When my children were at primary school, the word of the moment was “resilience”. It was 2011, the school was “Ofsted-expectant” and like a mother in her final trimester, it was preparing the nest for its imminent arrival. Noticeboard displays were worthy of the Turner Prize, and the fecund shoals of papier-mâché sea creatures in Reception were dazzling - not only in their vibrancy, size and number, but in their ability to detach themselves at will from their Blu Tack shackles and hurl themselves at the heads of visitors. They also held an eerily spectral capacity to set off the intruder alarm at regular two-hourly intervals throughout the night. Every night. But it was OK, our caretaker was resilient - and on double time for anti-social call-outs.

In fact, the whole school resounded with resilience. It bounced off the walls, literally, and found its way into every lesson, every classroom and every assembly. Children in Year 2 couldn’t get their plimsolls on the right feet, but they could spell “resilience” and give you five pertinent recent examples of where they had demonstrated it.

Not for the fainthearted

And I got to thinking about how resilient I was, and how resilient I needed to be in my role as a school business leader. And the answer, after about two minutes of careful contemplation, was “bloody resilient”. The school business leader game isn’t for the fainthearted, nor is it for glory hunters, the emotionally fragile, or those for whom positive feedback is at the very least, a “nice to have”. School business folk are tough. We walk in the door every morning, expecting something to have gone wrong. We plan that it might, we expect that it will and we cope when it does. But what we also do, is act as a virtual punchbag for the people who are affected when disaster strikes.

Sometimes it’s tough to listen to the rants and raves of parents or colleagues who think it’s your personal fault that it snowed, that their delivery didn’t arrive on time, that they’ve lost their keys or that they got double-charged for a panini in the canteen last Thursday. Most of the time it’s no big deal - after all, that’s why we’re there, to lead the support services of the school. We listen and we support, we suggest and we reason, we fix, we soothe and we follow up. But some days, when our spinning plates are slightly out of kilter, the temptation is almost too great not to hurl one of them against the wall and tell the world - or the wall, at least - exactly what you think of it.

But we never do, not out loud at least. And that’s when our old friend resilience steps in. Resilience is the thing that makes you stop typing an angry reply and makes you go for a walk instead. It’s the thing that makes you seek out your office buddy, the one you can swear and vent at, until you’re laughing at the stupidity and pettiness of whatever it was that set you off. And it’s resilience that makes you leave your bucket of angst outside your office every night, along with the sandwich you didn’t get time to eat, for the cleaners to dispose of. And as funding cuts, recruitment crises and decreasing wellbeing take their toll on our schools, so they also take their toll on our profession.

A longer, bloodier battle

School business leaders are spending more and more of their time tied up in the necessarily negative aspects of their roles: trudging through budget cuts, shedding services, delivering bad news and making difficult decisions. And as we dig our trenches deeper, bedding in for a battle far longer and more bloody than we’d expected, shoring up our schools, so we find ourselves unable to find the time or the resources to evolve. The time we should be spending in creating exciting new opportunities, in developing ideas and driving our businesses forward with innovation and risk, isn’t available anymore and those exciting times we used to love are fewer and further apart. That’s a shame, because those are the bits of the job that make you sparkle and fizz inside - and those are the bits that make the magic happen.

So some days it feels like all we have is resilience to keep us going, to stop us from walking away from the profession we love and the schools we care for. But on other days? On other days when the sun is shining and children make you laugh and you fix all the problems that get thrown at you - and then you come up with a genius plan to save a wodge of money. Those days bring you back again. Those are the days that restock your resilience reservoir ready for the next day, and the next.

And me? I think back to those days in my kids’ primary school and I think that I should listen to those Year 2 children, that I should be proud of my resilience - and that maybe, this weekend, I should make myself a papier-mâché pufferfish and hang it by my office door with a very small blob of Blu Tack, just to remind me of them. 

Hilary Goldsmith is director of finance and operations at Varndean School. She tweets at @sbl365 

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