Rob Hollingsworth’s Blog

Anyone who has been for an interview or two for a school based post will know that the process is broken.   Whether the role is for a member of support staff, a class teacher or one with leadership responsibilities, they almost all follow the same steps: Work with children; Answer some questions that have been found via a Google search the day before the interview process begins; Some in-tray task and a list of the worst things that could ever go wrong, all happening on one day for you to prioritise (more prominent if you’re going for a leadership role) Some other crazy task that you’ll never come across in your role.  But what do we actually want from our successful candidate? I’d argue that the only one that’s remotely pertinent is working with children, although what can you actually get from a 20-30 minute observation of a ‘lesson’, especially now it’s widely agreed that one-off observations should not be used anywhere in school? It’s time for us to change and design inter...

In January 2022, I moved into my first Headship. This wasn’t under the usual circumstances, but as a secondment. Whilst it definitely had its positives - I got to ‘try out the school before I committed’ and not many people get to do that - it also came with a bunch of significant challenges.  I didn’t know whether I’d be staying more than my initial 2 terms and neither did the staff, I’ll talk about the challenges of this in another post. Below are some of the things that I learnt when going into that new role and a few things to consider when moving in the future: 1. Decide on the type of leader you want to be - We’ll start off with the hardest one. Decide the type of leader you want to be and make sure that you follow through on it.  Think of all of the best (and worst) leaders that you’ve ever followed. What do they all have in common? What skills, values and attributes do you want to be known for?  You have an opportunity to ‘reinvent’ yourself with little baggage and...