You Don't Walk Alone

 

You Don’t Walk Alone

Alongside my family and love of porridge, the other great passion of my life is following Liverpool Football Club. LFC is famous for its anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and I can still remember being challenged to sing it by members of Council when I was elected President in Shanghai (I did and the resulting sound was not pretty!)

The problem for many of us in the leadership community is that we often feel that we do walk alone. A sense of being isolated and the only one who is facing this particular problem is one of the biggest causes of stress for leaders, wherever they are in the world. I have found that the same can also be true for leadership associations, who can feel that the challenges they are facing are particular to their own jurisdiction.

For this reason I found ICP’s Pre-Council survey particularly powerful, since it offered the chance to demonstrate that both the challenges and opportunities faced by leaders are often the same, regardless of where we find ourselves. Yes, context and the way in which these issues impact upon us might vary, but the fundamental issues are surprisingly consistent.

We had 28 responses from across the ICP family:

Our survey had been drawn together by Nancy Brady, our Executive representative for the Americas, and focused upon issues raised by her regional group around the recruitment and retention of leaders. The response to the first of our questions demonstrated the problem very clearly:

When you have a 100% agreement from nearly 30 countries across five different continents, it speaks for itself. Responses from our members illustrate what has been happening: Wellbeing, workload and ongoing stresses related to pandemic logistics dominate the everyday life of principals

For this reason when 86% of respondents report a change in job satisfaction over the past two years I do not think they are telling us that the role has become more fulfilling:

 Comments from members tell their own story:

Financial stresses linked to COVID, staffing and lack of relievers, how to reengage students and concern about how to make up lost learning time have increased anxiety. They are stressors that are not easily solved within education alone and they are underpinned by equity issues.

As the pressures and workload associated with  being a leader increase, so the job becomes less fulfilling. In part this reduction in job satisfaction relates to leaders being taken away from their core role within the school:

Having been extremely responsive and responsible COVID logistics managers, school leaders need time and support to refocus on teaching and learning

Over regulation and compliance administration is taking us away from learning

Data from Professor Phil Riley has indicated that while Irish school leaders enjoy their job the sheer quantity of work is the top stressor for them followed closely by a lack of time to focus on teaching and learning

As a consequence, the next two responses are perhaps to be expected:

Clearly these responses point to a worldwide cause and effect that as the job becomes both more demanding and less fulfilling there are increasing numbers either leaving the profession or finding that these demands have a negative effect upon their health. In the words of one national association:

As an organization we are quite concerned about the health and wellbeing of our members post pandemic. They have navigated the crisis well, but our research tells us that people often suffer the full effects of a crisis once the crisis has passed

Some members reported that policy makers had been slow to understand what was happening:

We are observing a significant increase in the number of non-educators in senior leadership roles in our bureaucracy. This is having a negative impact on a wide range of operational matters and a significant negative impact on morale. The workload is unsustainable and the damage to our students should not be under-estimated

Around 60% of members reported an increased difficulty in recruitment (it would be interesting to hear more from the remaining 40% in a future survey about what they are doing to keep recruitment levels high). Survey responses below provides a flavour of what is happening on the ground:

Fewer teachers are willing to leave the classroom to become administrators and take on more responsibility for virtually no additional compensation. Boards are not offering incentives.

Increased workload, exacerbated by the pandemic, combined with chronic staff shortages, have made school leadership positions unattractive to potential strong candidates - quite frankly, we can't recruit good people to the positions

 It was fascinating to see that over 92% had looked outside education to recruit to senior roles. Whilst this is not a negative, since it is important to make use of talented leaders from all walks of life, it does highlight the need to ensure that they are provided with training and preparation for the specific demands of educational leadership. For this reason it was striking that over 92% of members reported that they had put in place their own training to support colleagues taking on leadership roles.

Having read the survey results, it might come as a surprise to hear that this was the most positive and optimistic Council I have attended. We did not travel all that distance to share our complaints, rather to work together on constructive and workable solutions. In doing this, I think we all found that there was a particular power in discovering that we did not walk alone and that we were all facing a set of common challenges. As a result of the different places that we work in it is unlikely that there is one single solution, but when speaking both to members of our own organisations and policy makers we can now say that these issues of workload, recruitment and retention are faced by school systems across the world.

 

 Peter Kent

ICP President