Are you a school leader willing to take the professional risks that meaningful school improvement requires?
After 26 years teaching and leading in London secondary schools, I learned that the most important leadership risks were rarely dramatic. They involved opening classrooms, reforming unhelpful policies and admitting when an idea had failed to improve teaching and learning.
Back in 2017, I argued that school leaders should take small professional risks: open their classrooms, challenge myths and remain connected to staff. Almost a decade later, I still believe this, but today’s risks are less performative and more structural. They require leaders to challenge routines, reduce competing priorities and create the conditions for teachers to improve. Here are my updated top 10:
1. Openness
Open your classroom door and invite colleagues to see you teach. Leadership should never make us immune from feedback; professional vulnerability builds far more trust than pretending we have mastered everything.
2. Honesty
Admit when last year’s initiative did not stick. Instead, revisit what staff were asked to learn, identify what prevented implementation and strengthen it before launching the next fashionable idea. Your staff will thank you for it!
3. One Focus
Choose one important teaching problem and understand it properly. When everything is a priority, teachers receive disconnected messages.
4. Subtraction
Stop one low-impact practice that consumes teachers’ time without improving learning. Removing unnecessary work shows staff that workload matters.
5. Clarity
Define the classroom behaviours you want colleagues to develop. For example, labels such as “adaptive teaching” need practical examples of what teachers might say, do and notice.
6. Autonomy
Give departments permission to translate whole-school principles into their own contexts. Consistency should mean coherence – a shared direction, not identical teaching in every subject and classroom.
7. Development
Use lesson visits, learner conversations and work scrutiny to identify strengths and support needs. Quality assurance should help teachers improve—not reduce teaching to a grade or checklist.
8. Rehearsal
Give teachers time to practise before expecting confident implementation. Professional development requires modelling, rehearsal, feedback and follow-up—not another presentation followed by silence.
9. Trust
Give middle leaders genuine responsibility, time and authority. Accountability without capacity is delegation in name only.
10. Impact
Evaluate what changed for learners, not simply what training staff attended. Ultimately, did classroom practice and learner experience improve?
Real leadership courage means choosing fewer priorities, removing low-impact work, treating professional development as a sustained process and being prepared to ask whether anything has genuinely changed for teachers and learners.
Wishing all schools and colleges a successful year ahead!