I am the Headteacher of a 2-18 school in Dumfries and Galloway and very interested in leadership in general, specifically professional development. I plan to share some of the key activities that I am involved in. I hope it is useful.

I have been working with David Burgess at Education Scotland over the last few years. Following on from the OECD report that asked us to focus our efforts on management from the middle, I was keen to look at the leadership of our middle managers. Prior to the pandemic, David visited the school and delivered a presentation to members of our middle management Leadership Academy. 

When Covid started, I was keen to keep our professional leadership programme going but obviously couldn’t do it in the same way. David and I met virtually to agree a way forward. After this meeting we agreed that David would share resources with me and we would then adapt them to make sure that we could deliver these in a remote way.  Sometimes David would be involved, but recently we have handed over the delivery of these materials to the school and I think this has worked really well. We gave the members of our Leadership Academy a wide choice of activities and asked them to prioritise the areas they are most interested in. During lockdown, we looked at the following areas:

• Using Conflict Constructively
• Strategic Planning
• Leading Meetings
• Communication and Decision Making
• Leading Learning

and we are now working on Challenging Conversations.

Moving forward I am working with Rona Grant. Rona has just provided me with materials on Challenging Conversations and we are working through the materials to make sure they will work for Wallace Hall. This involved some pre-reading which I have already sent out to staff, some activities and an evaluation at the end. I will be presenting this to our Leadership Academy on Tuesday 15 March. 

All members of my Senior Leadership Team in the primary and secondary have also just started the Agile Leadership course which is presented by Dr Simon Breakspear, who is an Australian academic working out of the University of New South Wales. This is a 12-week programme which includes webinars, online modules, downloadable templates, reading and videos. Following the first webinar we have been working on a template called Clarify Canvas which allows us to focus on four key themes involved in any initiative. The themes are: 

• What impact do we want to have?
• What problems are we trying to solve?
• What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
• How will we know if we are having the desired impact?

We have been positive about this way of looking at change and are keen to try it out in different parts of the school.

Our journey with Education Scotland has been an interesting path and one we will continue to walk together.