Sam Gibbs: ‘It is possible to be a good leader and a good parent’

Sam Gibbs is currently trust curriculum and development lead at Greater Manchester Education Trust. She has formerly worked as a teacher educator for Ambition Institute, in CPD leadership roles and as an English teacher. She writes:

I went on my first maternity leave four years into my first teaching job, just as I had the opportunity to get a promotion. There was an assumption, suddenly - among many people - that having had a baby, I would not want the extra responsibility; that this wasn’t something a new mum would seek out; that I would not want that option any more. I found it so insulting. It still fires me up now. It’s really driven me to move up in my career since, as I want to show how wrong it is that women are expected to choose between motherhood and a career.

I think it is possible to be a good leader and a good parent. It’s important to role model healthy working habits. It’s important that I tell my children how much I love my work because they will need to understand why that work takes time away from them. I also want to show them that work can be a passion and not just an income.

I taught for 12 years full-time in the classroom. The people doing the hardest work in the system are teachers. I am very aware of how lucky I am with the opportunities and flexibility my kind of leadership role gives me. But I’m sometimes envious of teachers, too, despite the fact that I know it is so hard. There is something so special about being at the heart of those school communities that you cannot find in other jobs.

When you have been out of teaching for a while, it is really difficult to get people to understand the relevance of what you have done. I spent three years at Ambition Institute working on teacher development with hundreds of schools. I had this itch to go back into schools, so I applied for head of English jobs. I had the CV for it, but I couldn’t get a role because heads would tell me I could not demonstrate recent direct impact on a cohort of Year 11s in a school. That just seemed such a narrow view, and such a waste if that was how others with broader experience were being judged, too.

The little things really do matter. There was a moment when I was working 70 hours per week, I had some really, really tough classes, and this one morning I got in and I was exhausted. The photocopier was broken, it was halfway through the day and I had had no time to eat or get a coffee or go to the loo. And so I ran to the workroom before a lesson and I grabbed the kettle, but inside it was just mould. And I picked up the coffee jar and it was all congealed and disgusting. Then next to me was a colleague with this brown sludge in a flask. I asked him what it was and he said he knew he would have no time for his lunch so he had liquidised it so he could drink it quickly between lessons. I knew I was done in that moment. You can’t treat professionals like that and expect them to stick around.

There are some pretty big barriers to flexible working while you still have a model of 30 kids sitting in a class. But we can definitely make things easier. If I am running a twilight session and it is a 30-minute drive away at another school, and someone needs to get back to a childminder at 5pm and the training is not relevant to them or is something they didn’t need to be there for in person, then I’m not really going to achieve much with that group. But if I make the whole experience worthwhile - really focused, relevant training that demands that physical presence, with great coffee and food and an early finish to ensure pick-up times are met, I am going to get so much more from that group because I have actually thought about them as human beings.

The fact that I have never been a head has been used against me frequently during my career, particularly by men. Their argument is that I cannot support heads because I have never done their job. I don’t think that’s true. I know from my own experience that it is not true. But to work, it does require the head to buy into it, for me to understand my blindspots, and to have a headteacher working with me who points those blindspots out constructively. I am lucky that I work with heads who do that, and where we have mutual respect.

I have never wanted to be a head. I think headteachers are amazing, but I have never felt it was for me. I’m deeply passionate about teaching, and I am the sort of person who needs to be passionate about something if I am going to be successful. I do not think I could be passionate about a lot of what headteachers are expected to do.

My job is to identify the problems that teachers and leaders have and help them to solve them, because they’re too busy running and working in their schools to do that themselves. If I tried to do that on my own, I would not be very successful. That’s why system roles like mine - where we go out and learn and share - are so critical. The majority of my time is spent in our schools, but every interaction I have with the wider system - be it running the Trust-Wide CPD Leaders’ Forum with Tracy Goodyear, attending or speaking at events, being part of panels - feeds back into what we do, and we share what we do with others. It’s why these roles matter so much: they do have a direct impact on outcomes.

We have to be so careful in teaching that we don’t just drag and drop. It is really dangerous to see something in another trust and just lift that and expect it to work in your own. If people come to me and say they like something we do, I tell them to find four or five trusts doing it differently and really think about what bits might work for them and why.

When I look back over my career, there are probably times when I could have done with being pulled back a bit. I love the excitement of ideas. I get a buzz out of challenge. So I always feel I’m slightly on the edge of going too far, and when I reflect afterwards, I think, “Was I too much?” Mentoring and good friends are really effective for keeping that in check!

I think a lot about how, as a leader, you balance consistency, equity of offer for students and teacher autonomy. In a trust that has schools that are thriving and where the standards are high, it is easy to enable more autonomy. But when schools are in crisis and you need to dampen the fire, it’s much harder to get that balance right.

Because of the work I do across the sector, I do worry that at some point I could become somebody for whom people start saying, “Oh, her again!” I don’t want to take space from other people. I am realistic about why I get offered those opportunities: a network built when I was at Ambition, the work I have done through the CPD leader network, being on panels. That doesn’t make what I have to say any more important than anyone else, and I try to pass on opportunities where I think there is someone better to take them - which is often.

The more I see the impact of leadership roles like mine, the more secure I am that this here is my lane and that I do not need to be a CEO to be successful. I hugely admire those who take on CEO roles, but I also think that it should not be seen as the natural end point for a successful career.