Lessons from an Accidental HoD, Part 4: inheriting and auditing

This time of year brings movement: new roles, new schools, internal promotions as people begin looking ahead to September. If you’re stepping into a Head of Department role, some of what follows may be useful.

As a new HoD there’s an undercurrent of pressure - perhaps, in part, self-imposed - that becomes more explicit as the year goes on. The clock is ticking and you’ll feel like you need to make an impact, and quickly. Perhaps the best way to make a positive impression with new students, team and line managers is not by reinventing the wheel or shunting some initiative through but by making some fairly cut-throat decisions early on in terms of what to focus your attention on and what can be parked for later in the year, when time opens up. Early credibility can be more about exercising restraint and deliberation. 

Senior leadership may well have ideas about your subject that your predecessor was not entirely on board with. You’ll need to decide which things can wait, and which need to be brought to the team. That often means managing upwards as much as leading downwards. It’s worth asking, repeatedly, whether something is actually needed right now. Creating work for the sake of it rarely earns you much goodwill (vital currency in any school), particularly when it drags people away from planning and teaching. 

If possible, make contact with the team before you arrive. Even a basic sense of how things work - routines, expectations, underlying dynamics - helps. Once in post, avoid becoming isolated. However you do it, find a way to get to know people quickly. Short check-ins and one-to-ones are often enough to get a sense of morale, and of what small changes might have a disproportionate impact. Working closely with a 2iC matters here. This person is your ally, even if alignment isn’t immediate. Finding common ground early tends to make everything else easier. 

There’s nothing worse than a sloppy HoD in a team that can manage perfectly well without one. You quickly become a figurehead for failures rather than someone adding value. Teams tend to have fairly clear expectations of leadership, even if they’re not always articulated. Modelling what you expect - punctuality, organisation, honesty, including owning mistakes - does more to establish credibility than most initiatives.

The aim, at least early on, isn’t to create more work but to identify what’s actually getting in the way, both in planning and in the classroom. That applies as much to meetings as anything else. These need to be focused. An agenda is an obvious necessity, as is a clear overview of what’s coming up, kept somewhere easy to access. Beyond that, it’s often a question of protecting time rather than filling it.

There’s no shortage of things to look at. The challenge is not to rush to fix them all at the beginning of the year. Term 1 is rarely the moment for sweeping curriculum change; it’s a time to observe, to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. If units need reworking, that requires time and usually negotiation to create it. Waiting until exam classes leave is often the only realistic option. In the meantime, patterns will emerge. Data can be useful here, particularly around value added and subgroups, but only if it leads to something meaningful. The same applies to looking at schemes of work, assessment practices, and what’s actually happening in lessons. Student voice is helpful, as is a sense of how the subject is perceived more widely; uptake at A Level, visibility around the school, the kinds of conversations happening with parents. None of this needs to be acted on immediately, but it does need to be understood.

Any vision you bring into a department needs testing. What worked in a previous setting may not land in a new one, and imposing it too quickly tends to backfire. Involving the team, even informally, usually leads to something more workable. If there is a direction of travel, it needs to feel grounded in the reality people are dealing with day to day. If you can make inroads into some of this in your first year, without steamrollering immediate change, your longer-term goals will carry more weight than you might expect. Much of what follows will become easier.