“You must be winding down this week, aren’t you? With half term coming next week?”

These are words that are always sure to make any teacher bristle with barely concealed fury.

There is no such thing as ‘winding down’ in a school.  Any notion that a school full of teenagers become any easier to manage or engage in the final days before a holiday is for the birds.  To give you a sense that this is not the case, let me share my week. 

Monday began with our Senior Leaders meeting at 7.45.  This is an operational meeting where the arrangements are organised for any staff absence, where daily duties are checked and adjusted and any important information that has reached us over the weekend is shared and assessed for impact.  Incidents that may have taken place in the community, or even within families, can have a big impact on a school and so our pastoral leaders share news with us, and we determine which student may need to be checked in ones are organised.  A similar check is run across our staffing, especially at the end of a busy term where some staff may need a little extra support.

From here, we go out on duty in front of school.  This is a busy area and takes a large staff presence to ensure the safety of all our staff, students and parents as they arrive on site.  Within twenty minutes, over thirteen hundred young people, six buses and around a hundred and fifty vehicles pass in and out of the school site and well-drilled routines ensure that by 8.40, all the students are in their tutor classrooms and the front of school is quiet and calm again.  It is a feat of intense organisation and commitment from all our staff, as well as the cooperation of our students to pull it off.  But it happens every day, day in and day out.

I normally start my week with a meeting with Mrs Price, Deputy Head.  In this meeting, we plan our quality assurance activities.  This involves around fifty lesson drop ins per week which we share between us.  This work ensures that the quality of education is always of a very high standard, and it is a great privilege for us to be able to see so many fantastic teachers at their work.  Through this, we also identify especially strong practice which we can then share amongst the staff.  At this time of year, we are also looking ahead to the next school year, and we have already started to plan our staffing requirements and tweaks to our curriculum.

At ten o clock, I go on break duty; this involves joining the team of staff monitoring around four hundred students as they line up and use the canteen.  The vast majority of our students are highly self-regulated and need minimal supervision, but the presence of several staff is reassuring for students and gives them someone to talk to, and to share their learning and highlights of their day.

At 10.30, we were visited by Mark Brown, our Trust Director of Education.  It being Year 11 mock week, we headed for the exam hall so that I could show him how impressively our students were settling into their mock exams; we then dropped into a few lessons and did the second break duty together. 

This year, we have seconded two of our talented middle leaders onto our Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and, as the term ends, I wanted to check with them how they were benefiting from the experience.  So, at 11.30, I met with Mr Sellers, Assistant Head of Science, to discuss his leadership development and how we can further support him in his work.  Talking about leadership is something I always enjoy and, later in the week, I had similar conversations with Mrs Phetla, Deputy Head of Maths, who is also seconded to SLT this year.

At 12.20pm, it was back into the canteen for the first lunch duty and then, at 1pm, I met with Mr Minns, one of our school’s teacher union reps.  I am proud that we have a harmonious working environment at Hessle, but it is helpful to have staff representatives to bring me any concerns or issues that I need to be aware of.  Managing a school of over two hundred staff is quite daunting and I have to make decisions that don’t please everyone but good dialogue is the key to getting it right more often than not. 

At 1.30, I had a meeting with another member of staff and then, at 2, I did my share of the lesson drop ins that I had planned earlier in the day with Mrs Price.

By 3 o’clock, the school begins to empty and I was back on gate duty once again before leading the whole staff meeting at 3.15 during which I summarised the achievements of the term to date and thanked them for their work. 

There was still a couple of hours of work to do, to read and reply to emails and prepare for the next working day.

The rest of the week followed in similar vein but also involved hosting a visit from another headteacher in our trust and a Year 10 Parents Meeting on Tuesday.  The days are relentlessly busy but I would not have it any other way. 

When I left university, I spent a summer working in an office where my job was to transfer a heap of manual finance records onto a computer system.  Our breaks and lunches were taken at fixed times and nobody moved or spoke whilst working.  It was mind-numbingly boring and although I only worked there for a month, the days lasted weeks and the month seemed to last a decade.  I vowed that I would never work in a role where I ‘clock-watched’ again. 

Working in a school is hard and leading it occasionally brings pressure that I had never known before; but it is never dull and every day brings laughter, joy and immense satisfaction.  I am very lucky.

Just to underline how fortunate I am, I had an interaction with a family on Tuesday which I will never forget.  Their child had been out of school for almost two years for reasons that are too complex to go into here.  As a parent myself, I can’t imagine how anxious I would feel if one of my children was unable to attend school.  Anyway, six months after joining Hessle, their child is now attending school every day, gradually building confidence and starting to enjoy being a teenager again.  “Everyone in the family is happy again,” they told me.  They singled out one individual member of staff for praise (which I couldn’t wait to pass on the next day) but this kind of work goes on in schools all of the time.  And it is life changing.

As I write this, the sun is shining and the students have left the school site.  All of our staff will be at Wolfreton School tomorrow for our annual Trust Conference.  It promises to be an enjoyable day meeting colleagues and learning from one another.  And then, it will be half term.

On Saturday, I will be in Derby watching Hull City, at the behest of my son who is chalking up visits to as many sports grounds as he can.  From there, we are heading further South to my wife’s family in Surrey for a few days which, on Monday, involves a trip to as many London-based football grounds as we can fit in.  My son believes we can visit thirteen and has a highly detailed itinerary already planned.  We’ll see how that goes when it meets the reality of the London transport network!

By midweek we will be back home for a few days of ‘life admin’ - visit from a plumber, haircut, dentists, car MOT – before getting ready to go again for another seven weeks.

It has been a very successful half term for us at Hessle High School and I thank you, as always, for all of your support. 

Enjoy the weekend.