Happy birthday, my dear, dear friend

The Bank Holiday weekend has afforded me a little bit of extra time, to pause, to reflect and well, be kind to myself, acknowledging that together we're making a difference.

The commitment I have made to promote the goals and values of #WomenEd, during the last 9 years have enabled change. I have changed. I have changed lives. I have used my voice, my leadership to bring about change.

Co-writing the chapter in the new #WomenEd book, with my wonderful colleague and friend, Wendy Cobb, on flexible working has been an emboldening action. In my new role as a CEO of a Multi Academy Trust, I am delivering on the belief, the anger, and the unfairness, that our reluctance to embrace different ways of working has lost so many talented women to leadership. This drain of talent is clearly documented. It needs to be stopped. Not because there is a recruitment and retention crisis in education, but because it is wrong, it is unfair, it excludes women from leadership roles.

When I had a vacancy to appoint a new Head Teacher, the opportunity to explore a co-headship was obvious to me. This is an exciting opportunity to disrupt our constructs of leadership which have served to exclude. Our new co-heads are learning headship AND they are learning co-headship. This is a new way of leadership.

New to headship is a challenge.

New to co-headship is a different and another challenge. We need to be brave, and not deterred because the of the new learning necessary, but emboldened to disrupt the narrative that a leader has to be one full time role.

I have been warned (off) co-headship is difficult, expensive and problematic.

But I am going to risk it. Why? Because I believe that this is the way to unleash talent, invest in our women leaders, and be a catalyst for change. The only risk is doing the same old!

Becoming a CEO has given me a chance to be the leader I wanted and needed, a leader who saw the unrealistic expectations of juggling two children and working full time, and the toll it took on my wellbeing to meet the multiple demands on my time. Worn out and worn down.

There can be an alternative. I will use the space I now occupy to make changes, to disrupt, the language and practice of leadership.

A Postscript ….

Flexible working is not about giving everyone part time hours.

Requests for flexible working need to scrutinised carefully. In that review process, openness and discussion, sharing the rationale for any decisions reached. Importantly, the review needs to disrupt constructs that normalise ways of working and our unconscious biases.

Happy Birthday #WomenEd.

Let's party!

But we've got more work to do. And nobody is going to stop us, because as Sara Ahmed writes, the problem does not going to go away if we stop talking about it.