Last word
Helen Burge is working on her flexibility as she adapts to new ways of thinking and operating
Bendy I’m not very fl exible. Evidence of this fi rst became apparent when I was in Year 3 and dislocated my shoulder doing a handstand in the school playground. As I grew up, I dislocated my knees multiple times, and I’ve also slipped a couple of discs over the decades. In fact, I’m the exact opposite of my Pilates instructor, who is referred to by my husband as the ‘Bendy Lady’. My front room (aka home offi ce)
has become my Pilates studio on Tuesday evenings. Instead of popping down to the village hall, I log onto Zoom, roll out my exercise mat and experience Pilates remotely. No denying this is odd: I fi nd it hard to distract myself from the items on my desk, or from spotting cobwebs under furniture or in light fi ttings from my new vantage point as I fl ex muscles I didn’t know I had. However, I know I
need to continue with Pilates to maintain some sort of fl exibility, especially as working from home involves extreme amounts of time sitting continuously in front of my laptop, sometimes tense and scrunched up despite revisiting the display screen equipment training early on in lockdown.
Agile I imagine that most school business professionals can fi nd the words ‘fl exible’ or ‘adaptable’ in their job description. The Institute of School Business Leadership’s professional standards list ‘agile’ as one of the six principal behaviours, by which they mean adaptable, fl exible,
58 AUTUMN 2020 FundEd
refl ective and capable of leading and managing change. All this describes the behaviours school business professionals were displaying in abundance during the lockdown of our schools and the extensive work involved in safely reopening them to the whole school community. Even after the fi rst few weeks of
the new academic year, it became apparent that this heightened state of fl exibility will continue to be a requirement for all school leaders in the foreseeable future.
Shatterproof We have to be mindful that even bendy, fl exible things can break when they are fl exed repetitively – and the same can be said for
adaptable, accommodating, amenable, responsive
people. I remember having
a shatterproof ruler when I was younger and testing to see whether it would shatter or not if I bent it multiple times. Of course it snapped eventually and when I repeated the exercise on my next ruler I stopped when I saw a stress mark and discolouration of the plastic, which I couldn’t remove, despite applying stickers from Smash Hits! We need to be careful that our
continuous fl exing doesn’t cause a lasting mark or lead us to break. We know what causes stress:
being under lots of pressure, facing big changes, worrying about something, not having much (or sometimes any) control over the outcome of a situation, having responsibilities that can seem overwhelming, and facing times of uncertainty. Does any of this sound like your 2020 so far?
New skills Being fl exible sometimes means you have the opportunity to see everything from a completely different perspective and discover things that have always been there quietly in the background. You might also discover something about yourself, something that might have lain dormant for years or not come to the top of your skills list yet. Like most plastic rulers, we’re not
shatterproof and I’m sure we can all point to our own stress marks – the new grey hairs from the class of 2020. I hope these are the only stress marks left behind for you after we move out of this pandemic.
Helen Burge is deputy chief operations officer at The Priory Learning Trust and SRMA with Cotswold Beacon Academy Trust. @DeputyCOOatTPLT
‘I imagine that most school business
professionals can find the words “flexible” or “adaptable” in
their job description’
IMAGES: KRAFTMEN/ LANKOGAL/
ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
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