your self-esteem isn’t it? “One of the toughest learning experiences


headteacher, I took a one-year secondment through leadership charity htI with one of the world’s largest business consultancies in the early 1990s. the experience completely changed my perspective


on leadership. It gave me a deep appreciation of the importance of strategic thinking, accountability, systems, structures and processes.above all, it opened my eyes to the importance of strong connections between education and business and their profound relevance to improving the employability and life chances of young people. how often do the day-to-day pressures of your job


allow you to look over the parapet and see the bigger picture?have you ever stepped outside education since your first day at school? If not, how can you really empathise with the challenges young people face when they move from school to work? It is 25 years since a group of visionary business


leaders pioneered the concept of secondments for headteachers into business as a means of stretching their leadership skills, getting employability on radar in school and breaking down barriers between education and business. What they had not anticipated was the value of the headteacher’s contribution to business. since then the landscape for education and business


has changed dramatically. Leadership development opportunities – rare in the mid-80s – are now in plentiful supply. there is more interaction between education and business than ever before. Business has an increasingly hands-on role in the management, funding and direction of the emergent new breed of schools. Yet many schools still struggle to forge meaningful relationships and the issue of young people’s employability rumbles on. In these turbulent times, there is an unprecedented need for ever-more innovative forms of professional


Melanie Warnes


the opportunity for a two-term secondment as a subject matter expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers came at exactly the right time for Melanie (pictured, right), headteacher of the Castle school in Bristol and a National Leader of Education (NLE). she had taken the school to an “outstanding”


Ofsted inspection, was working successfully as an NLE with local schools, had established a strong ethos of distributed leadership and innovative professional development, and was looking for new challenges. she explained: “I still felt invigorated, but I


wanted to broaden my repertoire of experience and also do something which would strengthen the whole school leadership team. I agreed with my governing body that insights into business could be a valuable development area.” Confident that her leadership team would not


only maintain the status quo but also move the school forward in her absence, Melanie uprooted herself from school, home and family to take on a role at PwC that proved to be far more than a subject matter specialist. Melanie’s line manager, PwC education and


enterprise partner Chris Kirk, believed very strongly in the role business can play in developing teachers. But with a rapidly and radically changing landscape for education, he was equally convinced of the benefits Melanie could bring to his team’s work. he explained: “as a person, Melanie connected


strongly with the team, bringing fresh perspectives and emotional intelligence to the work we do,


how we do it and why it is so important. that was revitalising for us.as a NLE, she brought deep expertise to the work we were doing with local authorities on school improvement, sEN and changing roles, as well as unrivalled access to local and national professional networks.” although Chris was impressed by Melanie’s


adaptability to a completely new environment, she admits it was quite a shock: “I felt like a plant uprooted and dropped into alien soil. Overnight I’d gone from being in a very secure place both personally


development to ensure all young people get the education they deserve and need. stretch, as the secondment programme became


known, has adapted to this changing landscape over the years, with individually tailored secondments for middle managers to National Leaders of Education now available for anything from a couple of weeks to several months and not just into business, but public sector and voluntary organisations too. Research by Deloitte for the UK Commission


for Employment and skills has identified two key imperatives for teachers in delivering employability skills to young people: better knowledge and understanding of employers’ expectations and requirements, and up-to- date experience of business and industry. stretch has always delivered on both counts, but


our own research shows that secondments could have a catalytic impact on a wider set of government agendas from raising the aspirations of disengaged and deprived learners to expanding leadership capacity, building innovative cultures, and succession planning.


secondments are transformational experiences,


whether to a bank, pharmaceutical company, professional services firm, brewery or government department. they result in a “mindset mindshift” for the secondee,


the host company and colleagues back in school and the impact can be felt not just for a few days, weeks, or months, but for years – and not just in one school but wherever the secondee goes throughout his or her career. above all, they are transformational for the young


people – more than eight million of them so far – who are better prepared for life and work because their teachers have had the courage to get out of their comfort zone.


SecEd


• Anne Evans OBE is chief executive of HTI, an independent social enterprise working to develop exceptional school leaders.


Further information www.hti.org.uk


and professionally to somewhere where my usual reference points were absent. You are forced to drop the costume of leadership on secondment, but that in itself is liberating.” Melanie has loved the challenge of it all: the


opportunity to look at education issues through different lenses; to bring her own insights to the debate; to help develop and successfully pitch an idea for a new tool to help schools to benchmark and identify improvement areas; to work directly for clients and compare working practices. “My experience has really reinforced my view


that a person’s success is not just dependent upon their academic achievement, but equally on their ability to respond to new challenges and unfamiliar situations with confidence, flexibility and agility. I am determined to ensure that these characteristics are developed in my students.” she has also picked up new ideas on deployment


of staff skills, as well as performance and project- management. the value of praise and regular constructive feedback – particularly when people are lacking in confidence – has been reinforced too. While Melanie has been on secondment two of


her deputies,andy Bethell and Peter smart, have had their own professional development experience, sharing the role of acting head. Picking up responsibilities for personnel, finance,


the outreach aspects of Melanie’s job, day-to-day management decisions, and the myriad of incidents a head has to deal with has broadened their skillsets, developed their professional relations and allowed them to see the bigger picture.


was delivering bad news to employees facing redundancy when the Grid was privatised, which wasn’t easy but very good preparation for headship – following procedures properly, doing things professionally, and having difficult conversations. I used my experience to develop competencies for teachers, leaders, governors, so we were ahead of the game there.”


Kevin Boyle


Kevin, headteacher of Oaklands secondary special school in Cheshire, took ahtI secondment to the health and safety Executive in 1997. “It was a fascinating eight months and taught me


a great deal. I inspected a ship carrying explosives and mines. I worked with the factories inspectorate looking at homes for senior citizens. “the most important thing I learned was how


multi-skilled I was. I had two jobs – to look at their quality systems and to inspect with them. I found it easy because as a head you are always juggling multiple balls.”


Katherine Fey


Katherine, head of economics at Croydon high school, spent two weeks at Google’s California headquarters as part of a htI development programme for middle leaders. “In some ways I was struck by the similarity


between the Google ethos and that of a school: the notion of continual learning; having a strong vision that everyone is behind; collaborative working. “I was particularly smitten with Google’s 20 per


cent time initiative, which enables employees to spend 20 per cent of their working week doing whatever they want. Fifty per cent of all product releases are generated from this 20 per cent of time. It’s a concept I’d love to see introduced into schools here.the experience left me buzzing with ideas about the kind of school I’d like to lead one day.”


Luke Burton


Luke, headteacher of Leytonstone Business and Enterprise specialist school in east London, spent a year working as a member of hsBC’s Education trust team. “My secondment gave me the confidence to


apply for headship when I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for it. It gave me the opportunity to experience business practices in a global corporate, see how they used technology to communicate globally, how they marketed and promoted themselves, and network on a national and international level. I’ve brought all of these things back into school as a headteacher.”


Jeremy Taylor


Jeremy, principal at Fleming Fulton in Northern Ireland, says the Outstanding team of the Year teachingaward that his school won directly relates to a powerful realisation from his four-month secondment to PwC’s Public Policy team. “My direct involvement with shaping and


forming policy at PwC made me realise that we don’t have to be passive recipients of someone else’s decisions and that we can be shapers too.a couple of years ago we began to notice a drop in pupil numbers as parents of children with physical disabilities opted for mainstream education, rather than special schools like ours.at the same time we knew that inclusion was a challenge for mainstream schools. so, with lottery funding, we set up a specialist team to help them provide the level of care these children need. It was that realisation from my secondment that inspired the vision to shape our own future.”


SecEd • March 17 2011


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