Research School Network: School Leadership – Communicate the Vision Chris Runeckles writes the first in a series of blogs connecting the EEF’s implementation guidance with leadership at Durrington

Durrington has, for the past decade or so, been a school where we have been explicit about how we teach. Our six principles have been widely documented through our blogs and via the ​‘Making Every Lesson Count’ series of books. These codify our approach to teaching and provide the framework for the associated professional development of teachers and the array of implementation activities required to maintain and evolve our practice.

What recently became clear to us is that we’ve been less explicit about leadership. We’ve had a list of leadership ​‘principles’ for a number of years now. These are:

• Moral Purpose
• Communicate the Vision
• Grow the Team
• Be Organised and Strategic
• Implement Change
• Model Behaviours

These all have a series of corresponding descriptors articulating what that would look like if done well. However, we recognised that these were not sufficiently detailed to allow our leaders to implement and realise those behaviours with fidelity. They described what we thought good leadership looked like but failed to exemplify the fine detail actions. For example, telling our leaders that ​‘candour’ is an important leadership behaviour, doesn’t tell them how to have a successful candid conversation. It’s a bit like telling a student they should get an A*, without teaching them how! Furthermore, there is an issue with sharing and describing generic leadership skills. Like everything we learn, they have to build up a domain specific knowledge of how to do the things that great leaders do, by having it described to them, modelled to them, trying it out and then receiving feedback on how they did.

Luckily the inspiration for change arrived last year. I was lucky enough to visit Thahmina Begum’s fabulous school ​‘Forest Gate Community School’. I picked up several great ideas, but one that really resonated was their ​‘Leadership Playbook’. This playbook explored a number of really important leadership approaches and described in detail how to do each of them. It didn’t just tell leaders what great leaders should be like, it told them how to do the things that great leaders do really well. There is an assumption that new leaders know how to do these things. Through no fault of their own, they often don’t, because they haven’t had to, or nobody has told them how.

This got us thinking and we started working on our own version of this – our ​‘Leadership: Principles in Practice’ document. We took our existing ​‘leadership principles’, broke them down and explored different ​‘plays’, or for us ​‘PiPs’, that bring these principles to life. This has been in use now for a couple of terms and is starting to permeate leadership at all levels. So far, we’ve been really pleased with the impact it has had.

Last year useful documents seemed to arrive a bit like the proverbial big-city red buses. Alongside our Leadership PiP document came the updated A School’s Guide to Implementation guidance report. What has become clear as I have become more familiar with the new implementation guidance is that the two documents resonate strongly and the guidance directly supports both the principles themselves and their implementation. This and the two blogs to follow will aim to explore this relationship from different angles. To start with I want to focus on communication.

The new guidance report is far more focused on people and behaviours than the previous iteration. It tells us the importance of adopting the behaviours that drive effective implementation. It splits these into three:

• Engage
• Unite
• Reflect

Within the Engage behaviour there is the following statement:

Engage people through clear communication and active guidance

This involves leaders communicating the direction of travel, explaining decisions, motivating staff, corralling efforts and preventing implementation being dragged off track.

Immediately this chimed with section two of our PiP document: Communicate the Vision. Below is the checklist that this section begins with:

To me, the crossover is clear. Of course, this is not going to be news to any school leader. Clearly you have a better chance of uniting those you lead behind an idea if your communication is clear and effective. However, what our PiP document seeks to do is to exemplify what that communication would like through the more detailed PiPs. For example here is the PiP for ​“Articulate the Why”:

Next of course comes the challenge of how you take the PiP from the page to the practice of our leaders. That will be the focus of our next blog.