headteacher-secondary

teachwire.net/secondary Most secondary schools have them, but it’s not always clear what a head of year’s pastoral responsibilities should involve, says Stephen Lane ... What do your heads of year actually do? 28 I love being a head of year (HoY), fraught though it is with the emotional carnage of childhood or, in my Key Stage 3 context, that vicious twilight zone of the emergent teenager. It’s difficult to list all the things that we actually do in pastoral leadership roles – to precisely articulate the nuance of the situations that might arise, to catalogue the multitudinous decisions we have to make on a daily basis, to index the infinite complexities of the endless variations in social, emotional and mental wellbeing that our students experience. And then there’s the school context. Whilst there are, no doubt, a hundred commonalities across diverse school communities, there are surely thousands of context-dependent needs and demands that form tutors, heads of year and pastoral leaders must try to understand and negotiate in order to best serve those in our care. Nevertheless, there’s obviously a need to define the role of HoY (or pastoral leader), if only in order that such posts can be advertised and qualified in job descriptions. So how would you do it? If you were to write the job description for a HoY role, what would you include? And, perhaps more interestingly, what would you omit? Sloganised managerialism Perusing the job adverts and accompanying descriptions on the Tes website is revealing. Many reflect a desire to find someone who can ‘motivate’ people; who shows ‘enthusiasm, sensitivity, resilience and strong interpersonal skills’; who is ‘inspirational’. Of course, they must also be ‘an outstanding and talented practitioner’ because everyone must be ‘outstanding’. It’s a word which has probably done more harm to the teaching profession than any other. The problem with this kind of language – or jargon – as it appears in many of these adverts is that it’s a form of sloganised managerialism full of clichés so cold they’ve been rendered ultimately meaningless. Search for the term ‘passion’ in teaching job adverts and behold the banality. This kind of wording says nothing about the job. Sure, it presents a kind of idealised set of aims, including the desire to improve ‘Young people’s life chances’ – but there’s nothing much there in terms of specifics. Job descriptions will further often include a lot of ‘co-ordination’, ensuring ‘student progress’ and reviewing attendance data. Whilst these tasks are perfectly reasonable and important, it strikes me that they’re somewhat … administrative, managerial, dry. There’s also nothing there about commitment to professional growth or learning, and nothing at all about developing research, or evidence-informed policy or practice. ‘Wiping noses and kicking butts’ It could be argued that such job descriptions perpetuate what Caroline Lodge described in 2008 as “dysfunctional interpretations” of the role of HoY, “using the system for administration, as a watered-down welfare service, or for behaviour management.” Lodge goes on to cite a phrase used by a group of headteachers with whom she was working, which she claims “Poignantly captures two of these distortions – ‘ wiping noses and kicking butts ’.” Lodge articulates frustration at the notion of the HoY role being about behaviour management. The notion that we perhaps ought to be moving beyond a view of the pastoral as simply ‘wiping noses and kicking butts’ is one I can support. Despite the vastness of all that the word ‘pastoral’ encompasses, it’s nonetheless valuable to draw out some of these strands in an effort to define what a pastoral leadership role might actually involve. I’d recommend periodically writing a list of what your role entails – this is a useful grounding exercise that can help to refocus your priorities during hectic periods and identify any areas where you might legitimately ask for support or delegate to others, such as form tutors. Better still, producing such a list in conjunction with colleagues might help foster a collegial approach to pastoral work that would likely benefit the team and, most importantly, the children in your care. (See ‘My pastoral list’ for mine.) Helpfully, the National Association for Pastoral Care in Education (NAPCE) has composed its own guidance for pastoral support in the form of a long list (see bit.ly/ts97-napce) . The NAPCE does a decent job of encapsulating the plethora of particulars involved. It also succeeds, I think, in traversing the potential false dichotomy between the pastoral and the academic. It should be fairly obvious to most teachers that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two. There’s also a strong emphasis in the NAPCE guidelines on personal development. It’s worth noting, of course, that Ofsted’s Education “Everyone who works with children should have safeguarding as their first and last thought”