The End of the Headteacher’s Report

Dear Governors

The spring term has certainly been an exciting one! We had our french exhcange to Toulouse which everyone really enjoyed, we refurbished 3 further toilets and James got awarded his gold medal Duke of Edinburgh.

And so it goes on…

If you suspect this could be the kind of headteacher’s report you’re reading at your next governing body meeting, now’s the time to start worrying.

It’s my view that headteacher’s reports as they’re standardly presented are often unstructured and generally unhelpful. The idea of a headteacher’s report is that it should give you enough information about the school to supplement what you already know and allow you to be able to support and challenge the school.

When the headteacher’s report is an array of anecdotal titbits, it doesn’t really help you do that at all – it just ticks a box. No matter how bad a school is – a headteacher looking hard enough can always find something nice to say. And then the danger is that they feel they’ve ‘done’ informing the governing body, and you get little further about the things that you need to know.

So how do you get meaningful information from your headteacher on school performance? The solution comes from the world of business – where they’ve been grappling with similar issues for years, with senior managers needing to know the facts from people below them desperate to persuade them that it’s better than it looks.

In my opinion, you should bin your headteachers report – and set up a dashboard instead. A dashboard is simply picking 5 to 10 of the most important (numerical) measures of your school’s performance and tracking performance against these measures regularly. I’d also suggest having a short paragraph alongside each to allow the headteacher to explain the reason for the figures, and one to explain what he/the school plans to do next. (Think it all sounds a bit flaky? This dashboard design borrows heavily from a similar White House version!)

This allows you to work out what the key priorities for your school are and focus on these with each report, so there can be no dodging the key issues. Plus numbers (if you’ve chosen the measures well) are much harder to spin. The ‘Actions’ column then provides a focus for discussion at your next meeting.

What should you choose as your key measures? Your school improvement plan / Ofsted report will be a good place to start, but here are a number of other areas you could think about:

• Year 6/11 predicted grades
• Number of behaviour referrals / exclusions
• Results of staff observations of teaching and learning
• ‘Soft’ measures such as pupil / parental satisfaction

Picking the right measures is the key to success. I’m hoping to create a sample dashboard over the next few weeks – if so I’ll post it so that you can see what I’m rambling on about!