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 How to be a Successful Deputy Head, by Geoff Brookes
Continuum
£16.99
Part One: Chapter Four - Your day-to-day world
Everything is now your job
Much of what you will do will be trivial. But they are the things that keep your school ticking over. You can sometimes wonder how it came about that grown adults are unable to make even the most obvious decision. But the point is that someone has to make those decisions. Someone has to put their name on things. They are sheep awaiting instructions from a sheepdog. And that sheepdog is you. People know what has to be done – that classroom can’t be used because the ceiling has fallen in. The answer is obvious. Move to another one. But the school requires you to make that decision. That is what you have to do.
At the same time, you will be involved in strategic planning, involving large sums of money, or with complex contractual issues for part-time French teachers. You are expected to see the bigger picture as well as the nitty-gritty. You will be expected to manage adults, teaching and non-teaching, colleagues and strangers, children, resources, buildings, stray animals. There is nothing that can happen in school that you can walk away from, saying, ‘That’s not my job.’ Everything is your job. Perhaps the headteacher can wash their hands of certain issues (though it is not something to be recommended). But you can’t.
You can never walk away.
Oh, and by the way, in between you have to scuttle off to deliver quality lessons. This is what makes the job so unpredictable and so exhausting. One of the great sadnesses of being a deputy is that eventually some of us feel that we no longer have any skills at all. We spend all our time dealing with other people’s issues, making decisions that are really compromises that please no one, teaching difficult classes, dealing with naughty students. It doesn’t take long before your sense of your own abilities disappears. You may find that you lose track of developments in your own subject area. You may find that you are no longer teaching the sort of classes on which your reputation has been built. Instead of the certainties of your own classroom, you will become a beast of burden. As you walk around the school, teachers will give you another monkey to carry. They will have passed a problem on to you that has thus made their life a little easier. But it has made yours that little bit more complicated.
You can spend all day dealing with these monkeys and you could have, as a consequence, a well-run school. You will be managing the day-to-day concerns of the institution and, in so doing, driving yourself into the ground. But you won’t be doing your job. Of course, you must ensure that the school is well managed. You are driving the galley slaves. But you have to provide leadership. And you can’t provide vision, innovation and the promotion of achievement if you are reactive. You need to set the agenda, not service the agenda of others. And make no mistake, teachers will be happy for you to do this. They like the idea that they can hand their issues on to others. Of course, you will want
to support your colleagues in any way you can but you mustn’t be abused by them. You are master, not slave.
Look out for chapter six of this book, "Your teaching", next week.
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