Shorter reflections.
Smaller, more frequent notes on school leadership, culture and the day-to-day of running a school — alongside the main blog.
The Day a Grandmother Threw a Venomous Snake at My Chest
Refuse Average: Lead the Way You prepare, as best you can, for the parts of school leadership everyone warns you about. I've had parents scream the house down a…
Read → 14 September 2026The Quarter-Million-Pound Sixth Form: How a Portacabin Beat a £30 Million Building
"I want you to take over the sixth form. It's running at a two-hundred-and-forty-thousand-pound annual loss, and we can't sustain it." That was how I was handed…
Read → 7 September 2026Ninety Kids, One Postcode: The Industrial Unit That Rescued a Cohort
Every school has a small number of students whose behaviour repeatedly disrupts the education of everyone around them. In one school, we identified sixty such p…
Read → 31 August 2026The Empire in the Basement: When Culture Rot Hides Behind a Toolbelt
Every school has departments that operate almost entirely outside normal scrutiny. In one school I worked in, that department was estates and facilities — and t…
Read → 24 August 2026Cluckingham Palace: How Livestock Became Our Best Recruitment Tool
Years before I ever got the chance to try it properly, I proposed bringing small animals into a school to support literacy and confidence — modelled on a scheme…
Read → 17 August 2026What Your Budget Can't Buy: The Staff Welfare Week That Nearly Wasn't
"What do you want to do — tickle their tummies?" That was the reaction when I proposed a staff welfare week, after watching a brilliant, long-serving head of de…
Read → 10 August 2026Proving Her Wrong: Turning Sick Days Into a Six-Figure Saving
"You really think you can do that? I don't think so, young man." That was the response I got from my Principal the day I proposed fixing something nobody else w…
Read → 3 August 2026Seeing Beyond the Conventional: What a UAE Dragon Taught Me About Leadership
Refuse Average: Lead the Way Not many school leaders get to sit across the table from a man who brought Hamleys to Dubai, owned West Coast Customs — the company…
Read → 27 July 2026Human Bollards: Why £100,000 Walked Out the Door Before Anyone Noticed
Refuse Average: Lead the Way I was recently working with a school where, on paper, everything was in place. The Headmaster believed in what we were building. He…
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