Best Practice

Reality is like a beachball: Overcoming the imagined school

Leadership/school profiles Senior leadership Middle leadership
School leaders operate in the tension that lies between the reality of their schools and the future they imagine. This is not an easy space to work in. Robbie Burns considers how we can dream of the future while keeping a foot in the here and now
Image: Adobe Stock

“We all live within our own imagined world, but we operate within the real world. However, we can only improve the real school if we work on our imagined one.” Headteacher Matthew Evans (2021)

 

We might not be conscious of it, but our perception of reality is not a complete representation of all that is. As you drive into the car park, turn off the ignition, scan yourself into the building, and begin your working day, you don’t have time to think about all of the beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, ideas you hold about the school in which you work, the people who work there, the children who learn there, and the wider community you are all a part of.

You just get on with the day. You make decisions. You run staff training. You teach lessons. You tick things off on the development plan. You help people move forward. You improve the school.

But pause for a moment and reflect on these statements. Are you really improving your school or are you just improving an imaginary one?

How do you know that the version of the school that inhabits your imagination is the one that really exists?

 

Explore leadership articles from Robbie Burns

    • Reality is like a beachball: Overcoming the imagined school: This article
    • Leadership: Finding focus in the frantic life of a school: Published May 1
    • Sharpening the leadership saw: Habits to form for continual renewal: Published April 24

 

The imagined school

We are just being human when we spend time in our imaginations. Even more so, as leaders, it is in our job description to have a pretty well worked out imaginary version of the future which we want to lead everyone towards. This is a natural part of being a leader.

Headteacher and blogger Matthew Evans, whom I quote above, however, warns leaders against spending too much time in our minds thinking about a school that is simply aspirational. As we live our lives in reality, he says we must not root our minds in something that is illusory. We must avoid the “imagined school”, something we are moving towards, becoming something we think already exists. This is easier said than done.

 

The reality gap

As school leaders we work (slightly) removed from the realities of the classroom. As school leaders we work outside the daily realities of duties, intensive work with complex students, photocopiers that don’t function, and deep relationships with small numbers of students.

But with this important but slightly “removed-ness” from the daily practices of teachers, lunchtime supervisors, office staff et al, we must continually consider whether we are making decisions based on our own ideas about what is true about our school and the vision we have for the future (the imagined school) and what really is going on in the day-to-day lives of our students, our teachers, and our community.

We must live in this important tension. As time goes by, I see this to be one of the important arts of leadership – to live one foot in the past, one foot in the present.

To not do this is to be in a place where over time, little-by-little, poor leadership will supersede any attempts to really improve life chances for young people.

As Evans writes: “It seems to me that the gap between how the school is and how the school leader imagines it to be is where poor leadership thrives. Leaders’ decisions are made with reference to the imagined school but play out in reality. It is in our interests to assist leaders in closing these gaps.”

 

Interrogating reality

It is worth saying again: leaders must live in tension between what is real and what they feel the future for their students, their teachers and their communities ought to be.

To not do this is to miss an important aspect of the leadership challenge. But the gap between these two entities is where bad leadership thrives. Therefore, it is important that there are regular rhythms, check-ups, whatever you want to call them, that ensure that leaders can make sure that the foot in reality and the foot in the future don’t ever get too far apart.

The first step, before “health-checks” or “away days” are scheduled, is to realise that your version of the reality of school life looks different even within your own leadership team. The reality of your school for your early years leader is different to yours, that of your office manager, and your SENCO.

To an extent nothing can be done about this and you should not be expected to know everything there is to know about every situation in the life of the school. That’s why you assemble a team.

The error, though, is often that leaders see the whole school through their subjective lens and claim that that is the truth. Likewise, deputies and headteachers with much wider responsibilities tend to do exactly the same at a much higher level: they see the school through a far shinier, more optimistic lens and at times choose to ignore the issues their other teachers and leaders feel acutely each day.

This insight is important because it means that when you sit round a meeting table to make decisions, discuss important aspects of school life and consider the priorities you ought to have, you need to realise that the ones you have will naturally be in a different order to your early years leader; the deeply felt first thing you want to improve might be important but not a priority to your SENCO.

That’s okay but difficult to overcome when you are aiming at interrogating reality.

 

Reality is like a beachball

When it comes to interrogating reality, it’s helpful to view your organisation and your team roles like a beach ball – covered in coloured stripes.

Each stripe represents an aspect of school life. Each of the stripes forms the whole beachball but has a specific colour and role. To work together in an effective manner, and to ensure that teams don’t work in silos, we need to bring their “truth” to the table in our senior leader meetings. The truth must be challenged, shaped and eventually contribute to the interrogation of reality that is so desperately needed at the leadership levels of a school (because good leaders understand that we don’t see everything all the time).

Leaders exist on a “stripe”, where our responsibilities, closest relationships and focuses will naturally cover, elevate and prioritise things that might not be at the top of other people’s lists.

 

Let’s unpack this a little further

Imagine your school as a beachball. It has yellow, blue, green and red stripes. Imagine:

  • Your early years leader stood on the blue stripe.
  • Your SENCO stood on the yellow stripe.
  • You are stood on the green stripe (and so contrary to your opinion perhaps do not actually have a bird’s eye view).
  • There is a red stripe but no-one in this senior leadership meeting stands in that one – this stripe represents the people you are making decisions for who are not in the meeting.

You are about to launch a new system for running break and lunch times. You think it is going to be slicker, cut the costs of lunchtime supervision and improve the way the school day runs. You explain, using a nice PowerPoint and handout and then ask the team: “So what do we think?”

“Well, you’ve not thought about the students who have autism and need support at all times,” the SENCO explains, stood on the yellow stripe (after a day of being on the yellow stripe working with students with some very challenging needs).

“Well, I’m sure we can re-organise some teaching assistants on duty to ensure they are in class to support when it’s needed,” you reply. You knew there would be issues, but you are keen to find solutions.

“I do think this is better, but the problem is that early years staff won’t have the right ratios when it is needed. The other thing we’ve not considered is the fact that early years have their lunch at a different time and there is a chance that the hall will be overcrowded.”

The early years leader acutely understands the issues you’re trying to fix but the blue stripe is finding the running of reception and nursery hard enough at the moment and you sense a change at this point might be a little too much.

Your green stripe thinking, as you put together your neat and tidy PowerPoint, saw this whole thing as exceptionally simple. Surely your colleagues are simply not being solution-focused enough and need to be “more positive”.

This is where the issue of the imagined school emerges, and where poor leadership reigns. You could become disappointed with your team and ask them to help you find solutions from their respective stripes.

You could forget the plan altogether; it clearly isn’t that important to your colleagues on the other side of the beach ball.

You could plough on, come up with a decision, simply because you want to “get this done” and “share it with staff” to “fix the issue”.

From experience, the solution does not lie in any of these.

Viewing your school as a beachball is the important first step of interrogating reality. You realise that although your decisions do impact people on the blue and yellow stripes the decisions you are making have the most impact on the people on the red stripe. They are the ones who will actually have to change what they are currently doing and implement a new plan.

The lunch and break times you imagined could be simply fixed from your green stripe as you thought green thoughts and did green things all day. There was no need for you even to consider the fact that everyone who would be doing this stands on the red stripe and thinks red stripe thoughts about red stripe things all day. They won’t even understand the green stripe language. In fact, the red stripe wasn’t even invited to the meeting making decisions about them.

Add your own issues, struggles, problems within the warp and woof of the school day to this analogy.

 

Final thoughts

Before any questions, strategies, steps and processes can be shared and discussed to develop the way that you talk, learn and lead your colleagues, you must understand this fundamental aspect of good leadership decision-making: your imagined school must always be anchored to the real school you lead.

To interrogate the progress towards the imagined school that your real school is making, understand that you don’t know everything there is to know; your perspectives are not everyone’s perspectives; your reality is not everyone’s reality.

Think about the beachball analogy. Use it daily to process the people, the conversations, the meetings that you have.

One of the fundamental aspects of good leadership that avoids it going very wrong is actively thinking about ways to make sure every person on every stripe of the beachball knows that they can be heard, be recognised and have their opinions shared.

Equally, they must recognise that their perception of reality is not a sum total of all that there is and therefore must understand that not every decision will be something that accommodates their stripe. Schools are complicated. Hard decisions need to be made.

However, everyone recognising this provides an important platform for interrogating reality more fully.

 

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