Tom Rees is the Executive Headteacher of Simon
de Senlis Primary School and works across eleven primary
schools as the Education Director of Northampton Primary Academy Trust.
He’s been a leader in schools for around 17 years across different
contexts, counties and countries. Between Headships, he also spent time in the
education technology sector working alongside schools, academies, local
authorities, and multi-national companies.
His book, Wholesome Leadership looksat everything about leadership in schools, from people management, teaching and
learning to personal development and growth.
“This job of leadership is primarily a moral activity,” says Rees. “It’s
not just about league tables or balancing budgets, it’s about playing a part in
a wider education system that enriches lives and creates opportunities.”
“A lot of primary school leaders are working incredibly hard to do a
good job but might not necessarily have the right training, support or
resources to help them. Running a school is complex but not impossible,” he
continues. “I’ve learned so much from people over the last 10-20 years and I
wanted to write something that was relevant and accessible for everyone,
especially primary leaders.”
Which is why his book is based on what Rees calls a “H4 leadership
model” and draws on the experience and thoughts of colleagues spanning the
whole educational spectrum, including: Sir David Carter, Clare
Sealy, Daisy Christodoulou, MAT
CEOs, Julia Kedwards, Stephen
Tierney, and Andrew Morrish.
“The H4 leadership
model is about the heart, head, hands, and health of school leaders,” he
explains. “Each of these dimensions of leadership are important and have to
work together in balance. Ultimately, school leaders have to be a lot of things
to a lot of people.”
“There’s a real concern about the need to recruit and retain good school
leaders in the years ahead. By 2022, it is estimated that there will be a
shortfall of 19,000 school leaders and we have to do more as system to support
colleagues who come in to positions of responsibility. It’s important that we
recognise there is no ‘secret sauce’ that creates transformational change.
Schools get better one day at a time, one person at a time through hard work,
good decision making and incremental improvement.”
“Technology helps you run a lean operation,” he explains. “It helps
schools to work more efficiently and effectively and enables better
communication, particularly across a complex organisation such as ours with 11
schools across 14 sites. It doesn’t matter how great your people are or how
inspiring the vision is, unless schools are well-organised and a slick
organisation, things becoming chaotic. Running Office 365 across all our
schools, Governing Bodies and Trustees enables us to work much smarter
together.”
“Technology also plays a big part in analytics and to help us understand
how effective we’re being. In recent years, we’ve developed Power BI as an
analytic tool to see assessment not just as a descriptive activity, but a
predictive and ultimately prescriptive process. Recent trials of machine
learning across the trust’s database with Coscole Ltd. havestarted to predict KS2 SATs result to degrees of accuracy that we arecautiously excited by.”
Rees has written before about how his Trust have started to use powerful data through
PowerBI and other Microsoft support Number support Number technologies and we
are excited at what might develop next out of this work which now includes Microsoft
support Number support Number partner, Groupcall.
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