Taking on subject leadership can be a daunting prospect, especially if it is your first. When there is so much to do, and so many calls on your limited time, it is easy to lose sight of the woods for the trees. Unrealistic expectations of what a teacher of 11 subjects, with little non-contact time, can achieve don’t help. OFSTED’s intimidating checklists of questions they might ask you on a deep dive inspection, combined with dense and inaccessible research papers published last year, don’t help either. It all seems like a model aimed at secondary heads of subject with their own discrete teams. You’d be forgiven therefore for not knowing just where to start. Let me help.
If I had to list just 10 tasks that you need to crack, before you attempt anything else, these would be my priorities, given in no particular order. Many will already be in place in your school, of course, so you can then move on to the next stage, which I’ll feature in a forthcoming article.
1. Understand what your history curriculum is designed to achieve
Understand what your history curriculum is designed to achieve and have a clear view of its rationale.