Leading a Department in Your First Year

I remember sitting in a windowless meeting room during my third year as a middle leader, staring at a glossy, twenty-page slide deck about “Transformational Pedagogical Leadership.” The consultant was talking about synergistic growth models, but all I could think about was the fact that two of my best teachers had just handed in their notices and I had a stack of Year 9 essays waiting for me that were already a week overdue. Most of the professional development we’re fed on how to lead a department feels like it was designed by people who haven’t stepped foot in a classroom since the nineties. They give you frameworks for a perfect world, but they don’t account for the reality of a Tuesday afternoon when the photocopier is jammed and your staff are running on nothing but caffeine and sheer willpower.

I’m not here to sell you on a new strategic initiative or a fancy way to track data that no one will actually use. Instead, I want to talk about the quiet, unglamorous work that actually keeps a team together. I’m going to share what I’ve learned from nineteen years of surviving curriculum shifts and inspection cycles—the stuff that actually works when you’re tired, understaffed, and just trying to keep the ship upright.

Managing Academic Staff When the Calendar Is Collapsing

Managing academic staff during the spring term—or any term where the calendar seems to be actively conspiring against you—isn’t about chasing high-level departmental performance metrics. If you try to squeeze more “data-driven” tasks out of a team that is already struggling to find time for a proper lunch break, you won’t get better results; you’ll just get a room full of people who have checked out emotionally. Real team leadership skills are tested when the workload is peaking, not when everything is running smoothly.

In these moments, your job shifts from being a visionary to being a shield. You need to focus on what I call triage leadership. Instead of introducing a new initiative, look at what you can strip away. If a deadline is looming and the staff are drowning, the most effective management strategies are often the ones that involve saying “no” to the extra nonsense coming down from senior leadership. You have to protect their capacity to actually teach. It’s about maintaining a sense of stability when the schedule is falling apart, ensuring that the core business—the kids in the seats—doesn’t suffer because the adults are burnt out.

Operational Excellence in Departments That Actually Function

If you look at the glossy handbooks on leadership development for managers, they’ll tell you that operational excellence in departments is achieved through rigorous data cycles and constant oversight. In reality, excellence in a secondary school department usually looks a lot more like preventing unnecessary friction. It’s about ensuring the photocopier isn’t jammed when someone has a Year 9 lesson in five minutes, and making sure the shared drive isn’t a graveyard of broken links and “Final_v2_ACTUAL_FINAL” documents. When the systems are invisible, the teaching can actually happen.

Real effective management strategies aren’t about tracking every single minute of a colleague’s day; they are about protecting their capacity to actually teach. I’ve learned that the best way to drive departmental performance metrics isn’t to hover over a desk with a clipboard, but to clear the administrative rubble out of their way. If your team is spending three hours a week fighting with a spreadsheet that doesn’t work, you haven’t “managed” them—you’ve just added to the noise. True leadership is about building a structure that holds steady when the rest of the school feels like it’s tilting.

Five Ways to Keep the Department From Sinking

• Protect your people from the ‘initiative of the month.’ When a new directive comes down from the top that looks like it’ll take six months to implement and zero minutes to actually teach, be the buffer. Tell your team, “We’ll look at this in the next cycle,” and let them focus on the kids in front of them instead of a spreadsheet that won’t matter by Christmas.
• Prioritise the ‘unsexy’ stuff. Everyone wants to talk about pedagogical innovation and high-level cognitive load theory, but a department actually runs on clear, shared expectations for things like how we mark, how we organise our shared drives, and how we handle a broken photocopier. If the basics are a mess, the fancy teaching strategies won’t save you.
• Stop the meeting bloat. If a meeting can be an email, make it an email. If it has to be a meeting, make sure it’s not just you talking at a group of exhausted adults. Use that time to actually solve a problem—like why the Year 9 books are always missing—rather than reading out a policy that everyone could have read in the staffroom.
• Watch for the quiet ones. In every department, you have the loud voices and the ones who are drowning in silence. The teacher who has stopped complaining and just does the work is often the one closest to the exit. Check in on them—not with a formal observation, but with a “How are you actually doing?” while you’re both waiting for the kettle to boil.
• Model the reality, not the ideal. Don’t ask your staff to do something you wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do yourself on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when you’ve got a Year 11 mock exam next period and your printer has jammed. Leadership is about being the person who knows exactly how much work a ‘simple’ task actually takes.

What Actually Matters When the Dust Settles

Prioritise people over paperwork; a department of exhausted, well-supported teachers will always outperform a department with a perfectly filed audit trail but zero morale.

Focus on the small, repeatable wins—like a consistent marking policy or a reliable way to share resources—rather than chasing the latest pedagogical trend that promises a revolution but only delivers more work.

Build a culture of “good enough” for the non-essentials, so your team has the mental bandwidth to actually focus on the teaching that happens when the door closes.

## On the Real Metric of Leadership

“You can have the most polished departmental handbook in the country, but if your staff are too burnt out to find the page, it’s just expensive paper. True leadership isn’t about enforcing a new pedagogical framework every autumn term; it’s about protecting your team’s capacity to actually teach the kids in front of them.”

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The View from the End of the Corridor

At the end of the day, leading a department isn’t about mastering the latest spreadsheet or perfecting a high-level strategic vision that looks great in a folder but does nothing for a Year 9 lesson. It’s about the small, gritty realities: keeping the workload from becoming a tidal wave, ensuring the resources actually exist when a teacher is running late, and protecting your staff from the constant noise of new initiatives. If you can manage the calendar, keep the operations steady, and look after the people doing the heavy lifting, you’ve already done more than most. It’s about building a fortress of stability in a system that feels anything but.

I know how exhausting it is. I know the feeling of looking at a pile of marking and a department meeting scheduled for the same hour. But remember that your staff aren’t just names on a rota; they are human beings trying to make a difference in rooms that are often louder and more chaotic than any textbook would suggest. If you lead with a bit of pragmatism and a lot of genuine empathy, you won’t just run a department—you’ll sustain a community. Focus on the people, ignore the fluff, and keep the ship upright. That is where the real teaching happens.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.