For teachers who are seeking promotion, plenty of good advice abounds. One suggestion is to gain experience that demonstrates your suitability for leadership - but if your workplace doesn’t have a spare secondment or a maternity post in your specialism, then this can be hard to acquire.
One way to gain leadership experience, and many other transferable skills, is by looking outside education and taking up a voluntary board position with a charity. Even the smallest charities need a board of trustees to lead them through difficult decisions, for free, in their own time.
Volunteering in this way can support great causes, while also providing experiences that could benefit your career. I have spent almost a decade volunteering in some capacity, and highly prize the experience, skills development and network that I have gained. When I applied for senior leadership roles, this was an integral part of my offer, and I referenced heavily the skills that I had acquired.
As a trustee, you interact with people and situations that you would not face in a classroom or middle management role. Leadership in a charity environment often means making difficult decisions, with far-reaching and enduring implications for the charity. It means weighing up these consequences and reaching out for advice, sometimes from lawyers, accountants or other charities.
Wide range of responsibilities
Charity trustees handle financial issues, HR and staffing issues; they frequently handle difficult conversations. They need an understanding of risk, ethics and basic charity law, so that they always act in the best interests of the charity.
As the stewards of the charity’s future, trustees require an understanding of a good governance culture, and how to create the conditions of accountability and transparency that underpin it. This runs the gamut from simple tasks such as ensuring that minutes are taken, to instigating a suite of policies for situations that have not happened yet, including complaints, grievances and cybersecurity breaches.
Trustees, then, ensure compliance and strong governance.
The traits required to successfully discharge those duties are highly applicable to management positions across education. For example, cross-sectional leadership is entirely usual in the third sector, with public and private sector leaders acting in a voluntary capacity on a board.
There are clear benefits for leaders in education from the experiences they gain on boards, not just in helping them to secure a leadership post, but in being successful in that role.
I have often drawn on my charity leadership experience when dealing with new or challenging situations in my career. Difficult conversations with parents, colleagues or young people are less difficult when you have extensive experience, while exposure to good HR practices can be useful at this level.
Seeing the bigger picture
Similarly, having strategic vision for the area or department you lead on in school, but being able to see the bigger picture, is just as integral to the work of a board as to middle or senior leaders. Experience of handling financial information, understanding risk and being accountable for your decisions will also make you better at your role.
It is thought that over are trustees across the UK, and teachers will be very well represented in that number. There are many compelling reasons to join them, most of which are about the charity itself and the good cause that you would be supporting.
If, however, you are looking to develop your leadership skills and take a new step in your teaching career, looking outside of teaching to the third sector might offer the skills development you’ve been searching for.
Paul Bisland is deputy head at The Glasgow Academy
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