Thread on leadership overreach. I would argue that much damage has been done by an inflated perception of senior leaders' knowledge of what things should be like and of the positive impact that their interventions can have. Here are some areas which have been badly affected...

Pedagogy. As a new senior leader I was expected to make judgements (graded ones at the time) on the quality of teaching in a wide range of different subjects, when I had received little training on pedagogy since my PGCE and could only draw on experience and guesswork...

Marking. It beggars belief how much senior leadership time has been devoted to this in book looks, learning walks, meetings etc, as if every important issue can be reduced to whether or not the books are marked. Remarkable, when you consider the lack of evidence to support it...

Progress. I remember student progress being the most important sub-judgement on lesson observation forms, ignoring the fact that there is no valid way of observing such a thing. This fed a culture of intervention when students fell below target, all based on a fallacy...

Monitoring. This is a sort of umbrella term which applies to all three previous issues. There has been a collective sense amongst senior leaders (driven by Ofsted in the past) that leaders can and should measure everything and can use the data to make valid judgements...

Change. This has been worshipped as a false god of school leadership. There has been a narrative that leading change is the only worthwhile thing that leaders do, rarely asking whether all change is a good thing or whether senior leaders are necessarily best placed to lead it...

I think this matters because so much time has been wasted and damage done to staff morale. Student learning has suffered through the wrong things being prioritised and staff being drained of energy which could have been devoted to more productive ends. We can do better. Fin.

Not quite fin. It's on my mind because some of the same old habits seem to be visible in senior leadership thinking and practice during lockdown e.g. applied to remote learning. This is based on even less secure foundations than normal and likely to be more damaging. Really fin.