Managing & Leading SLT Meetings

Gareth Harris

Principal of Beamont Collegiate Academy

Top 5 Tips on Managing SLT Meetings

Twitter’s new lord, Elon Musk believes meetings rarely add value to organisations. Here’s 5 things that we do to help ensure meetings are useful, meaningful for all and add value to our work.

1. Get that agenda out early

Seeing an email with the words "SLT Agenda" arrive in your inbox on the day of the meeting will seriously annoy the team. Especially if it means they have to cobble something together relating to an item they didn’t even know was on the agenda! With our meeting scheduled for each Tuesday afternoon our team know they can expect the agenda by Friday afternoon. Giving them time to consider what needs to be produced for discussion or review is essential. If you want well considered documents and discussion at meetings then leaders don’t need to be sent into a frantic spin to produce something (anything!) due to your tardy communication on what’s on the agenda.

2. Leaders are (pre) readers

Working on our senior team at BCA is underpinned by four key elements:

· Challenge—we are prepared to be challenged and challenge the thinking of others.

· Trust—we understand that professional trust is essential for successful team performance

· Purpose—we should have clear understanding of what we are trying to achieve.

· Intellectually interesting—we must remain curious about education and associated areas.

To ensure meetings move beyond the operational and we remain intellectually engaged we ensure each meeting is supported by a piece of mandatory pre-reading linked to the meeting’s core focus (See below). This helps our team to remain engaged and curious in research and thinking related to a number of areas of school life, and allows leaders to signpost articles, research and policy papers, blogs and, on occasion, podcasts. Our expectation is that we have all read pre-reading material and ready to discuss within the context of our own school. This really does mean that we encounter a wide range of reading and thinking via our meetings. Examples of pre-reading material that have informed recent meetings include:

· Extracts from Imperfect Leadership. Steve Mumby

· Extracts from Leaders with Substance. Matthew Evans

· 5 Things High Performing Teams do Differently. Ron Friedman. Harvard Business Review.

· EEF Recommendations for Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools.

· Podcast: Evidence into Action. Interview with Prof. Becky Francis: Making the Difference for Disadvantaged Pupils.

As ASCL’s General Secretary, Geoff Barton, frequently reminds us via his twitter feed: “leaders are readers”.

3. Shine the spotlight on a key component of school life

In their book Putting Staff First, John Tomsett and Johnny Uttley argue that school leaders must aim to become experts in as much of school life as possible. With this in mind, here at BCA our SLT team meetings aim to strike a healthy balance between school operations and the strategies relating to a core component of school life. Typically, a meeting is divided into 30 minutes of operational

information sharing with relatively little discussion—more a case of updates relating to day to day events and issues. This is followed by 60 minutes of what we call our Core Focus. Here we spend time looking closely at strategy and impact relating to those essential areas of school: attendance, behaviour, personal development, curriculum, SEND, teaching and quality assurance. So instead of jumping from one area of school life to another in a single meeting this allows us to have a disciplined and focused meeting led by the member our team with responsibility for that particular Core Focus. An example of a recent agenda is set out below:

School Operations: Information and Updates

1. Staffing update/position.

2. Calendar.

3. Yr11 Roadmap and PPE exam timetable

4. Behaviour update: Statistics since 31.10.22

5. KS3 Support Centre: Provision, purpose and pupils in readiness for KMO start

6. Peer review: Observations on behaviour

7. PACE Learning Observations—verbal summary of observations that have taken place.

Core Focus: Teaching, Learning and Teacher Development (Led by AP for T&L)

Pre-reading: The bad News and the Good News: Why and How to Teach about Memory. Tricia Taylor.

1. Response to pre reading.

· What do we see at BCA that chimes with the article?

· Are there any areas for development at whole school/departmental levels?

· To what extent does T&L at BCA consider the role of memory and cognition?

2. BCA’s 6 Dimensions of curriculum: expectations, strengths and development.

3. CPD overview inc June CPD conference plan.

4. Speak last and welcome constructive dissent.

Speaking last on a subject at a meeting is not as easy it at sounds. Nonetheless it can be important in ensuring you chair the meeting with a willingness to listen to others and also avoid some members of your team parroting the views of the meeting’s Chair (usually but not always the headteacher). The added benefit of hearing all views but expressing your own is that you are able to refine your own opinion in light of others’.

The notion of dissent around the table is one leaders can often shy away from. However, dissenting and diverging opinions should not only be welcomed but be viewed as an key indicator of a healthy team. As leaders do any of us want a group of nodding group thinkers around the table? In his book Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed argues that constructive dissent and disagreement far from being seen as a threat to social cohesion should be viewed as a contribution to a team’s social dynamism. So sometimes you just have to sit back and let members of your have highly combative discussions, including ones that challenge your own views, safe in the knowledge that this signals team strength not weakness.

5. Finish on time.

Finishing on time is essential in signalling to your team that you recognise their time is precious and they have lives to live outside of leadership team meetings. Agenda not covered? Move the item to the next meeting.