The key people
Who are they?
One of the best bits of advice I was given when I started teaching was as follows. Don’t worry about the senior leadership; the people you need to befriend and get on the right side of are the cleaners, the school caretaker, the dinner ladies and the person who has the key to the stationery cupboard.
Obviously, they were being a little tongue-in-cheek: I don’t fancy your chances of promotion if you completely ignore the senior leadership team or, worse, treat them shabbily. But there is more than a grain of truth in that advice.
The caretaker can say throw you out at 5:30pm if that’s the time he goes round the school locking up. He can also say: “I see you’re working. I’ll lock up the other classrooms and come back in around 20 minutes.”
The person in charge of the reprographics department, if your school has one, can help you out by running off 30 copies of a page in a textbook just before the lesson starts, instead of making you fill in a form and give a week’s notice.
I realise that this sounds like I am suggesting you befriend people for purely mercenary reasons, but I’m not. Rather, I am leading up to this important point: the person with the most power and influence, at least with regard to your immediate needs, is not necessarily the person with a grandiose title.
After you’ve landed the job of head of department, you may have a deputy headteacher in your team, and a teacher who can’t wait to retire. The obvious thing to do would be to pay the latter as little attention as possible, and to try and impress the deputy headteacher in the hope that he or she will convey to the headteacher what a brilliant leader you are.
However, that would-be retiree has probably seen initiatives come and go. She knows the best way to try and get extra money out of the headteacher. She is probably a first class teacher who might well be glad to have an important role, like mentoring trainee teachers or taking new members of the department under her wing.
You cannot ignore the senior leadership — or, at least, you do so at your peril. However, don’t overlook “ordinary” members of your team just because they don’t seem important.