headteacher-secondary

44 teachwire.net MY CAREER AS AN IMPOSTER It’s common for school leaders to feel fraudulent in front of experienced colleagues – but becoming a headteacher can often mean having to temporarily be an imposter, says Dr Paul Heery ... I ’m sure readers will be familiar with the phenomenon of ‘imposter syndrome’. Commonly felt by individuals who have recently secured a new job or been promoted, it’s the inescapable feeling that you’ve somehow succeeded in advancing under false pretences – compounded by the fear that at any moment you could be found out and sent back to your ‘rightful’ place. Headteachers seem particularly vulnerable to this. Rarely have I spoken to a fellow head who hasn’t felt like an imposter at some point, particularly during the early stages of a new headship. For many of us, the feeling never fully goes away. That’s partly down to the loneliness that comes with the job, partly because honest and impartial feedback is often hard to come by, and partly because many of us feel the need to present an air of competence that would be undermined by us suddenly asking, ‘ How am I doing?’ I’m no exception. I still vividly remember giving my most confident and reassuring smile to my new team, closing the door, sitting behind my desk and thinking, ‘ What the hell do I do now?’ No amount of time spent in SLT meetings, or even as an acting head, can prepare you for that ‘buck stops here’ feeling. I’ve found it helpful to try and understand imposter syndrome, and have found comfort in appreciating that others have experienced it too – but with the benefit of hindsight, I realise now that actually, I really was an imposter . Staying true My first teaching job was at a London primary school back in 1988, at a time when London schools were finding it almost impossible to recruit. Through a combination of eagerness, luck and market forces, I made rapid progress. After just three years, I was invited to apply for a deputy headship by someone I got chatting to over coffee on a CPD course and was duly appointed. As a new deputy head with responsibility for teaching and learning, I observed the teaching of wise and experienced colleagues, and gave them pointers for improvement, while storing away tips and techniques for improving my own teaching. I then became a headteacher, nine years after first joining the profession, and spent the next four happy years in a challenging school surrounded by supportive and talented colleagues. From there, I moved to an inner-city school that was in Special Measures. Thanks to wonderful support from school’s staff team, as well as colleagues at the local authority and neighbouring schools, we were able to make a difference. Six years later I became a local authority adviser. That role saw me make frequent visits to great schools staffed by dedicated and skilled practitioners, during which I’d often think ‘That’s a good idea – I wish I’d done that when I was a headteacher.’ It was around this time that my experiences as an imposter began to grow. Standing in a conference room, explaining to 200 headteachers how to implement a new National Strategy initiative I’d only read for the first time the day before. Carrying out a performance management review for a virtual school headteacher who’d already forgotten more about educating looked-after children than I could ever hope to learn. Feeding back to members of the Education Select Committee about the challenges of running a small rural school, despite never having worked in a school that was either small, or indeed rural. Thinking on my feet, reading everything I could, relying on great colleagues – that often got me through by the skin of my teeth. So long as I stayed true to my own values, and the values of the organisation I worked for, I felt I could contribute through a combination of hard work, showing willing and dumb luck. A sense of panic My ‘greatest’ imposter moment came relatively late in my career. I’d applied for a post leading a small trust, working across schools with a great deal of unrealised potential. The only problem was that the trust comprised two secondary schools and a sixth