Lessons from an Accidental Head of English, Part 2: Filtering the Noise

This is the second post in a series on moving into middle leadership. The first explored those accidental beginnings; this one focuses on team culture, filtering noise, and the mechanisms that help a department function.

I’d been lucky to spend a year at the school beforehand and knew that colleagues already shared core values and curriculum instincts. Nevertheless, as I put together the first induction meeting with the team and a schedule for department time, that imposter syndrome gremlin kept piping up.

I really struggled with delegation in the early years and still do. By taking everything on yourself it reduces the autonomy others in the team need to feel professionally fulfilled and, honestly, burns you out. I learned (slowly) that delegating isn’t an abandonment of responsibility but creates space for colleagues to shape the department with their particular strengths and skillsets. Conversely, one of the core duties of a middle leader is to filter the wider organisational noise from their team.

Reducing Administrative Noise

It’s not an unrealistic assumption that everyone in your team, irrespective of vision and values, wants to do right by their students. If not, teaching may not be the place for them. Ensuring your team can prioritise this by reducing the persistent chatter of last-minute deadlines, data drops, events and processes that can crop up unexpectedly. Establishing simple infrastructure, where it doesn’t already exist, allows departmental processes to run more autonomously and gives teachers the space to focus on the quality of their lessons - the most important part of the job.

That means:

• communicating deadlines clearly and early via agendas or bulletins.

• flagging potential ‘crunch points' in the calendar early

• de-implementing tasks that drain time without improving learning.

• tightening internal processes

  
  

Ultimately, this sort of infrastructure helps your team protect their attention for where it matters most: student outcomes.

The Unromantic Essentials

Then there’s the unromantic-but-essential functionality; a huge amount of departmental culture is set in the procedural:

• Alignment: Does everyone have the texts and resources they need? If not, why not? Your purchasing and requisition colleagues quickly become crucial allies.

• Onboarding: New staff need clarity on systems, expectations, and who to go to for what.

• Assessment cycles: In an international school with a mid-August term start, IGCSE and A Level results land in week two, so having systems ready for data analysis matters.

• Mechanisms of intelligent accountability: Drawing on David Didau’s work, accountability becomes less about piling pressure onto teachers in the hope of improved results and more about designing systems that create the conditions for teachers to thrive. When teachers are supported to do good work with minimal friction, better outcomes for students tend to follow.

The Challengingly Intangible

There are the trickier-to-pin-down things that bear mentioning and certainly don’t get covered in a PGCE. Middle leaders all too often learn on the job - hence the deluge of mistakes along the way:

Not everyone shares your priorities, which is fine. People have CPD interests, pastoral responsibilities, and leadership duties that sit alongside your agenda. Understanding this makes you more empathetic to people with even more responsibility. And more strategic.

Managing upwards matters as much as managing across: Sometimes your team has more urgent fires to put out than the thing on your list. Sometimes you do. Leadership means holding both truths at once.

The quickest way to stall a department is to mistake personal preference for universal principle. Teachers need the space to teach in their own voice, within a shared framework.

In many international schools, you end up involved in marketing, budgeting, or strategic planning sooner than expected. It’s all valuable - it rarely aligns neatly with the timing of your internal departmental priorities.

Holding these bigger picture components without losing sight of classroom realities has helped my understanding of leadership more than anything else.

What A Team Ultimately Needs

Middle leadership is, at its core, human work.

Your team needs to know:

• you’ll back them

• you’ll listen

• you’ll filter the organisational noise

• you’ll (try to) create conditions where they can do their best work

• you’ll support their development if they’re aiming for promotion

  
  

Everything else - processes, spreadsheets, timetables, trackers - is scaffolding around that central truth.