What Makes a Great School? Lessons in Leadership and Learning

MCC and the Education Authority launched a comprehensive league table ranking Hungarian secondary schools. The prestigious Top 100 list was featured in Mandiner, while the highest-ranking institutions were honored at a gala held in the elegant Castle Garden Bazaar. The event's highlight was a thought-provoking keynote speech delivered by Dr. Nicholas Tate—renowned historian, education expert, and former headmaster of several esteemed British and Swiss institutions—who shared valuable insights on academic excellence and international education trends.

Congratulations to all of you on your schools’ impressive achievements, and to all those from your schools who are not here but whom you are representing and who have also made these achievements possible: your teachers, other staff members, and of course your pupils. It is a collective effort we are celebrating.

I have been asked to say some words on the theme ‘what makes an effective high school?’. You may well have thought longer about this than I have and will certainly have your own views about it. I shall simply be giving you a few personal and fairly random thoughts from my own experience. There are many factors that make for an effective school. I will only touch on a small number.

First, leadership. A few years ago I attended an education conference for head teachers in San Francisco. One session was about leadership. The speaker began by talking about how stressful a job it can be at times as a head – something about which I am sure we can all agree. He asked us therefore to start the session by turning to our neighbour and telling them ‘you’re doing a great job’. I couldn’t possibly bring myself to do something so infantile and embarrassing but didn’t want to cause offence so turned to my neighbour and said:  ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’m British. It’s culturally impossible for me to do this’. Fortunately they laughed.  ‘Cultural sensitivity’ was one of the themes of the conference.

I tell you this story as, unlike in San Francisco, I am more than happy to say to you today ‘You’re doing a great job’ because this time I know it is true. Telling you that ‘you’re doing a  great job’ is the whole purpose of today’s event.

By the way, the rest of the talk on leadership was as appalling as the introduction suggested it was going to be.

My experience of school leadership is as head of two schools, a 13-18 school in England and a 3-18 one in Switzerland. The Swiss school had over 4000 pupils spread across three campuses in which there were eight separate schools. I line managed all the heads, as I did in a subsequent  role as executive chairman of a global  group of eight schools. I have also been a Governor of five schools and so one of the people who appoint, dismiss, fix the salaries of and evaluate heads. I shall talk from this personal experience as one head to another. I was also for six years head of England’s national body for curriculum and assessment. What I am not is an academic expert on school effectiveness. 

One of heads’ most important priorities, I have come to feel, is to ensure there is effective delegation and to put a lot of effort into supporting all the people immediately below them in developing their own leadership roles. I have spent much of my time doing that. Heads ‘are doing a great job’ when the school keeps running smoothly if they have to go away for a week . I am sure all your schools are running very smoothly today in  your absence and hope that you will not feel the need to either phone or text them even once.

There is a massive literature on school leadership. I have occasionally dipped into it, but found reflecting on my own experience more helpful. The only writers I failed to abandon before the end of the first chapter were Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman whose work on non-cognitive intelligences I found very useful and which I recommend if you haven’t read them. But the main thing is to self-evaluate continually however you do it. Headship can be lonely, especially when things go wrong . I myself have never had any external mentors to whom I could turn, though I have organised this for heads I was managing and seen how outside support helped them to do a better job. 

Over the years I have come to feel that perhaps the head’s most important job is to be the main custodian and promoter of his or her school’s fundamental mission. A group of London schools, for example, has as its mission Immanuel Kant’s sapere aude (‘dare to know’ or ‘dare to use your reason’) and three principles: High Standards, Hard Work and Kindness.  Mottoes like these can sometimes sound clichéd but can be a useful way of drawing attention to what a school stands for. Implementing them is a collective  responsibility but it is above all the head’s job to remind everyone constantly what their implications are for the school’s identity and purposes. Heads are ‘doing a great job’ when they epitomise what education and their schools are fundamentally about.

Heads are also ‘doing a great job’ when they personally model the kind of lifelong learner we want our pupils and teachers to be. Heads will do this in different ways. I have tried to do it through articles for school newsletters in which I make an effort to go beyond the daily matters of school life and write about contemporary issues or books I have been reading, reinforcing the idea that schools should be intellectually and culturally stimulating places in which everyone is continuing to learn.  In both schools, for the same reasons, I also organised every year as a Head’s initiative a ‘Study Day’ with lots of visiting speakers in which sessions were available on topics outside the curriculum from which pupils made up their own programme. The sessions were on a wide range of topics: medical ethics, being a Member of Parliament, Roman Britain, biotechnology, ancient Persia,  a German play reading. The message I was wanting to get across was: learning is for life and not just for good exam results or ‘getting on’ in the world.

My next point, which is about teachers, is largely about matters beyond your control. It is a message to governments: schools are only as good as their teachers and you won’t get good teachers unless in the education budget you prioritise teacher numbers and teacher pay, give them good working conditions, don’t swamp them with administrative duties, and allow them to concentrate on exciting their pupils about their subject. This involves giving them the time needed for their preparation and marking, supporting them in their ongoing development, and having class sizes that enable them to get to know each child and their individual needs and talents. I know research shows that class size is not the main determinant of academic success, but education is not just about academic success. It involves teachers having the time to get to know each child well, not just their academic strengths and weaknesses but also their personalities, and not being so swamped by their duties that they don’t have the time to notice if there is something wrong and to find a moment to have a chat with a child to see what might be done about it. It isn’t courses on social and emotional learning or relationship education that children need but this kind of individual attention from people who know and care for them. Heads are ‘doing a great job’ when their teachers know that they support them in the challenges they face while at the same time holding them to the very highest standards in their teaching. 

My final point about the curriculum is also about matters largely beyond your control.   Having spent eleven years developing, evaluating  and revising England’s first national curriculum, I am well aware of how a curriculum is a major determinant of a school’s effectiveness, both how it can be too prescriptive, excessively limiting school’s autonomy and the creativity of the best teachers, but also insufficiently prescriptive allowing bad practice to flourish. Getting the balance right is not easy.

President Ronald Reagan once said that ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language’ were  ‘I’m from the Government and I’m here to help’. In most English-speaking countries schools at the moment are feeling the truth of this warning. They are swamped with government pressures to help solve whatever the problems of the moment happen to be, whether carbon emissions, knife crime, children’s dental decay or alleged systemic racism. The image of schools preoccupied with these sorts of issues is not going to help our main objectives, which are inspiring the best people to want to work in our schools and allowing our pupils to focus on the main purposes of education.

So, in conclusion, I have only had time to mention three out of the many influences on a high school’s effectiveness: thoughtful leadership that focuses on mission and on modelling lifelong learning; a school environment that attracts teachers and lets them get on with their jobs; and a state that knows where it can help but also where it should not.   You knew all this already, I am sure, but important things sometimes merit repetition.

Congratulations on all your achievements that have led to today’s awards and, once again, with all sincerity, ‘you’re doing a great job’. 

Dr Nicholas Tate