This blogpost is the first of two, summarising the principles that underpin our development of heads of year at our school. We are a research-informed school serving a catchment area with high levels of deprivation; we believe in high expectations and a knowledge-rich curriculum as an entitlement for our students. The pastoral team is absolutely crucial to our delivery of this vision, and these are the twelve things we focus on in order to make sure our pastoral leaders are everything they can be.
- Be clear about your principles and your rationale
There must be an underpinning core to pastoral work, otherwise we are just going through the motions and our actions fail to be really impactful. Heads of year must be passionately committed to the school values – at our school these are ambitious curriculum, excellent manners and soft skills, success for everyone regardless of their background, stoicism, community, kindness and responsibility. These aren’t just a set of words – they are headlines from the wealth of reading that the team have undertaken – from “The Power of Culture” to “The Chimp Paradox” to “The Courage to be Disliked”.
We know what we do and why we do it: we do detentions because it is our responsibility to teach students how to behave well. We set homework because it is our responsibility to teach students good habits. We narrate the positive because we want a warm, happy school. Etc. Heads of year need to be motivated by these ideas and live them every day in the details and big pictures of their work.
2. Steep yourself in these ideas
It’s not enough to just agree with these headlines – really great heads of year immerse themselves in thinking about personal development, behaviour, and values. They read. They didn’t always read in the past – but it’s a part of their job now. The school buys books and they read them: Michaela, Tom Bennett, Stephen Lane, but also Marcus Aurelius, Ryan Holiday, and Cal Newport. They listen to audiobooks and podcasts. They follow great pastoral accounts on Twitter – people like Barry Smith and Amy Forrester. They ask these people questions – often in direct messaging since pastoral matters can be sensitive. The richness of the knowledge gained from these pursuits cannot be equalled. Having this wealth of background means that our pastoral leaders are wholly committed to these ideas, they understand the details, the intricacies, the paradigms and parables. It gives people the courage and the confidence to act, to persist in the face of adversity, to notice things, to think of effective solutions and to plan intelligently for the future. It is a privilege to live in these times, of unprecedented access to so many great thinkers – and this immersion is a professional responsibility for our pastoral leaders.
3. Establish and use a shared language
So much of pastoral work is about messaging. Pupils need to know lots of things – expectations, consequences, values. We need to overcommunicate these and we need to make them easy to understand. For this we need a shared language that everyone uses consistently and persistently. We have a list of them – many are from Teach Like A Champion. We use SLANT, SHARE and STAR. We say “Tracking me”, “Perfect lines” and “Silence for Success”. There are lots more. We’ve written a list and we add more as our circumstances change and we need new messages. It’s important to establish these messages, to explicitly teach the pupils what they mean (and what the rewards and consequences attached are), and it’s really important too that staff use these messages and almost all of the time nothing else. It weakens the message if Mr Smith says “321 SLANT” and Mrs Jones says “321 Silence”. In consistency lies strength.
- 4. Step up and take initiative
At our school we have a policy of whenever a new pastoral leader joins the team (this has not happened often but we want to make sure we do it right when it happens) that a member of SLT leads the Year group for several months alongside the HOY. This is because we are aware 1) of how much there can be to learn in a new school and 2) we are determined not to let any uncertainty lead to the pupils believing there may be a drop in our expectations. We are very particular about how we line up, speak to staff, behave at lunchtime, and so on, and we would rather our heads of year have time to absorb it all so that they can take over with complete consistency. It’s really important, therefore, for heads of year to be intentionally pro-active and to step up to the role, with their own ideas, suggestions, and contributions. This means looking at behaviour, in data and in observations around the school, and identifying things that need addressing, and in putting forward a proposed solution for discussion. It means having an internal dialogue, every day, around “What is currently happening in my year group? What needs to be developed? How can we go about this?” and then sending the emails, asking the questions, taking the actions needed to drive these things forward. Of course, this is all made a lot easier by points (1) and (2) above.
- 5. Larger than life
We are back to communication again. We say this to all teachers at our school, but for heads of year it’s even more important: you have to be an exaggerated version of yourself. You have to perform. It’s a pantomime. You must be larger than life. You may be a really reserved person, you may be cooler than Demna Gvasalia, you may hate the pantomime – all of these things are fine – but to be a head of year you have to throw yourself into body language, facial expressions, the use of your voice. This is so that the children will notice you and understand and remember all of those important messages we have discussed. If you can’t put aside your laconic or dour self for the sake of your year group, you shouldn’t be a head of year at our school. Sorry. That’s how we do things here. We’ve got a headteacher who hates doing spreadsheets. I hate getting up at 5am. We do these things because they make our school run better and improve children’s lives and their futures.
- 6. Sweat the small stuff
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously drastically improved crime rates in his city by adopting a “broken windows policy”: by targeting minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering and public drinking, major crimes were significantly reduced as a result. In short, by sweating the small stuff, the big stuff is (largely) taken care of.
Societal norms are so so powerful. Teenagers will always want to rebel. That is a law of nature. They will rebel wherever your line is. If your line is impeccable uniform, they will try it with that trainer-like shoe. If you don’t have a line on uniform, they will look for another line to cross – and that line could be disruption, rudeness or violence. We are not saying that schools must have uniform – we are saying it makes it easier to have high standards of everything else when you give students their rebellion line in their uniform. Not that they won’t rebel elsewhere – but if you keep your standards high then all of the natural teenage rebellion stuff will happen at those boundaries. Let them rebel by turning round in class, not by telling a teacher to fuck off. This is better for everyone, for so many different reasons.
So a head of year must issue a demerit for every single infraction. Every trainerish shoe. Every turn-around in class. Every whisper in line. We owe it to our children to give them these safe spaces for their boundary testing. If we don’t give the sanctions then the boundaries slide and the rebellion will be of a different, more serious nature. Some teenage rebellions can be very dangerous, and some can drastically damage learning or happiness. If we don’t issue the sanctions consistently, the students lose trust in us, and that is a sad way to run a school. Our students deserve to know they can trust us, to know we will always respond in the same way. That doesn’t mean we don’t lend out school shoes every day because families are struggling, or sit with students and help them organise their homework, and all the other ways we support students to get better – but we never let them off, because we refuse to let them down.
Tom Yatton 