Teach Middle East Podcast
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Teach Middle East Podcast
Breaking School Leadership Myths With Nick Hart
Nick Hart, Principal of Horizon English School in Dubai, shares his journey from aspiring footballer to educational leader and unpacks how school leadership must evolve beyond industrial models to embrace complexity and meaningful interactions.
• Nick's unconventional path to education began with a sports science degree and a semi-professional football career
• Horizon English School ranks among Dubai's top schools with exceptional academic achievement combined with happy children and staff
• Educational blogging became Nick's tool for clarifying thoughts and self-accountability in leadership
• Leadership has evolved from industrial "command and control" models to creating conditions where solutions emerge from interactions
• Schools should aim for coherence (aligned values with adaptable practices) rather than consistency (everyone doing the same thing)
• Effective leaders need extensive knowledge across multiple domains and an understanding of complexity
• New leaders should listen and understand before implementing changes
• School leadership teams benefit from diversity of thought, experience and perspective
Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or visit his blog at athttps://mrnickhart.wordpress.com/ to explore more of his insights on educational leadership.
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Speaker 2:Hello everyone. I'm donning my fan. It's still hot here in the Middle East. Welcome to the Teach Middle East podcast. Today I have Nick Hart with me on the podcast. He is the principal of Horizon English School in Dubai. See, I didn't make the error. I was there practicing with Nick offline going. Do not say the wrong name, I won't even call the other name but Horizon English School, Dubai, and we are on the podcast today to talk all things leadership. Nick has been prolific in writing about leadership. I read his stuff on his blog, which, by the way, you should go and check out. It's mrnickhartcom and you can read all the stuff he posts there, or you can follow him on LinkedIn. I like to read stuff on leadership, especially from people who sit in the seat and understand what it takes to actually lead a school in somewhere like Dubai, which is highly dynamic. Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, Lisa. Glad to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for, by the way, your contributions at the Middle East School Leadership Conference. Really, I was looking back at the Middle East School Leadership Conference. Really I was looking back at the highlights and I was like, yeah, that was a really nice workshop. I really really wished I could have sat in it. But you know, on event days I'm like running around like I have no sense.
Speaker 1:I was only mildly offended that you came to the door and then walked away. So no one next time. So sorry Anyway sorry, anyway, leadership.
Speaker 2:So I know you weren't, you know, I know you probably were leading your parents when you were in nappies, but let's not start there. Let's start with your journey into education. How did you get to the seat in which you now sit?
Speaker 1:so take us back a bit so all through school I had one which was to play as much football as possible. So any decisions around studying or subjects or even university degree was all around how can I play more football? So I ended up doing a sports science degree with Brunel in London with no intention other than play for the football team brunel and try and get a job and try and work in high level sports. But there was a moment with the careers office, I think in my second year of studying, where I went along and asked them you get the standard meeting, don't you, about careers when you're nearing the end of a degree. And at the time the advice from them was you can. They listened. They listened to my kind of wishes of trying to get into high level sport and I said well, you can go and find any job that you can with organizations like the Football Association, that kind of thing, and just get your way in as whatever level as possible, or you can go work in a gym. But I thought, ok, I need to do two, three years of university to go work in a gym. And they said or you can teach. So at the time I need to do two, three years of university to go work in a gym and they said, well, you can teach.
Speaker 1:So at the time I was also playing football semi-professionally and I thought, ok, I want to be able to play football evenings and weekends. So I was looking for then a job that is nine till three every day and nobody corrected me, nobody said, actually that's not what teaching's like. So I ended up in the short term being a teaching assistant for a term and then I did the graduate teacher program to study whilst teaching and then did the usual worked through some various middle leadership positions leading maths, english science, pe, and then assistant head, deputy head and head teacher in England for a couple of years. And then Dubai came calling and I had to teach in England for a couple of years, and then Dubai came calling.
Speaker 2:Dubai came calling. How did it call? What happened? What led to you leaving your home in England to sunny Dubai?
Speaker 1:It's a funny story because for a long time I wanted to live and work out here, but timing was never quite right. So we needed to time it to do with kind of career and kid studies as well. So we came on holiday here. It must have been three or four years ago. I wanted to know what it was like, what schools were like in Dubai, because, although having visited Dubai, I'd never seen a school.
Speaker 1:So I used my social media network and the deputy head here at Horizon, martin we had been talking over Twitter as it was then, and I asked can I come and visit? So I came to visit the school, loved the school, met lots of lovely people, and I remember going back thinking I don't just want to work in Dubai, I want to work at Horizon English School. But at the time there was no vacancy, there was no possibility for leading the school, and then, as luck would have it, ian, the previous principal, moved into a director of education role and then the previous principal moved into a director of education role and then the Horizon principal job came up and got a phone call and various things went in motion. And here I am, the principal of the school that I visited, hoping that I would be able to lead one day, and I actually am. It's great.
Speaker 2:See how good that is. It's almost like the manifestation malarkey that I talk about sometimes, but I think it does work sometimes. I'm not sending anyone out there to close their eyes and try to imagine yourself sitting in a principal's desk if you haven't done the work. I'm sure Nick did all the work because he rose through the different ranks and levels and had the experience. But what's the experience been like now that you've got the job? What has it been at Horizon?
Speaker 1:It is comfortably, comfortably the best school that I've worked in and led. It's incredible. It has a reputation of being a great school in Dubai, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that, globally, horizon should stand up there with some of the best schools in the world. The quality of education that we provide, the employee experience, parent experience it's a dream job. It really is a dream job.
Speaker 2:I don't want to linger on this because I want to talk leadership, but you said something there. You said it should be among the top schools in the world. Give me some specifics, like what makes it such a standout school?
Speaker 1:So I mean lots of schools have a high academic achievement, so you take that as given that the achievement is there. So I mean lots of schools have a high academic achievement, so you take that as given that the achievement is there. I mean it's hard to compare Horizon with all three schools because we're a primary school and you don't have the GCSE and the A-level or the equivalents to compare for academic achievement. But children attain really really well. The standardized schools, the various year groups are great, but attainment achievement, lots of schools do that, but lots of schools also do it in a way that is maybe unsustainable or leads to kind of burnout.
Speaker 1:So the way that we've managed to have high academic achievement but also have incredibly happy children and incredibly happy parents, it is really special when people visit horizon.
Speaker 1:They talk about the culture, they talk about the connection, they talk about the community feeling and lots of people say those things but backing it up with kind of evidence around what parents say in our annual survey, which is when we look at net promoter score, is top 10 percent of organizations in the world.
Speaker 1:The same with the voice of the employee when we look at the net promoter score for voice, the employee our scores through the roof. You can look at maybe top five percent of organizations, employers, not just in education, across all sorts of industries. The score is incredibly high and I think it's down to the way that we work that we prioritize flourishing and happiness, because that is the route to high academic achievement. It's not the short route, but it is the sustainable and morally correct route to do that. So I'm really grateful for my predecessors in terms of setting that foundation and I've been glad to be able to take it on a little bit further and nudge it a little bit higher in terms of all those outcomes. It's it really is a special place brilliant quick question blogging.
Speaker 2:Yes, what led to that and when did it start?
Speaker 1:You know, you might remember. So back in I think it was 2011, something like that the London riots were happening and this is a strange place to start for them.
Speaker 2:Right with my home. So that's so funny because I felt taught no, don't try it, nick. What are you trying to say? I'm joking.
Speaker 1:Go on. I remember back then trying to find out what was happening in the world because the news you know how biased news things is and back then Twitter was just taking off, I think, and I remember signing up to Twitter to just to find out some different perspectives on what was happening. And I quickly found out that beyond finding out about what's happening in London riots, there was a pocket of Twitter to do with educationists who were talking about education in a way that I hadn't really experienced before. So when I was a teacher and maybe an emerging middle leader, I only ever spoke to the teachers in the school and the leaders in the school about teaching and about kind of emerging leadership. And then I realised there's a whole other world of people actually talking about evidence and research and ideas that wasn't really exposed to.
Speaker 1:So then I started kind of delving a little bit deeper into the education side of Twitter and then started contributing and I thought, okay, I see some other people who are kind of writing blogs.
Speaker 1:Let's just make one and see what happens. And so I started just writing to basically think. So I was using it to write down ideas and capture them and to share what we're doing in my school at the time and it kind of grew and grew and then I realized actually this is a good way of learning. So I realized that when I write something down and I try and put it into a format that is understandable to other people, it made me understand it better and I almost realized what I think about something by writing it, communicating it and sharing it. So for me it's what it's turned into is a bit of self-accountability for learning, for processing thoughts and ideas and turning them into something that is hopefully clear, communicable and helpful for other people, because if nobody else reads it, I have found so much value in writing it in the first place. So for me, blogging is figuring out what I know and being able to communicate clearly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do write a lot as well and I do encourage educators to write, but now, with AI, people are writing less and less and it really worries me, especially as a former teacher of languages. I am very worried for, you know, the coming generations, that their lack of skill in processing thoughts, putting them on paper, making them coherent and communicating their point of view effectively. I'm very worried. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:I mean, linkedin has become a bit of a strange world where you can quite clearly see AI generated posts and then AI generated responses to that. It's like nobody's actually thinking. And there are obviously there are lots and lots of exceptions to that, but it's too easy. It's too easy to put a prompt into an AI and get it to create content. For me, it's not about content, it's about thinking. You do the thinking in order to get the result. If you kind of take away the thinking, what have you got? You've got kind of an empty shell of nonsense thoughts that just get posted there for the content rather than to try and actually contribute or to clarify our own thinking is. It is really. It's a risk, and something that I think we'll have to figure out over the next couple of years is to try and maintain the thought processes that really go into good leadership and not outsource it to AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think we'll come full circle. I don't think we'll come full circle quickly, but I think eventually people will get so saturated and so fed up with the garbage not the garbage, fine, I'll say garbage that AI spits out at you sometimes. And then, once you get to that point, once you hit that saturation point, you will then start to look for quality among the things that you read and eventually we'll become very adept at spotting what's authentic and what isn't authentic. It'll take us a little while, but we'll get there, I think, eventually. But what's your writing process Like? How do you start? Because a lot of times teachers ask me how do I start to do this whole writing thing that you do on LinkedIn or that I used to do on Twitter and on my blog? How do you start your process and how do you carry it through?
Speaker 1:Usually there's some sort of stimulus.
Speaker 1:It might be a conversation with someone, it might be something that we're talking about at school, it might be something I've read, it might be a study or someone else's work, and quite often what happens is I'll try and translate something that I've learning or thinking about in a form, in a graphic organizer kind of form that I think then is useful.
Speaker 1:After that I'd use that to elaborate. So the process tends to be find out something interesting, turn it into diagrammatic or graphic organizer form and then use that to elaborate and write something so I can get into the model a little bit and into the framework to make sure I can communicate something clearly, because I found that school leaders, the ones that can communicate ideas really clearly, are typically the ones that are successful. And if, if we can't explain our thinking behind something, if we can't justify our reasons for asking people to do stuff, then they quickly kind of fall away and easily lose credibility. So it's the graphic organizer section that is probably invisible to a lot of people, because I try and represent it first and then write something that elaborates on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, apart from your own personal benefits of writing, have you had any external benefits that's come to you as a result of putting your work out there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I get various inquiries through the blog to do training days in england, multi-academy trusts or conferences, and actually one of my books was because of a blog post. So one of a publisher saw a post I'd written, announced me to elaborate and turn it into a book, which is great, and I think I have social media and blogging to thank. So a lot of that has contributed to the situations I found myself in as a leader where opportunities have come my way. So you said at the beginning, the hard work goes in, but then you're generous and you share. Hopefully it comes back as well. So that's been. My approach is to freely share things because it may come back around one day and that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you write a lot about leadership and I talk a lot about leadership just because I'm a student of the subject, because sometimes you know, I can see where I did it really, really wrong. You know, it's weird because I left school leadership in 2018 and now that I'm looking from the outside in sometimes I feel like a tinge. I'm very open, I feel a bit ashamed of some of the foolishness I did. I really like I'm thinking I mean, luckily for me, some of my colleagues they still reach out my former teachers and stuff from my school. They're gracious, they haven't kind of excommunicated me completely, but I look back at some of the ways I did things that now I would not have done and I wondered and you've written something about how the industrial models no longer suit what we are trying to achieve now as it relates to leadership. So talk me through how leadership in your view, especially school leadership, has changed and evolved over the years or over the decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean, I think that there's a general pattern that when people started writing and thinking about leadership, it's come out of what the dominant organizations and models were. And so in that industrial area, when post-industrialization, when there's lots of factory work and lots of organizations working in that way of simple cause and effect or production line style kind of organizations, then leadership was about pressing buttons to get the outcome that you want. It was pull that lever, get that thing. And sadly I mean sadly now the approach to people in that way people don't work like that. Production lines may work like that, but people don't work like that. And so when we're progressing out of an industrial era into this knowledge era of complexity and free, quick sharing of information, those models of command and control or a heroic white man in a blue suit, middle-aged, that's not what leaders look like and that's not what leaders do. The shift is towards complexity. The conditions that we work in in schools are nothing like those industrial models. There's a beautiful complexity about a school where hundreds of people interact every day in ways that we can't predict, in ways that we can't control, in ways that we can't control in ways that we can't imagine. And so the shift in leadership is about understanding those conditions, I think, and creating those interactions, because those interactions are the things that enable the emergence of solutions to problems or to innovations in how we teach, and therefore our job isn't command and control, it's to understand the conditions and encourage interactions for people who are closest to problems, to solve them.
Speaker 1:One of my pet peeves is schools that dictate how teachers teach, and one thing I like to talk about is how we shouldn't be aiming for consistency, because consistency is everyone doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:We should be aiming for coherence, where we've got aligned values and aligned ways of working, but teachers have to adapt what they're doing to the children in front of them. You can have two classes right next to each other teaching the same curriculum to the same age children, but the approach needs to be entirely different, because the children are different, because the teacher is different and therefore the interactions are. So that pet peeve is one that I try to make sure that we don't do. We're not going to tell you exactly how to teach. We'll help you to identify the problems that you're experiencing, and we all experience problems and have to solve them day by day, and our job as leaders is to try and help people to interact in a way that solves those problems and we find a way to get the most out of every interaction with children in the classroom, rather than following a cookie cutter and a set of routines or structures, which sadly does happen in a lot of places the cookie cutter.
Speaker 2:Is that there because that level of consistency is easier to measure?
Speaker 1:yes, and it's arguably a quicker way to success if you've got chaos or I say chaos in a manner that explains the kind of lack of structure. So some schools are in chaos because they don't have systems, they don't have routines, they don't have expectations, and if you're in a school that needs what david carter talks about rescuing and putting systems in that's the easiest way to do. It's the quickest, safest. Actually, the most common sense way of leading a school that is in crisis is you make people do the same thing that you know at some point will give you a starting point. So there is an argument for that as a leadership strategy for a particular situation, in times of crisis, in times of where stability is needed. But you can't do in crisis management and stability for a long period of time. Eventually it settles and they need something else. So there is a time and a place for it, but it's not a long-term sustainable approach.
Speaker 2:I get that, but the argument is that the consistency helps to meet the standards stipulated by the regulatory authorities so that you can then attain the rating, which then means that you can then raise your fees and do all the bits and attract to the parents. How do we counter that, nick?
Speaker 1:And that's a frustration with the regulation system and it's good that it's changing.
Speaker 1:The regulation system that we have had in Dubai for the last few years in our relatively immature school system is that, and the regulation system is that way to quickly raise standards. But when you talk to school leaders about and I'm sure you do about their experience of inspection and regulation, then it's not easy. It's a lot of time bound, time pressured, numerical based things to chase rather than doing the work that in our hearts we know is right for a community and a group of children. So in some ways it's a bit of a privilege to have a good grading in order to step away from the treadmill and step away from the conveyor belt that is required to get to a certain stage. So I completely understand why it is an approach in some places. But I suppose the leadership angle is we need to know when to change the approach and to be brave enough to do it. And if we get that opportunity as a school leader then I think we should take it with both hands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love to make analogies and I think you're very right. You know, the kind of force that is needed to push an aircraft off the ground is not the same that is needed to take it and smooth it out at certain altitudes. And I get that we might need those structures and that sort of consistency in place. But when you get to a certain altitude we can work for coherence in leadership and it can be smooth with the occasional bumps because you know there are air pockets everywhere.
Speaker 1:But I mean you're ready to jump back into crisis mode at some point because you could lose 40 of your teachers through normal international transients and attrition, in which case you can't then do the same things you'd always do. So in international schools we are at the mercy a little bit of transient teachers, because if your teaching kind of profile changes, you can almost have to start again. And this is I've had this problem a couple of times in england where you get to a certain point with teachers and their training and then, for whatever reason, they move on and you almost start again with new people and to recognize that is an important part of leadership and to act accordingly yeah, let's change gears a bit.
Speaker 2:debunkunk the myth. For me, hierarchical leadership means strength and relational leadership could potentially mean weakness.
Speaker 1:Debunk that myth hierarchy, person in charge, strength, and we're conditioned to probably think that relational leadership may be cozy and warm and non-challenging and non-judgmental, for example. But when you talk about relational leadership, the language of it, I don't think it's helpful. So you hear the word relational and you think, okay, relationships, you think warm, caring, that kind of thing. But actually relational leadership is is more the encouragement of interactions between people, and what we can do is take the best of both. Do you need hierarchical leadership? Yes, you need someone who is accountable for something happening. Simon can be. Our group ceo talks about someone. You have to have someone to catch the ball. At the end of the day, you could pass it around, but someone has to catch it and so we do need that. People need clear roles, responsibilities, but one of our responsibilities is interactions. So you can go about relational leadership and be all about interactions but have no substance. So you could get people being really nice to each other. You can get people being kind, you can get people being really nice to be around, and one of the problems with that which I kind of used to illustrate the point is in one year group. So they were all lovely people, so kind, so nice, so nurturing their children loved them. The parents loved them. But when you put them together in a year group and they talk about teaching, they were all too nice to challenge each other and say I don't think that should happen. I think we should do it like this so they would sit in their team meeting and they would share their planning, and I know that they'd be thinking I don't quite like how that's done. I think we should do differently and they'd all go away, make the changes that night, all of them doing the same thing, and then not say anything to each other. They're tripling their workload and yet they're burning themselves out to make the changes that they all know should happen, but they they didn't want to say it to each other.
Speaker 1:And that's where relational leadership can, in that myth, be weakness, because we need good relationships, but rooted in substance. You need people who are experts in their jobs, like they were. But to be able to challenge, to be able to feel like, yes, I can say to this person that I like this bit, I like this bit, but my class needs something different. I think they should do something else without feeling like they're going to offend someone, and have the trust and the mechanisms to be able to do that, which then raises standards. So although they had in this example, they had good interactions on a personal level, they didn't have good interactions on a professional level, and that's part of our job if we're going to attempt to lead relationally is to make sure we've got expert people but set up the systems to be able to challenge and to have good conversations about the substance of what they're doing so that the standard rises. And I think that's a really good way.
Speaker 1:A sustainable, long-term way of raising standards is getting teachers to talk more and getting leaders to talk more about the substance of what they do, creating a situation where they are challenging and setting up systems to make it work so that the bar rises, rises, rises over a period of time and then, before you know it, the standards have risen over. It's over six months and then again then six months later and and habits change. So the strength doesn't come from having a person telling them what to do in a hierarchical model. The strength comes from the interactions that people have that enable great conversations, great learning and therefore great teaching yeah, I agree with you, but I know that could be a myth.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, well done in debunking that. But my other is there is a little bit of a complaint around this region, in particular in the UAE, about inexperienced leaders being promoted too quickly, rising way too fast and not being able to handle the nuances and challenges that school leadership brings, and I wanted to find out, apart from years of experience, which not everyone will have, what are some traits of a good leader, particularly a good school leader?
Speaker 1:I think it's good to differentiate between experience and expertise, because you can be a 20-year veteran of leadership but you could do the same year 20 times. But you could also be a leader for two or three years and learn an incredible amount of kind of regional approach or strategy in that time and be a more effective leader. So for me it's not necessarily expertise, it's not experience that matters, it's expertise that matters. But what does a successful leader look like? So I've got opinions here that are very much rooted in some of the work done at Ambition Institute in England where for me fundamentally, if you have any chance of being a successful leader, you have to know a lot of stuff. You've got to know so much about curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, safeguarding health and safety and increase it in Dubai and at international school, the marketing side of things, the admission side, the growth side. You have to know so much because decision-making without a basis of knowledge is just on a whim. So the way that we make decisions, I think, sets leaders apart. So Neil Goodbride does some really interesting stuff on leadership, decision-making and our ability to appreciate the complexity, and I think there's a real fruitful area of leadership development where Neil talks about ego development, ego being the place in our psyche where the outside world and the inside world collide and we make sense of the complexity around us. And what Neil talks about in his research is that for years we thought, perhaps, that ego develops up until adulthood and then it stays the same, whatever level of ego development you have at 18 or 20, then stays. But no, there are stages of ego development you have at 18 or 20, then stays. But no, there are stages of ego development into adulthood, and that we can progress through stages of ego development through having disruptive experiences where you think, oh, I didn't notice that, I didn't see it. From that point of view, his research is really interesting that a leader's stage of ego development greatly influences our ability to make sense of complex situations and therefore make decisions that affect thousands of students, thousands of parents, hundreds of staff.
Speaker 1:So for me, what does a good leader need?
Speaker 1:What does a successful leader need?
Speaker 1:It's an understanding of complexity, an understanding that you can't just press that button to raise attainment there, that there's going to be all sorts of unintended consequences, there's going to be all sorts of near and far cause and effect that we can't possibly imagine and it's not just a case of okay, I'm coming in as a leader, I'm going to make everyone use this one PowerPoint and then we're going to fix reading. Or I'm starting a new school, as a leader, I'm going to make my mark by introducing Pobble or whatever. It is that understanding that schools are complex places and you can't just transplant something that has worked somewhere else here, because the problems are probably different and therefore the solutions are different. I think at the heart of it is leaders' understanding of complexity, their stage of ego development, and at the heart of it is leaders understanding of complexity, their stage of ego development and, at the heart of that, knowing loads of stuff yeah, and I think also when it comes to I think you've covered it, but I think it also comes to your willingness to be a learner.
Speaker 2:Yes, because if you think you know everything coming in as a leader, you're going to learn some things that will definitely humble you.
Speaker 1:When I started here at Horizon, the school had been outstanding for several years great kind of results, great kind of stakeholder feedback and everything. I remember thinking what can I add? What can I add to this, this? And so I was very deliberate in coming into the school of saying to everyone before I even think of doing anything, I need to learn how this school works. I need to learn the history. I need to learn what's worked and what hasn't. I need to learn the reasons for the success that we've had, because I could quite easily inadvertently undo all sorts of success by just coming in and letting my ego get the better of me and try and implement things that I think work before really understanding the school. And it's only really after about maybe 18 months where I actually probably did anything significantly different to what was already existing.
Speaker 1:I saw my job as I remember talking to the CEO about this. My job in the first period of time was all about aligning, like me, inducting myself into a very successful organization before even thinking about trying to affect any change. Because how can I possibly know what this school needs without spending time understanding it and understanding the people? So I think that's a massive one there, which is to listen first, to watch first. Don't act too quickly. Yes, act if there are safeguarding health and safety issues. But when it comes to kind of those more complex things, just try and understand what's happening first before you go wading in and trying to solve problems with your off-the-shelf solutions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very much so, and I think that's what trips up a lot of people when they go into a school. Very much so, and I think that's what trips up a lot of people when they go into a school. If I'm honest, I would not try to take over an outstanding school. My skill set would not be such I normally and I just kind of look back at my career it was mostly going in and fixing things in schools that required improvement, and so to run a school that's already been rated outstanding is a challenge in itself. A lot of people think, oh, it's easier, but I think definitely it's harder. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the first school that I've led that wasn't in trouble as well. So all of the schools that I've been a head of teacher of previously had rapid improvement required, had rapid improvement required, and so I had to learn quickly as well. A change in approach here, because if I'd have done here what I'd done in those other three schools, I'd have been out in six weeks. They wouldn't have put up with it. They would have said who's this coming in from england with all these big ideas? We don't need this.
Speaker 1:So definitely it is a challenge and I think it's probably one that isn't spoken about enough, because I had this one colleague for me from years ago that made a career of turnarounds. He was an interim head teacher after interim head teacher, after interim head teacher, because that's what he was really good at. He wasn't there to set the culture for five, ten years. He wasn't there to set the vision and see something through. He was there to rescue schools in crisis, stabilize them and hand it over to someone else who could do that. And I think it's really important that either we specialize in a particular area or we learn the different parts, because there are certainly different approaches for different schools? Absolutely. That's part of understanding the complexity of the organization that we lead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're winding down. We're way over 30 minutes. If you're commuting and you're listening to this podcast, can you commute twice with it, please? I've got over the 30 minutes, but I knew I would geek out with leadership with Nick, because I do enjoy his writing and the way he thinks about leadership in schools. I wrote recently about fluidity in leadership and classroom. Having that fluidity the ability to move between the two as you like, without being seen to be weak because you stepped down from leadership and then taught for a while and then go back into leadership and vice versa. What are your thoughts on that level of fluidity in schools? Should that be normalized?
Speaker 1:I have a real problem with recruitment and opportunities because you never remove it completely. But if you remove the boys club element of who you know and that kind of thing and look at merit on what someone is capable of or what they're interested in, what their expertise is in, I think that there would be far more opportunities for people to do what you're describing, which is to sometimes realise that the job you're doing isn't the one you really want to do. Sometimes we have people who second to leisure positions and then realise it's not for them and go back into the classroom and then actually learn and grow and then think, okay, I can do the job much better now because I understand it more. And so I think there's a lot to be said for life experience and the humility involved in recognizing yourself, what you like and what you want and what you're good at and what you're not. And I think any good recruitment process will explore that really well, because not everyone has the same path.
Speaker 1:Not everyone goes teacher, middle leader, senior leader. That is a bit of a stereotype and actually if I'm looking at a candidate or thinking about a candidate and it's just a plain sailing rise through the ranks, I'm thinking what hardships have you been through, what challenging situations have you had? And I think it's our job from a recruitment point of view to make sure we're open to a variety of situations, experiences, that kind of thing. I think a lot of senior leadership teams are far too homogenous you've got all people that think and look the same, and leadership is about variety of experiences and expertise and viewpoints and I think if we search for that, we're far more likely to understand our school much better, because if we've got all people thinking the same thing, we're going to miss stuff. Absolutely we're going to miss it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is very, very true and something that we talk about a lot but we don't implement. You know, everybody has this oh, we want diversity of thoughts, we want diversity of experience, we want diversity in ethnicity and we want all of that, but the truth is, nick, they don't really want the thing. It's not true. When it comes to time for appointments, you can see what people really want. It's one thing to say you want something. It's a whole other thing to actually act on that want. All right, quick fire. If you were to meet your I don't want to call it role model leader, but an iconic leader, whether in or out of education who would it be and why?
Speaker 1:more iconic leader. I grew up watching football in the 90s and the noughties and so for me, a Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, was long-serving, hard but nurturing. I think that would be an interesting one, Definitely. The longevity and the legacy there is incredible.
Speaker 2:Not Arsene Wenger.
Speaker 1:No, no, not an Arsenal fan.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I had to do that. My husband's an Arsenal fan. I I had to do that. My husband's an Arsenal fan. I just had to throw that in there Quickfire. What's one thing school leaders should stop doing now.
Speaker 1:Stop doing now, asking teachers to do things that make no difference to students' learning.
Speaker 2:Brilliant, and what should they all start doing? Final question my.
Speaker 1:What should they start doing If they haven't been? People behave differently, whether you like it or not, whether they want to or not, they do. And so to widen the perspective by talking to different people and getting the truth of what's really happening in the school, because I think we all have huge blind spots about what's actually happening in the school. We can think it's great, we can think it's running smoothly, but our leadership is only as good as the information that we're getting on the ground. So seek a wider variety of viewpoints.
Speaker 2:For me, Brilliant that we're getting on the ground, so seek a wider variety of viewpoints. For me, brilliant, where can people find you apart from your blog?
Speaker 1:Where else can people find you? So more LinkedIn posts these days than Twitter? The algorithms now mean that I think that hardly anyone sees anything that happens on Twitter, so I tend to post less there now more on LinkedIn. But yes, mr Nick Hart, on LinkedIn, same with the blog, is where I tend to leave most ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much. I've stopped posting on twitter completely. I've like have like never opened it since it was taken over by x no, it's just weird.
Speaker 1:I went from having like 14,000 followers and so many interactions to postings and nothing, no interactions. It's really weird, so it's stopped bothering me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll catch you all on LinkedIn with Nick, and sure we'll meet him somewhere at a conference or pay him a visit at Horizon English School. Thanks for being my guest.
Speaker 1:No problem, thanks, lisa.
