Manny Botwe is headteacher of Tytherington School in Macclesfield, Cheshire, and was president of the Association of School and College Leaders for 2024-25. He writes:

I grew up in Croydon, London. I didn’t go to the same secondary school as my brothers and sisters, as they did not achieve anywhere near their full potential and my mum wanted a different experience for me. So I went to a Catholic school in Sutton. The students were almost all white and it ran itself like a grammar. I grew up in an area where it was mostly people of colour who lived there and there was a lot of poverty, a lot of crime. It was an eye-opener, that school. But to be honest, I was always very good at code-switching and I got on really well there. I soon realised, though, that others were not as good at that switching, and I am now certain that one of the most important skills we can teach children is how to exist in different crowds and be successful.

My mum said, “Always put your best foot forward.” So for the first piece of work at my secondary school, it was my best neat handwriting, I’ve gone to the library, I’ve worked at it for hours. When I handed it in, the teacher refused to believe I did it. I argued but he refused to believe me. And I ended up having to make the piece of work worse before he would accept it. I’ve thought about it a lot, and there was really only one reason why he didn’t think I could have produced that piece of work. It was one of a number of incidents in my life that taught me how some people use positions of power to humiliate. I have always been extremely conscious of never doing that.

As I’ve got older, I’ve become a bit more comfortable with my narrative - a working-class Black kid from Croydon who went to a posh school, went to Oxford, was one of very few people of colour on the Fast Track school leadership scheme and then again in leadership positions in schools, and someone who now runs a school in an area where the vast majority of pupils are white. I recognise there are things that I can say - because of my ethnicity and my class - that might be difficult for other people to say, and I am aware that I have to use that for good.

I may be the only Black male my pupils see in a professional sense, and, as such, I believe I have a responsibility to carry myself in a certain way that forefronts ethics, morals, sensibilities and intelligence, and demonstrates that I get emotional and can be vulnerable. I don’t wake up thinking, “I have to be like this today,” but I realise that what I do matters more broadly than just their impression of me personally.

I did a 10-week internship in the prison service and it really changed the way I thought about schools. You’ve got a lot of people in prisons who, if you look at their life three or four years before that, something happened that changed their trajectory, and you realise it doesn’t take much. Teaching offers you an opportunity to affect that. It’s one of the real rewards of the job. But there are some kids for whom something happens that you can’t control, and it hurts when that happens.

I came into education pushing social mobility, meritocracy and unleashing talent, and those things are all still important. But I’m now uncomfortable about the idea that you have to move away from an area to be a success and, unfortunately, that is what has come to underpin much of the meritocracy and aspirational conversation outside of London. In the community I serve, there are whole swathes of people who’ve not gone to uni. They live a really great life; a life where they’re connected to their community. And for me, it’s disrespectful to ignore - or worse disparage - aspirations that don’t result in you getting really great grades and going to uni. It’s perfectly rational for youngsters to decide that they don’t want to move to London or go to university, and that they want to do what their mum and dad have done, if those avenues still exist.

A huge part of my job as a headteacher is to ensure that youngsters feel proud of where they’re from. And we do that by ensuring that this school is deeply embedded in and reflects and serves its community. We don’t do things to our community, we do it with them. That’s sometimes hard when you have an attendance or a behaviour policy and implement those consistently, but the overall narrative has to be, “This school works for you.” If you get that right, everything else is easier.

You need order in school, you need structure and systems. Otherwise schools are unsafe places to work. But you also need empathy, joy, inspiration. You have to really care. So you have to put as much resource as you can upstream, to prevention, to working with kids early. Have you got an environment where people feel like they can open up and be vulnerable, where you’re listening to the needs of youngsters? Because if you do all that, maybe there are things that we can avoid, maybe there are options. Once a kid does something like bringing a knife into school, your options are limited.

Sometimes, as a head, you’ve got to push things a little bit. That means you’re pushing things with parents, pushing things with the team, pushing your own expectations. You’re questioning everything. You have to be demanding. And you need to do all that without being an autocrat. It takes time to get that right.

A weakness of mine is that I like to have a debate about a particular policy, not because I want to win an argument but because I like to unpick it to find where its weaknesses are. And actually that ends up shutting down quite a few people, because they’re not necessarily comfortable in terms of having that level of debate. I’ve become very aware of trying to mitigate that.

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if people don’t get on with each other, you just can’t operate. So one of the things we do as an SLT (me included) is we rank our relationship and trust levels with all the different staff members in the school. It reveals quite a bit about who you really spend time with and it forces you to really interrogate how you operate. It’s not about performance - this is about really knowing people, having conversations about their lives. A five-minute conversation about someone’s holiday can completely transform your view of them. Making this a priority can transform your school’s culture.

I have a level of confidence that enables me to back myself. But I know there’s a healthy dose of luck in terms of where you end up in life. The minute you begin to start believing in your own hype, you begin to lose empathy with people who maybe didn’t have the luck. And then you’re done as a leader, really.

I’m fortunate that I love my job. I still love gate duty at the start of the day - I can’t live without those conversations, that banter, when you’re talking to a young person. And when I no longer have butterflies about assemblies or meeting the new Year 7s or exam results day and all of those things, I’ll know it’s time for me to go.

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