Peter was often inappropriate (by the standards of the day), he had little grasp of what he called “modern” ideas around proper management processes, and he took risks that would make your eyes bulge.
He was also one of the greatest turnaround heads I have had the pleasure of seeing in action.
You may imagine a CV of repeated success at multiple “failing” schools, but Peter only turned around one school. It was a school in dire need of saving. And when he secured an Ofsted “outstanding” grade on the first try, he knew it would not be enough in the long term. He knew real change took much longer. And so he honed and adapted and strengthened that turnaround over the next 20 years. When he eventually retired, that school was genuinely too good to fall again.
School improvement
I thought of Peter a lot this week. New research from the UCL Institute of Education IoE and the Education Policy Institute was published that looked at so-called “stuck” schools - those schools with repeated poor Ofsted inspections that seem immune to improvement. The study did a good job of highlighting the numerous problems with the punitive inspection system and the multiple ways in which the situation of a stuck school is made more difficult by external circumstances largely out of its control.
It sparked a broader discussion around how you could codify a turnaround journey: what elements make for a successful resurrection of a struggling school? Catchment, staffing, funding, curriculum, behaviour, culture, community outreach and more were all thrown into the pot and given various levels of importance.
What became clear, despite some insistence to the contrary, was that what worked somewhere did not necessarily work elsewhere. Surprise, surprise: much was context-dependent.
Leadership in schools
Peter would go further than that, though. He believed that a struggling school needed to be dragged up by an individual who was completely entrenched in, and invested in, the community of that school. It had to be a leader who knew every blade of grass, every pavement and every front door of the community.
A vulnerable school is like a vulnerable child, he would say: you need to be the scaffold and never break. Do that, earn trust and then the rest is easy.
It was a thought echoed to me this week by a senior MAT leader who, as a headteacher, turned around one of the worst-performing schools in the country. That list of levers - catchment, staffing etc - is largely irrelevant, he said. What a struggling school needs is the right person, at the right time, who is completely committed to that community and so just won’t accept anything but success.
You can’t scale that, he admitted. You can’t codify it. Sometimes, it’s just luck that a school finds its match.
Finding solutions
You could interpret the views of Peter and this MAT leader as pessimistic or unhelpful - a cult of personality can be dangerous and struggling schools can’t just sit around and wait for serendipity to deliver a saviour.
But we should instead learn from what they say. Cut-and-paste strategies are unlikely to work - we know this because we keep trying it and failing. So what in the experiences of Peter and the senior MAT leader can we learn from to help those schools that continue to struggle?
Certainly, a good supply of confident, highly skilled leaders is integral - without that, we simply won’t have the diversity of approaches and ideas for every school to find its fit. We need leaders to have the time and autonomy to be able to react to what they see. And we need those heads to be backed with the funding, inter-agency help and trust to make things happen.
Currently, we don’t have any of that.
Perhaps, then, rather than trying to find what is wrong with a stuck school, we would do better to look more closely at how that school is being failed by a stuck system.
Jon Severs is the editor of Tes magazine