Blog: School leadership Tips
Every head has that one child who keeps them awake at night.
The one you carry home in your heart.
The one you wish you could do more for.
I was speaking to Sian recently about Tia — a bright, funny Year 4 girl with learning differences that sometimes spill into frustration.
There’s a lot you can’t control right now.
The funding formula.
Energy costs.
National pay scales.
All set elsewhere — and often without any sense of your reality on the ground.
But here’s the hopeful bit:
You can’t control the funding.
You can control the impact.
If every penny is stretched at the moment, here’s a hopeful thought:
You might have £10k in your budget.
You just haven’t found it yet.
I see this all the time in schools — money that’s there, quietly hiding in plain sight.
Here are a few places it loves to hide
Sickness doesn’t just hit the timetable.
It hits the budget — and often harder than we realise.
Here’s a quick way to see the real picture.
Think back to last term (or better still, last year): How many sick days were there?
Now multiply that by £150.
Here’s a number worth knowing — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it:
Everyday conflict in your school might be costing you the equivalent of one full-time teacher.
Here’s the simple maths.
If low-level issues take up just 30 minutes a week of your team’s time —
things like:
lateness
poor marking
mood hoovers
resistant TAs
caretakers not getting jobs done
admin not following through
— then across a whole staff, that half-hour becomes a huge drain.
Here’s something I see in outstanding schools almost everywhere I go:
They look like they have money. But they don’t.
They have more Superstars on their payroll.
What do I mean by superstars?
People who are brilliant at their job and great cultural fit for your school.
Put simply, you’d clone them if you could!
And that alone gives them the equivalent of £200k extra for every £1m of payroll.
School budgets can feel so out of your hands — formulas, pay rises, energy costs… all set elsewhere.
And when we talk about budgets, we usually dive straight into codes and spreadsheets.
The best heads I work with look past the spreadsheet.
They keep focusing on four human numbers that tell them whether their school is getting real value from their biggest spend — payroll.
We always talk about “the Christmas holidays”…but let’s be honest — for those who work in schools, Christmas doesn’t always feel like a holiday.
School plays.
Religious festivals.
End-of-term deadlines.
And Christmas chaos on top.
Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s tired.
Here’s a light-touch wellbeing boost that works — without burning you out