Leading a school’s revival – Emily on headship, resilience and renewal

Emily is a 2016 Teach First ambassador and Headteacher at Hartland High School in Bristol. After being rated ‘Inadequate’ by Ofsted in 2023, the school has experienced a revival, led by Emily with support from Teach First leaders at Greenshaw Learning Trust. Here, Emily shares how she found teaching, her journey to headship, Hartland’s recent progress and the support she has found through Teach First networks.

My mum was a teacher while I worked in a regular office job in the healthcare research sector. Each day, I heard about her experiences of teaching and thought her life looked better than mine as a recent graduate. She would tell me about an interaction she’d had that day, or the successes and challenges at school, and I could see the impact of what she was doing and how motivating it was. So, I started to explore teaching.

I chose to go with Teach First because I felt so motivated by the mission and by the broader challenge of educational inequality. I was also aware that any career you embark on as a 22-year-old might not be your final career. I liked that Teach First has links to policy and you could get exposure to things outside the classroom, and your options can stay broader.

Preparing for leadership

I really loved the buzz of Teach First. I was assigned to a school in North London to teach maths which was nerve-wracking because I didn’t come from a maths background. I was lucky it was a brilliant school in a historically challenging area in Enfield. I spent four years there as a maths teacher before becoming a deputy pastoral leader and I then worked as head of year 11 during Covid which was...interesting!

The training was always framed around the idea that from day one you are going into a school as a leader; not necessarily leader of a department, year group or school but you are a leader of your classroom.

I definitely think the Training Programme prepared me for leadership. The programme instilled in you the idea that you can have a critical lens on what you’re seeing and that you can bring your own contribution to whatever team you’re working in. It’s not that you need to be promoted really quickly to be successful, but it encouraged me to think, ‘I’m only in my third year of teaching but I could probably still manage this small leadership role, I can absorb that without compromising my teaching practise.’

Support through Teach First networks

I can’t get enough of the Teach First networks. Joining the Women’s Leadership Network and Heads Forward has been really useful and interesting. There’s shared support and expertise but it’s also a literal network – you can go into the WhatsApp group and you can reach out and connect with similar schools who could offer some advice. The group conversations and the network generally has been a great source of knowledge, but also reassurance that there’s people who are going or have gone through similar things.

Since becoming a headteacher, I’ve tapped into the networks more. I’m conscious of being a female leader and leading in a profession that has a high proportion of women so I need to be aware of the needs and challenges that women specifically face. I’ve really enjoyed meeting other female leaders in the Women’s Leadership Network and hearing about the challenges they’ve faced and solutions they found.

It’s definitely worth being in these networks because they’re full of inspiring, brilliant people doing cool things inside and outside of the classroom, living the social justice mission of Teach First.

One of the things that made being part of a Teach First cohort so powerful was being part of a network. It’s supportive to feel part of a group and I think you can lose that through your career. Sign up!

School-wide impact as a headteacher

Becoming a headteacher was quite daunting but the first thing to say is that I feel really happy working in this role. I moved to my current school initially in a trust leadership position and while working for the trust based in the school, I applied for the headship which is how I ended up as headteacher here.

I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable a job it is to have this unique position within a community and to work with so many different stakeholders. It’s genuinely a privilege.

The school had been graded inadequate in 2023 and like many Teach First schools the first challenge was to make the behaviour good, make the school feel safer and make the teaching and learning solid. Initially, literally just having teachers in the classrooms as we were slightly understaffed in lots of areas!

We had to take some drastic actions early on, like taking certain subjects out of the curriculum and we had to group teach, teaching 60 kids together as a matter of norm. We had a lot of work to do with community members to reset standards and inevitably had higher suspensions than we would normally want.

The area the school is in has a really low proportion of children going to university and cycles of socioeconomic disadvantage. My vision when starting was to secure great outcomes for students and enable them to go to university if that’s what they want, or go on to the careers they want, which all starts with securing great outcomes.

We’ve sorted a lot of the fundamentals in school now. One standout moment of this progress comes from our Christmas celebration assembly. I was really nervous because it was end of term, students were excited and we had every student from year 7 to year 13 in one room. It ended up being such a beautiful moment for our community. Students were really polite, listened attentively and genuinely celebrated each other’s achievements.

We had different awards, a balloon arch and a staff band. It was amazing to see students without a hint of poor behaviour genuinely delighted by each other's achievements. It was brilliant.

But if I ever feel like I’m struggling, I try to get out into the classrooms or walk around the school. Seeing the quality of teaching that’s happening and the students learning, it makes me feel ‘yeah, we’re doing a good thing here.’

Looking ahead and Teach First’s impact

We’re a real Teach First school, in an area of high need with a history of underperformance and chronic staffing gaps.

Teach First has played an instrumental part in the change the school has made. When we were initially understaffed, we had six or seven Teach First staff join us this year who have been utterly amazing. I know that we would not have been able to make the progress that we’ve made in teaching and student achievement if it weren’t for those teachers. They’re such a high-quality group and it’s been wonderful to see their impact.

Attending the recent Heads Forward summit at City of London Academy Southwark, I loved that up in the atrium were pictures of students who had done amazingly well and were now torchbearers for the school. In time I’d similarly love for our students to know that if they come to the school, good things will happen in their future and the future could be theirs – that feeling of excitement, motivation, and the sense that this is a place where people succeed.

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