Mind Your Head
After nine years of being a headteacher, eighteen years of school leadership and almost thirty years of teaching, I made the personally momentous decision this year to leave teaching to set up Mind Your Head Education.
The sole focus of Mind-Your-Head.net is to support and sustain school leaders, in particular headteachers, as they manage their schools in deeply challenging times. There are two ways in which we can help; through the provision of reflective supervision for school leaders and their staff, and through the provision of school improvement services.
Reflective supervision is, as John has told me before, a little bit “over there” for school leaders. Senior professionals in other helping professions take supervision for granted as it is a feature of these professions from the outset to the conclusion of their careers. They see supervision as a developmental tool to help them make sense of their experiences at work and be better able to carry out their role effectively for the benefit of others and themselves.
My belief is that the need for supervision within education is already “over here” and the data back that up. An Ofsted pre-pandemic report suggested that school staff were well behind other sectors in terms of their wellbeing. Greany et al, in two reports during the pandemic, noted that most school leaders were either ‘mostly surviving’ or ‘sinking’. The Teacher Wellbeing Index of 2022 found that school leaders are highly anxious and stressed but work through periods of illness and so are at risk of burnout and leaving the profession.
Educational leaders have not had the opportunity for supervision in the past and so we see supervision either as a form of top-down control akin to appraisal, or we see it as being the same thing as counselling or therapy. Reflective supervision is neither appraisal nor therapy.
Instead, the reflective supervision that we offer at Mind-Your-Head.net is a holistic approach to supporting and sustaining school leaders. Through regular 90-minute sessions (monthly or half-termly according to your need) we help school leaders in ways that are restorative, formative and normative at the same time. That is, we help educators to make sense of the often personally challenging nature of their work in ways that help them to become more adept at their role and better equipped to meet the standards expected of them.
‘Putting staff first’ has never been more important in my experience of the education sector. We face the ‘four horsemen’ of being asked to do more, with higher expectations of what we do, with fewer resources, at a time of disruption and uncertainty. These demands of the education sector are here to stay and so ‘putting staff first’ means that school leaders must be well-equipped in terms of their own wellbeing. We are told on aircraft that we should put our own masks on before going to the assistance of others who need an oxygen supply. This commitment is no less important for school leaders seeking to put their staff first.
If you would like to find out more about how reflective supervision can help you and other leaders in your school, or how we can help you build a reflective supervision culture across your school or trust, please get in touch. You can use the contact forms on Mind-Your-Head.net or email us directly at mind.your.head@outlook.com.
