What has March 2020 taught me about my leadership?

I’ve been meaning to blog again for a while, and what better opportunity than lockdown?! I’ve got a few topics in mind but wanted to start with a series of short reflections on what March 2020 and the pandemic crisis has revealed about myself and my leadership. For context, I’m the Headteacher of a SEND school for 105 pupils with autism in West London. I’m pretty new to the job, having been a head for 1.5 years.

I’ll post each one separately so they’re not too long:

1. Clear communication is everything

2. Striking the balance between being prepared and pre-emptive

3. Stand up for your values – you need them more now than ever

4. Times of crisis – you reap the culture you’ve sown

5. Protecting your mental health as a Headteacher

Clear Communication

Coaching some time ago helped me realise that when you know what your core values are, you gain enhanced understanding of why some situations trigger you in particular: if it is a core value, then you react particularly strongly to it being ‘crossed.’ For example, one of my core values is ‘fairness’ so I’m especially unable to accept or ‘let go’ of situations in which I think I’ve been treated unfairly.

COVID-19 has revealed to me just how much I value clear communication: how much I pride myself on being a clear communicator and how much I expect to be on the receiving end of clear communication from those ‘above.’ Therefore, I have been utterly incensed by what I consider to be poor communication from our government, particularly in the middle of March when coronavirus was really starting to gain momentum and there was a lot of changes being announced. I was infuriated at the government’s inability to do some communication things that we as teachers, are trained to do as a matter of course:

• Anticipate and address common misconceptions

• Anticipate and address common questions

• Remember and acknowledge your whole audience

For example,

• Why define a symptom as a ‘new and continuous’ cough without saying ‘new (since XX date) and continuous (‘continuous’ equals…) cough.’ I appreciate that the medical experts might argue that they don’t know what date to specify… but they’re in a better position to make an educated stab at it than 60 million individuals. I know that the definition of ‘continuous’ has now been specified.

• Why announce that schools will ‘close’ (also an utterly imprecise word) except for children of key workers and then leave it 30 hours before making the list of key workers available? It was an invitation for schools and LAs to interpret this in various different ways and made it all unnecessarily complicated and confusing. It should not be a big surprise that this would be the first question on people’s minds.

• It is blindingly obviously that all announcements (not the subsequent and multiple guidance documents) were only ever considering mainstream schools and that implications for other (significant minority) schools like AP, SEND, residential had not been considered in the announcement.

So COVID-19 has completely confirmed the importance of these three components to effective communication:

• Anticipate and address common misconceptions

• Anticipate and address common questions

• Remember and acknowledge your whole audience

But what else?

It has reminded me of the importance of using visuals to explain complicated concepts. Let’s be honest, when they extended the 7 days isolation to 14 days and widened it to include the whole household, who actually understood what that really meant until this helpful diagram was published? Again… AFTER the announcement (see above bugbear.)