This is the fourth of four posts I have planned related to my session at the ResearchED National Conference on Saturday 9th September. In the first post, I outlined why I believe that recent evidence indicates that there is a need for supervision within education. In the second post I explored what is, and isn’t, meant by the term ‘supervision’. In the third post, I provided an overview of some of the most recognised models of supervision utilised in other helping professions that could be of interest and use within education.
The title of this final post reflects my overarching feelings about the potential that supervision within education has for school staff and leaders, and I will say more about that as I draw together some conclusions from the first three posts and my thinking about supervision more generally. But the post’s title also relates to where I am at present and so I want to begin by talking about why my interest in supervision for the education sector is both personal and professional in nature.
Why supervision interests me, personally and professionally
I have been developing an interest in relational ways of leading and managing for most of my career. I became a second in an English department in my second year of teaching in 1996, progressing to subject leader in 2000, to assistant headship in 2005, deputy headship in 2007 (the same year I completed my NPQH) and headship in 2014. At no point within that journey have I been offered anything that approximates to what I judge supervision to mean by the schools for whom I’ve worked. Within these schools I’ve received plenty of training, worked with some very good line managers, received some distinctly dodgy coaching (alongside some good stuff), and have been the recipient of much ad hoc mentoring. Throughout all of that I have had provision made annually for performance appraisal and performance management.
Nothing unusual there, I would guess. This seems to be the pattern for education professionals. But it is a hotch-potch of forms of personal and professional support and challenge rather than something coherent. My in-school professional and personal development (as a teacher and as a leader) has largely been experiential in nature. Do the job, meet the challenges, figure those challenges out as you go along (sometimes with help but usually alone) and hopefully don’t make the same mistakes twice.
So, one reason for researching and writing this series of posts on what supervision could mean within education is to try and helping outline something better for the future. Now that I have left headship, I finally have the space to think about such things (which says something about the school system as it currently stands).
The second reason for this work on supervision is because it is clear to me that there is a growing (and now urgent) need to address a profession that is in crisis. In my presentation at ResearchED, I threw in the following slide as a metaphor for where we are:
I suggested to the attendees that school staff are not dissimilar to RAAC. They have an incredibly strong core. They have a relatively strong, but porous, outer shell that has been compromised by the intensification of the work that they do and the needs that they both encounter. They find themselves at breaking point, their core weakened, crumbling and sometimes breaking. But unlike the RAAC crisis, there seems to be no sign of a response from those “responsible bodies” for the upkeep and repairs to the personal and professional needs of school staff.
I speak from experience. A third reason for my research and writing is about my own personal-professional experiences recently. Like 30% to 40% of school leaders, I came through lockdown feeling that I needed to leave the profession even though I had intended to complete another six years as Head of the school I have loved leading. I was one of the 23% to 29% who found themselves “sometimes or mostly sinking” once the euphoria of getting through the lockdowns was over (Greany et al, 2021 and 2022). Despite all the good times personally and professionally in recent years, and despite working with a great set of staff, senior leaders and governors, I felt I could no longer continue. As the 2022 Teacher Wellbeing Index outlines is common for school leaders, I found myself suffering from quite extreme insomnia (always work-related) and irritability; a bad combination for someone who, as Vic Goddard has said, sets the weather for a school. As the 2023 Headrest report into headteacher wellbeing outlines, I became convinced that I was not good enough for the role I held as the stress became anxiety and, eventually, I became completely burnt out.
It was during this period of declining self-esteem and self-efficacy that I became interested in supervision. I had previously completed a doctoral programme in which I came to recognise that there are three ‘myths’ around leadership that dominate within education leadership literature. These are the myths of ‘enduring harmony’, ‘positional authority’ and ‘complexity reduction’. A brief summary of my thesis is that managers in schools are invited to think that they can make everyone happy all the time, that they can bend their organisation and its employees to their will, and that the complexity of school life can be tamed through simplification. The reality, in my experience, which tends not to be addressed in school leadership literature, is that plural (competing and collaborative) views of the good are inescapable in organisations, that responsibility is co-constructed by people staying in relation to one another, and that it is through the political act of negotiating with others that the anxiety of uncertainty can be reduced. As well as the thesis, interested readers can read a shorter version in chapter 2 of Complexity and Leadership (Chauhan et al, eds, 2023).
Having experienced a doctoral programme that was social through-and-through, the post-pandemic world of education was, if anything, heading in the opposite direction. Greany et al (2022) speak of dislocation and fragmentation and their interviews of assistant and deputy headteachers speaks to the distancing they have felt from the role of headteacher. As this sense of isolation built up, feeling I needed to shoulder the burden alone given everything else my colleagues were going through, I enrolled to join another community of inquiry with the Institute of Group Analysis, completing their foundation course in 2022 and their diploma course this year. Working mainly with psycho-analysts and psycho-therapists in a peer supervision group has been transformative to my thinking.
It quickly became apparent that my colleagues in the supervision group were astounded that headteachers, other school leaders and school staff generally had no entitlement to supervision for dealing with the pressures they face. One of these colleagues, who works with patients diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, was incredibly sympathetic about the challenges in my work and was dumbfounded that there was no outlet for containment of the personal and professional challenges this posed.
And so, in the spirit of full disclosure, the final purpose for me in writing these posts is because my post-headship journey upon which I am embarking will involve working with governors, school leaders and staff to provide supervision, and to assist others in being able to do so within their contexts. The second part of this post will be to outline what I have learnt from my research into supervisory theory and practice. The third part will outline some ‘best bets’ informing my offer to schools and their leaders.
The overall theme of this post is that we need to consider the personal and professional at the same time because, from my experience (both good and bad) there is no sense in trying to split these concepts. We teach and are teachers. We lead and are leaders. Our identity is wrapped up with our work. As the three posts have shown:
- Personal and professional needs are intertwined, and supervision can meet both.
- The functions of supervision hold the personal and professional in view together.
- Supervision models can meet differing personal and professional needs in education.
Why supervision should interest the education sector, personally and professionally
My first conclusion, from the first blogpost in the series, is that there is a growing and now urgent need for better support (which I contend ought to be supervision) for school staff and leaders. The data gathered by Ofsted in 2019 said the wellbeing of school staff was “worryingly low” and things have got much worse since then. Some of these reports (Greany et al, Education Support, Headrest) suggest that the wellbeing of school leaders and headteachers is of particular concern. The impacts on school staffing, effectiveness and sustainability are both actual, happening now, and potential, likely to worsen significantly in the foreseeable future. Reports written by those with the most influence (Ofsted and the DfE) do not give any assurance that additional resources will be forthcoming to help schools and trusts meet these needs, although the DfE make it clear that schools will be responsible (and accountable?) for such provision.
Hawkins and McMahon place these education-specific factors into context, explaining that there are four factors that the ‘helping professions’ have to contend with at present.
- Greater demand
- Higher expectations of quality service
- Fewer resources
- A world that is more volatile, disturbed and interconnected
Hawkins and McMahon believe that individuals, teams and organisations are expected to just “get on with it”. The result is the importation of “distress, disturbance, fragmentation and need” which cannot be contained. The result, without supervision, is decreased functioning for individuals and cohesion for teams. Scaife, in Supervision in Clinical Practice (2019), mirrors some of these views, saying that we have seen increasing risk aversion within public services alongside a reduction in resources, and a “stifling level of managerial control”. Within education, Edwards also agrees with Hawkins and McMahon, noting that there is more pressure coming from “a broader remit than the days when services were better resourced”. Headteachers and senior leaders carry the “weight of complexity” without the ability to share it, so that it becomes “overwhelming, exhausting and hard to see the wood for the trees”.
My second conclusion, from the second blogpost in the series, is that education lacks a culture of supervision despite it being well-established in many other helping professions. Educators have an ambivalence about the word, perceiving it as being mainly about hard-edged and potentially threatening professional appraisal processes or as being mainly about soft-edged and potentially woolly personal therapy processes. By contrast, despite some disagreements about specific definitions or wording, most of the helping professions agree with Proctor and Inskipp that supervision has three intertwined functions for supervision: normative (professional competence), formative (personal and professional development) and restorative (personal resources). These functions, together with definitions that are context-specific to education can provide a way in which supervision can become rooted in the culture of the education sector. The ambivalence of the term can be worked with in supporting/challenging the paradoxical personal-professional needs of those working in schools.
Scaife asserts that “supervision in different contexts and settings is much more similar than it is different” because Proctor’s three functions are relevant whatever employment practices are in place. Supervision enables professionals to open up about their work, behaviours, performance, practice, thinking and feeling to “scrutiny by another”. The education and development of the supervisee is prioritised alongside their “vulnerability, hopes, needs and desires”. Hawkins and McMahon believe that without supervision, staff in helping professions can suffer from the stuckness, rigidity and defensiveness that can lead to burnout. Developing relationship-based models of supervision can develop, support and improve the supervisee.
Having introduced a school-wide approach to supervision, Edwards writes that her model “assumes that practitioners are usually keen to work well, and to be self-monitoring”. Supervision brings colleagues to “professional maturity” whilst, at the same time valuing, supporting, and challenging them personally. Sturt and Rowe, two other authors who have ‘walked the talk’ in bringing supervision into school contexts, are similarly positive about its ability to develop supervisees both personally and professionally. They use a continuum to demonstrate how the different functions of supervision encompass the ambiguity and ambivalence of the term, including some forms of appraisal as well as counselling. It is worth noting, though, that such a continuum uses a spatial metaphor that attempts to split or collapse the paradox: counselling is not the opposite end of a scale to appraisal. It is perhaps more helpful to think of how professional feedback (appraisal) can offer therapeutic (counselling) benefits at the same time, or vice versa.
My third conclusion, from the third blogpost in the series, is that there are many varied and competing models of supervision from other helping professions. Some focus on theory (usually from psychodynamic approaches), others are based on supervisee developmental stages or needs, and others focus on the processes happening within the supervisory relationship and its context. Whilst it would be easy to conclude that such a variety is problematic for adoption and/or translation into the education sector, the reality is that supervision in education will most likely involve all three dimensions of these models, paying attention to the educational theory, supervisee development stages or needs, and the supervision process. As such, models of supervision are an interesting reference point for what it is we are trying to do together but are subject to constant negotiation in the act of supervision.
Bernard and Goodyear (2013), having summarised a vast array of models of supervision, conclude that within the context of supervision, it is the knowledge of theory, of practice and of self that is the focus, and that clinical supervisors are key to supervisee integration of these different types of knowledge. For Bernard and Goodyear, what distinguishes professionals from other types of worker are autonomy, uncertainty and specialised knowledge. Because of this, competence is not a “disparate collection of knowledge and skills, but rather something that requires the exercise of judgment”.
Scaife demonstrates how context informs what may be useful from one model to the next in the context of personal and professional development. Pre-registration supervision does not assume pre-existing professional judgment and wisdom and therefore has a “gate-keeping” function for the profession, involves a “power-imbalance” and needs to “socialise” new practitioners within their community of inquiry. These features are less frequently a part of post-qualification of managerial supervision where, for the most part, the assumption is that experienced professionals have demonstrated that they can work with autonomy, uncertainty, and domain-specific knowledge. The use of models itself, therefore, requires the exercise of context-specific practical judgment and wisdom.
‘Best bets’ for establishing a culture of supervision in education
So far in this series of posts I have drawn several conclusions. There is an urgent need for supervision in education because of the impact of increased demands and expectations at a time of fewer resources and massive disruption. This is unlikely to change soon and there will be no additional resources to fund the extra support. We can draw from definitions of supervision in other sectors to offer support and challenge for personal and professional development of school staff and leaders through normative, formative and restorative interventions. Like other helping professions, we can develop context-specific models for supervision in education, drawing from our knowledge of theory, of how people develop and of the processes of working with others. Wisdom and judgment are needed as no single model will be helpful in all situations in a complex professional field.
There are, I believe, three potential starting points for the provision of supervision within education to meet the urgent need for better personal-professional support and challenge: a leader-focused approach, a trainee-focused approach, and a school-focused or trust-focused approach. Ideally, our profession would focus on all three at once to provide a pincer movement to rapidly ensure that supervision is guaranteed for everyone working in education. However, this is not going to happen soon without impetus from the DfE, despite their recognition of the potential benefits of supervision. Pragmatically, then, where do we start?
The ’best bet’ for developing supervision in education is a leader-focused approach as the latest evidence suggest that this is where the greatest need lies. Without addressing this need, between a third and four-fifths of headteachers might leave the profession imminently because of burnout before retirement. At the same time, fewer senior leaders look likely to choose to step up to the position because they have been discouraged by the demands of the role. A second factor that makes this the best bet for bringing a supervision culture into education is that well-supervised school leaders are more likely to offer it to school staff more widely. A wider roll-out of supervision to staff in education is also more likely to succeed if leaders are seen as being “fully committed” to it “as an example” (Scaife).
Because leaders and managers of schools are more likely than not to be experienced practitioners the approach to supervision would need to be drawn from models that prioritise nonlinear development such as Rigazio-DiGilio’s orientation-focused model discussed in the second post, as opposed to developmental models based on linear progression towards professional-personal competencies. Highly developed and expert practitioners, which cannot be assumed in all cases but would be likely in most cases, mean that school leader-focused supervision might also be designed to draw from humanist models in other sectors. The urgency of needs within the profession suggests a humanist approach with more focus initially on the restorative dimensions of supervision practice, although the normative and formative dimensions ought also to be addressed.
One question of relevance for a leader-focused approach to developing provision of supervision in education is with regards to who should deliver it, those from other domains or those with experience in the role. The literature is clear that the preference would normally be for supervisors to be drawn from the same profession. At the same time, the literature suggests that supervision should ideally be done by experienced supervisors. This creates an implementation gap: without a culture of supervision, there are not many education practitioners with the experience of either being supervised or supervising others. There is no way around this approach in the short-term and so trusts or governing bodies who wish to implement supervision for school leaders need to take their chances one way or another, unless they are fortunate enough to find someone who has both recent school leadership experience and recent supervisory experience.
The ’second best bet’ for implementing supervision in education is, given the fragmented nature of the ecosystem in which schools work, for a school-focused or trust-focused approach. This would involve, as Edwards outlines based on her experience of doing it, the provision of external specialist support for leaders and then an organisational realignment of time, space, training, and resource to provide quality supervision to others within the organisation. Decisions would have to be made about who can take on the role of supervisor (seniority, competence, willingness?), how these people would be recognised and what training they would need. There would need to be consideration of how other personal-professional dynamics would relate to aligning supervisors with supervisees (friendships, team mates?). Schools or trusts would also need to choose whether supervision for their whole staff would sit alongside or replace existing processes such as appraisal and line management. In short, it would require drive, dedication and problem-solving acumen from the trust, governing body and leadership teams of schools implementing such an approach. Trust or school-focused supervision would almost certainly require an independent external partner to help guide the implementation of supervision, provide supervision for school leaders, offer supervision training for those identified as being potential supervisors, and monitor feedback around the impact of supervision.
Probably the ‘least best bet’ for introducing supervision in education is the trainee-focused approach. Most schools take on their Early Career Teachers (ECTs) from a range of training providers and then subscribe to an existing ECT partnership provider, meaning that there is less autonomy over what is delivered and how support and challenge is provided. Of course, there is the possibility that schools could shape the school-based mentoring roles for ECTs to build supervision into their common experience but that might have to align with external partner expectations of ECT monitoring and reporting. The same pattern is apparent in most leadership development programmes. The most common of these are National Professional Qualifications or NPQs, to which schools subscribe and over which they have little control. Groups of schools, including Trusts, may take an in-house approach to the provision of bespoke leadership training and so could perhaps make some headway. However, as a more widespread offer for entrants to teaching and to leadership, supervision is more likely to take centre stage if course providers choose to build it into their programmes.
Where schools or trusts do have some control over training programmes, such as those running their own ECT provision or those with clear induction and development offers for newly appointed leaders, the literature offers some guidance of how supervision might function. Unlike established leaders or teachers, trainee-focused supervision might begin with a core curriculum covering normative, formative and restorative functions: this might centre more closely on established professional standards. Supervisor expertise is more likely to play a role, with a greater focus perhaps on linear and stage-based models of supervisee competence. Cognitive-behavioural models, which feature planned agendas, homework, and more focus on assessment over evaluation, could offer a greater degree of focus on the socialisation of the novice and the assurance of competence acquisition. This approach requires supervisors to function more like gate-keepers to the profession which, in turn, requires a more consistent set of expectations from supervisors.
Conclusion
This post has offered some developing thoughts about what we know about supervision and how it might play a greater role in education, drawing upon insights gleaned from related professions in which it has become well-established. I began by outlining my personal-professional reasons for writing this series of posts and have tried to keep that theme going by exploring the personal-professional benefits of supervision for school staff and leaders.
This post, and the series, has not been an attempt to achieve perfection in outlining what supervision should look like. Schools and education are too complex for unequivocal truths and perfect models, as is supervision itself. The only real truths in this series of posts are the ones related to the growing need for supervision within education. What that looks like is always going to be contestable and contested, hence why the post concludes with no ‘guaranteed goods’, but instead some ‘best bets’ that may be a good enough starting point for further conversations and trials that will generate better forms of knowledge about what supervision could look like in schools.
Hawkins and McMahon write about how “good enough” supervisees help those they work with meet the challenges of our time so that the “good enough” helping professional can survive by being held and contained within the supervisory relationship. Lea Weston, in Edwards’ book, says that this ‘holding’ enables “deep, safe but challenging support” to take place. In doing so, for Scaife, the central purpose of supervision is “bringing about learning and development” that improves the welfare of the supervisee and the client, but also the welfare of the institution and the profession.
The fact that supervision does not distinguish between the personal and the professional has been why I have written these posts and why developing supervision processes within schools is the next part of my contribution beyond teaching and school leadership. If the series has got you thinking and you would like to discuss that thinking further with me, you can contact me on Twitter or LinkedIN. I would love to hear from you.
kevenbartle's Blog 
Posted on September 12, 2023
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