The question of virtue in leadership was playing on my mind this morning. I reached for my go-to book on moral philosophy: Being Good by Simon Blackburn. It is a pithy introduction to ethics which I hoped would help me ponder the question. Some time later I remembered that I should be doing jobs around … Continue reading Virtuous leaders

Knowsley is a local authority area to the East of Liverpool. It is a geographically fragmented borough, comprising swathes of countryside, the two old Lancashire towns of Preston and Whiston, and several areas of unattached housing. It is one of the most deprived parts of the country. Around 20% of working-age people in Knowsley receive … Continue reading Stuck schools

When you go behind the label ‘human error’, you see people and organizations trying to cope with complexity, continually adapting, evolving along with the changing nature of risk in their operations. Eileen Munro, Munro Review of Child Protection There are two warnings before you read this post. First, it is long as it was originally … Continue reading Catastrophic error

Consensus is desirable. Can we at least agree on that? I’m not so sure. One of the interesting features of the education system is the role played by concord and discord. We place high value on the former but live mainly with the latter. Think for a moment: what do we actually agree on? There … Continue reading The value of dissent

complex processes produce order and beauty when you zoom out and look at them from enough distance.Nate Silver (2012) In the 1960s, the US Navy coined the acronym KISS. It stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. As a design principle, it takes some beating. The thing is, we are not up to the job of … Continue reading KISS

“Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story. If he weren’t in the film, it would turn out exactly the same… If he weren’t in the movie, the Nazis would still have found the Ark, taken it to the island, opened it up, and all died, just like they did.”Amy's analysis of … Continue reading The School Improvement Story

Me used to be angry young manMe hiding me head in the sandYou gave me the word, I finally heardI'm doing the best that I canLennon and McCartney, Getting Better Now, I am as prone to making simplistic statements on which to hang policy as the next school leader. I recently wrote a discussion paper … Continue reading Getting better all the time

Being certain is emotionally satisfying. Whether it is knowing an answer in a pub quiz, retrieving the name of someone you haven't seen for ages, or working out why the dishwasher has stopped working, there is a tiny release of positivity when we 'know' something. The neurologist Robert Burton calls this feeling 'the sensation of … Continue reading Causes work in teams

Problems are gritty, grounded, local. We only understand them close up, case by case. We're tempted by high level solutions when we should be getting down and dirty. The solution may lay in the idiosyncratic and pragmatic, not the intellectual.Michael Blastland, The Hidden Half (2019) I'm going to go out on a limb here and … Continue reading The School Leader as Plumber

As the anniversary of the UK's first 'lockdown' passes, many are trying to make sense of the events of the past year. For those working in schools, this period has been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride. The blogs which have emerged describe the numerous 'stages' of school functioning and how it has felt to progress … Continue reading Sense and Sense Ability