I walked past a local school last week to be assaulted by its eye-catching entrance signage. Slashed across the colourful billboard was a clarion, diagonally offset, phrase, “Helping every learner achieve their potential”. “Be the best you can be”… “Aspiring to excellence”… You’ve seen these phrases, you can hardly miss them when you visit school […]

How well do you digest your staff? It’s an unusual question but hold on to your lunch for a moment. Why a workplace culture is toxic is often hard to pin down. Certainly, if you’re a leader who has experienced toxicity at work you know that it can come at you in relentless waves. There

You know those songs that get into your head and loop around until you think you’re actually going mad? If you want to fixate on a really sticky one, try Elton and Bernie, aka, The Captain and the Kid… And you can’t go back And if you try it fails Looking up ahead I see

You know the feeling. The 7th interview of the day has just finished. Your mouth is dry, your back aches, your brain is mush. All the candidates that you met during the day merge in your mind, a couple you already can’t remember at all, like the third movie on a long haul flight.  One

“Only the strong survive”, sang Jerry Butler on his 1968 album The Ice Man Cometh; “Only the strong survive”, sang Billy Paul in 1977; “Only the strong survive”, sang Rod Stewart in 2009;  “Only the strong survive”, Bruce Springstein entitled his 2022 album.  It seems, however, that this is a quote without a quotee, an

If all work and no play did no favours for Jack (or Jill), unremitting earnest worthiness doesn’t do a lot for any of us either. We work hard. We take our jobs seriously. We try our very best to be the best we can be. We are answerable, accountable, responsible, reliable, dependable – even though,

Once, during an interview, my glasses fell in half as I was answering a question.  In this moment of sudden catastrophe, my urbane veneer, my projection of ‘interviewee in control’, my self assured canter to a successful finishing line, were destroyed by the humiliation of having a lens dangling from each ear, swinging southwards like

I was standing outside a supermarket this week, about to enter, when a pleasant looking white haired lady came up to me and asked, “Are you going into the supermarket?” Instantly, I was on my guard, my sceptical radar activated. Was she going to ask me for money? What did she want from me? Cagily,

Every single night, I dream about school. Despite the fact that it’s been close to two years since schools were my everyday world, my tenure endures and flowers in a dream world of nightly adventures. Sometimes, these days, I need to wake up for a break.  For the most part these adventures are less harrowing

“They say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known”. Billy Joel’s lyrics from Summer, Highland Falls may be nearly half a century old but they capture an approach to existence that my father might have summarised as ‘just getting on with it’. My parent’s generation didn’t