About

In this episode, Claire talks over the internet to Glenn Russell, executive headteacher of Stalham Academy and Stalham Infant & Pre-School in Norfolk. Glenn talks about his background in education including about how he initially trained as a secondary teacher. He took on roles in middle schools in Norfolk before the county closed these to become a primary and secondary only system. Glenn decided to move into leadership roles in primary schools and became a deputy headteacher in a federation of four schools, eventually becoming headteacher of Stalham Junior School which, at the time, had been judged as inadequate by Ofsted. Glenn helped to turn the school around and became executive headteacher overseeing both the junior school and the infant school. Glenn discusses how, despite the coronavirus restrictions currently in place, his school has still managed to recruit new staff and he shares some tips and advice about what has worked best and what his school have learned from this process. He also talks about the importance of care and respect within his team, how his schools support, encourage and value all staff at all levels and how this was a crucial part of improving the school from inadequate to good. KEY TAKEAWAYS Remote recruitment can take away some of the benefits of meeting candidates face-to-face. While remote recruitment can make some elements of an interview process easier to administer, you can lose some of the benefits of meeting people face-to-face, such as being able to get to know people a little more than you might over a video-link. You can lose some of that ‘personal’ element that you gain when meeting in person. Be clear about how you will assess values and attributes remotely. Assessing values, skills and attributes over a remote interview can, in some ways, be quite tricky as some of these elements might be ones which you would pick up on and assess less formally face-to-face. One way around this can be to plan carefully in advance what you want from a successful candidate and structure the process and questions in a way which will promote or highlight these more clearly and explicitly. Build in more time than you think you’ll need for remote interviews. Whereas face-to-face interviews can usually run relatively smoothly and quickly, remote interviews will invariably take longer than you might think. Whatever time you think you’ll need, it can be advisable to double it as things like technology glitches, pauses and hand-overs to others on a panel can all add up to extra minutes. Be clear about time limits and expectations around any tasks. With on-site interviews, timings can be very tightly managed and controlled to ensure fairness for all candidates. Candidates on-site will also be on their own and you can be more certain that you are seeing them as they are. This can become more complicated with remote interviews where people could, if they wanted to, arrange to have access to other resources and help. While you can’t guarantee to be able to eliminate all of these possibilities, more tightly prescribing the amount of time each person has with tasks can go a long way to ensuring a level playing field. Remote panel interviews can bring their own unique issues. It can be easy in remote interviews involving several people to end up talking over each other or unintentionally interrupting someone and creating awkward pauses before someone takes a lead. To help with this, be clear about handing over to someone else when it is their turn to speak and have pre-determined ‘signals’ so that everyone can see when someone might want to ‘drop in’ and ask an additional question or make a point. Spreading the process out can be useful. Due to candidates’ other commitments, almost all interviews for school positions tend to be carried out in just one day. Remote interviews, though, can be structured to allow for more time to be able to delve into people’s responses and task submissions so that you can follow-up with questions in an interview on a subsequent day. BEST MOMENTS “When you're running interviews normally on site, you're able to get away with a number of the same types of activity or the same types of processes because actually you get to meet people. You get to kind of read them, you get to use your emotional intelligence, you get to find out about them. But without all of those advantages of being able to sit opposite someone and really get to meet them face to face, we had to sit and really rethink what does each position actually need. So the thing that we did first was be really, really clear on what we were looking for for the positions.” “In terms of how long you think something is going to take, I would clearly double the process time, because actually, speaking to somebody on Zoom, you have that pause, you have that wait, you have that shifting over to somebody else if you're doing the panel interview with several of you. If you are watching a lesson, then you've got the lesson, you've got the conversation remotely afterwards with a colleague about what you've seen or what you haven't seen. Whereas normally you'd both sit down and watch it together, so a lot of the activities take a lot more time.” “Being really, really specific about when things are being sent out and when you expect them back in gives you that kind of tight time limit that's really, really essential for clarity and fairness with all candidates.” “It really was good. It showed the candidates in such a different light and you got to have conversations with them in such a different way than you probably would do in the normal formal process.” “I don't see [some of this way of working] going away any time soon and actually there's plenty of things from the process that I think I'd replicate in the future.” “When you are doing panel interviews… be really, really clear about who is asking what and then, once you've asked the question, be explicit about handing over so it makes it easier on the number of voices happening at the same time. Also planning things like if [someone has] a follow-up question, what's the signal? What's the sign?” “Make sure that technology works. Definitely do some practices. Do some dry runs. My wife was good enough to sit and us interview her a couple of times and to make sure that it worked.” “One thing was actually having the process over more days rather than in the normal process when, in education, we tend to get it all done in one day. Having the different stages to this interview spread out over the week allowed us to really delve into candidates and what they did in different kinds of activities and how they responded to different time limits.” “That normal visit when the participant or candidate comes to your school to look around… because of this situation, I rang every single candidate that put in an application before we shortlisted to try and find out about them, but also to let them find out about me and the school. And those phone calls were going on for, like, forty-five minutes to hour long conversations and you've got such a good feel. And I think I probably gained more about the candidates in that way that I ever do when I give them a tour of the school.” “I say to my staff that I look after them so they're then able to look after the children. As far as I'm concerned the job is hard enough as it is without putting extra pressure and extra strain on.” VALUABLE RESOURCES Stalham Academy: https://www.stalhamacademy.co.uk/ Glenn Russell on Twitter #ValuedPeopleSuccessfulSchools: https://twitter.com/glennrussell84 The Teachers’ Podcast: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheTeachersPodcast/ Classroom Secrets Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClassroomSecretsLimited/ Classroom Secrets website: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/ LIFE/work balance campaign: https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/lifeworkbalance-and-wellbeing-in-education-campaign-2019/ ABOUT THE HOST Claire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide. Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.