The First 90 Days: How to survive (and thrive) as a new Head of History

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

I always dream big. I’m a big believer in the idea that you should set lofty goals and do everything that you can to try and achieve them. Then, if something sets you back, you regroup, rethink, and re-strategise to see if that dream is right for you, or whether you should pursue something else.

That could apply to all aspects of our lives, not just your career.

Do you want to lift heavier weights at the gym? Great: what’s your plan for that?

Do you want to write a bestseller? Great, have you put aside ten, fifteen, thirty minutes a day to get it written?

Do you want to get a promotion? Great, have you put in the time needed to get experience for the role?

A couple of years ago, I applied to be Head of History and didn’t get the outcome that I was after. It was disappointing – as is any rejection – but I was undeterred. I put in the work, got more experience under my belt and put myself out there. Two years later, here I am: running a department of 9 people, determined to continue to make positive changes to how the subject is taught across not just my school, but our partner schools, too.

If you’re applying for your first Teaching & Learning Responsibility (TLR, for those of us in the know), you might have absolutely zero idea of what to expect from it. Equally, if you’ve just scored your first TLR as Head of Department (HOD), congratulations! You’re probably dead excited to step up and show off what you’ve got. You’re going to have to get started on balancing the immediate administrative tasks with setting the strategic direction and culture of your department.

If you’ve never done anything like this before, it can feel like a lot.

Here’s what to expect from the First 90 Days as a Head of Department at a UK Secondary School, with an honest look at how to establish yourself as a leader, not just a manager.

People First: Establishing Leadership and Team Culture

The most important part of leading any team is the need to put your people first. You can’t expect anyone to follow if you don’t know how to lead.

So, let’s talk about it:

Leading vs Doing

If you’re anything like me, your initial urge will be to do absolutely everything that you can. It’s my job, you’ll say. I’m paid to do this, you’ll convince yourself. Or, perhaps you already know how to do something – therefore, surely it’s quicker to do it yourself, right?

Do everything that needs doing and you’ll very quickly burn out. It doesn’t matter how many time management strategies you’ve put in place; there simply isn’t enough time to run a department and get every single thing done.

It’s time to delegate.

Delegation is all about understanding what your direct responsibility is and what should be left up to your team – and trusting them to do it well. Now that you’re a HOD, you’re in charge of the bigger challenges. If you spend your time working on the smaller bits and pieces, you will quite simply run out of time. Suddenly, the bigger things – the things that your TLR entail – won’t get done.

So, the solution: clearly define roles and delegate tasks. Your value to this new role is in leadership and strategy, not in individual task completion. Of course, as part of your teaching role, there are a number of things that you’ll still be expected to do – just ensure that you’re not doing all of it.

To delegate, play to the strengths of your team. Does somebody particularly enjoy delivering assemblies? Ask them to plan one. Does a member of your team thrive from delivering 1-2-1 pastoral interventions, and want to pursue that course for their career? Ask for their support in this.

And, if you’re finding it hard for your team to do as they’re asked (perhaps because you’re new to the school or because you’ve taken on all of these responsibilities before), I’d recommend reading Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations*, which acts as a guide to holding difficult, honest conversations – including the value that they can add to your team, whether you’re in teaching or not. This is essential to your growth as a leader and for team accountability.

Communication and the flow of ideas

There’s nothing worse than a constant stream of messages clogging up your inbox, so why contribute to these? I send out a weekly update email every Friday, adding to it throughout the week, to keep all of my updates in one place. It takes the form of a Google Doc so that the updates don’t get lost in the aether.

As a result, my team have one place to check to see if there’s anything that I’d like them to do or focus on for the week ahead. All of these updates, and any essential files, are linked to on a History Dashboard – a Google Slides file that I keep bookmarked so that resources, mark sheets, long term plans and other administrative files can be accessed all from the same space.

This is also great for accountability since, if someone doesn’t do what you ask them to and claims naivety, you can easily use your paper trail as evidence. I’ve not had to do this since I’m really lucky to work with such a great team, but it’s a useful hack for any leader, whether you’re a HOD or a manager of a team outside of teaching.

On top of that, you can share best practice from either yourself, or empower your team by sharing theirs. Not only will this give them a morale boost for being recognised, it will also lessen the workload burden from you having to generate every new idea.

Cultivating morale

Sharing best practice isn’t the only way to cultivate morale. It’s important to organise activities outside of work to foster that collaborative, friendly workplace attitude.

And what better way to do this – especially at this time of the year – than by organising Christmas-themed events? Organise a work Christmas meal and Secret Santa, using a service like DrawNames so that who has who is kept secret and so that everyone can create a wish list, making it dead easy to buy for the person you’ve got.

Yup. I would also find this Maths lesson confusing

Driving Improvement: Strategy, Coaching and Vision

Staff morale is absolutely essential to your role, since you can’t expect people to work for you unless you’ve empowered them to do so. However, it’s not necessarily why you’ve been given the role of HOD. Chances are that your vision for your department is what cinched the job. Therefore, it’s important that you take clear steps to lay out this vision to make your department even better than it already was.

Keeping to-do lists at bay

You’ll have a lot on your plate as Department Chief, and so you’ll need to make decisions regarding what to do and when to do it. I use the Eisenhower Matrix for this, a system that allows you to assign tasks to one of four quadrants:

  • Important AND urgent (do now)
  • Important but NOT urgent (schedule)
  • Urgent but NOT important (delegate)
  • Neither important nor urgent (delete)

If it’s in quadrant one, you need to do it now. Tasks that come from emails from your boss asking you to do something by the end of the day fit here. If it’s in quadrant two, you can wait a day or two. Tasks like ‘I need to enter student names for exam entries by the end of the week’. For quadrant three, you’re looking at asking members of your team to do something for you, such as ‘John, could you please use your digital expertise to create a guide to using devices for our ECTs?’ Finally, tasks that appear in your inbox which have no relevance to your work belong in quadrant four.

Now that you’ve got a system in place, it’s time to get on with installing your Subject Improvement Plan.

The Subject Improvement Plan (SIP)

Some of these objectives may come from your superiors but, if not, it’s something you’ll need to consider anyway. Each half term, sit down and plan out 3 specific objectives that you’d like to act on or improve upon. This could be ‘ensure that every class has homework set every week’ or even ‘ensure that there is sufficient challenge in every lesson across all subject teachers’ lessons’.

Review these goals every half term to determine whether you’re ready to move on or if it still needs to continue to be a priority in the subsequent half term. For each goal, what actions are you going to take to ensure that it’s been met? Consider SMART targets to do this:

  • Specific (What exactly do you want to achieve?)
  • Measurable (How will you track progress?)
  • Achievable (Is it realistic?)
  • Relevant (Does it align with your priorities?)
  • Time-bound (What’s the deadline?)

If you want to use SMART goals to sort out your life outside of work, check out my complete guide to planning your life here.

And if your Faculty director has already issued you with their own SIP, consider how the above advice can help you to action it according to their proforma.

Instructional coaching

You’ll want to do weekly lesson drop-ins where possible. These aren’t necessarily for judgement – and you should explain as such. These are to see whether your team is rolling out whatever strategies you’ve asked them to use, and whether they need any support with behaviour or pedagogy.

Then, if you both have capacity, you can try to do instructional coaching. This is where, over a set period of time, you both focus on one aspect that you want that teacher to improve upon. You take a small amount of time to meet each week (say, 20 minutes), do some deliberate practice of the technique, and then observe them for a portion of a lesson to see whether they’ve improved upon that aspect in their teaching. Focus on one teacher at a time so that this doesn’t overwhelm your workload and you have a clear focus for improvement.

Use a clear, non-confrontational feedback model post-drop-in so that it continues to be friendly and non-judgemental. We use Step Lab, but your school may have already invested in the technologies they’d like you to use for this.

Budgets

Perhaps the least exciting but equally-kind-of-interesting part of the role is the insight that you get into budgeting. I was given my budget for the year at the start of September, and it’s up to me to stay on top of our stationery supplies. Do we have enough glues? Will we run out of black pens in the next fortnight? How many spare books are on our shelves, waiting to be filled? Do we need to buy anymore textbooks for the year 12 and 13s?

If you only have enough money for one thing, and not the other, where are you going to prioritise your spending? I also discovered that my budget is reliant on how many students have signed up to our subject at GCSE – which makes sense, since you’ll need more money if you have more students – but not anything I’d ever considered before taking on the role.

Budgeting correctly is a really fundamental, often overlooked, part of your new job. It’s up to you to order these supplies so that the department continues to run efficiently and students’ books continue to look beautiful so that, when Parent’s Evening comes around (click here if you’d like advice on how to run one), the books that your visitors read through are top quality, rather than ready for the bin.

What’s next?

Look, I’d be lying if I said that the first 90 days aren’t intense. Just like how the American President sets the tone for their presidency in their First One Hundred Days, you do the same in your first three months as HOD. What’s next is the need to continue to follow the steps laid out above – and then some.

You’ll want to review the curriculum once you’ve settled in, seeing where your priorities are in terms of what needs to be improved. You might need to redevelop or reconfigure your long term plan. I had already done this prior to the start of term, but it’s already changed a number of times, and ensuring that your team all stay on track is just one part of your new job. Then, if your school is part of a wider Trust, you might be asked to share your expertise with stakeholders at inter-school meetings, to implement improvements in your context or elsewhere.

For the HODs among you who have already completed your first year and beyond: what was the biggest challenge that you faced in your first 90 days in the role? Let me know in the comments below.

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