A Headteacher’s Suicide That Should Never Have Happened

Back in the day when I worked as a School Improvement Advisor, I could offer Heads and senior leaders an independent critical friendship and coaching service which gave them an opportunity to voice concerns and challenges without feeling judged.

In this role, I worked with a Headteacher who was garrulous, well-loved, and who led a thriving school, popular with parents and staff. One day we went on a long car journey to attend some training and he revealed his sleepless nights of worry about the job and doubt about an upcoming Ofsted inspection. I sympathised and shared with him my own experience as a Head of anxiety and impending doom on many days when I drove to school during an unexpected crisis.

We talked about how difficult it is during challenging times to lead a school – to be the person who must act as if in full control. To be the well-rehearsed confident, decisive voice of authority, reassuring everyone that everything is all going to turn out okay. And doing all this whilst inside our head is a quaking, vulnerable soul, searching for the solution to save the day.

This incongruence can take its toll on our wellbeing. You can’t let your persona falter or let your guard down, so your temper becomes shorter at home and you lie awake at 3am with the tyrant in your head telling you what you already know – you just can’t do it any more… But you wake up and you go in again, heart pounding. You used to love your job – what happened?

In my follow up meetings with this particular Head I asked him how he was, but his ‘brave’ front was up and all he said was “Absolutely fine”. But it wasn’t. The tragic end to this story is that some weeks later, my colleague was found dead in his office. He had committed suicide.

Nobody could understand why this highly successful, popular family man would do such a thing. His school was ‘outstanding’ – a judgment confirmed by Ofsted some months later. His suffering must have been unbearable and, as far as I know unspoken, apart from on that car journey.

There is nothing more dangerous, I concluded, than a leader hiding his or her doubts and failures and allowing those thoughts to erode their resilience until they believe the world would be better off without them.

This was when I decided to become a coach.

There are many school leaders who are suffering from the huge pressures Covid has relentlessly put upon them and their schools. But they still must make life-changing decisions for their children and their staff every day. School leaders have been immensely flexible and resilient throughout this crisis, putting the safety and education of their students at the forefront of their thinking whilst also balancing the health and wellbeing of their staff.

How can we ensure that our leaders have the support for their own wellbeing that they need through these times? No-one could doubt that a personal physical fitness trainer to motivate us to get physically fit and stronger would be a help for any leader. Even more important – especially today – would be a mental fitness trainer to help us understand how to manage our minds, to intercept negative thinking and grow our own mental muscles of empathy, resilience and self-regulation.

A good coach is a mental fitness trainer. He or she will listen, challenge your inner critic and show you how to create and maintain helpful habits of thinking. A coach will show that you are far more likely to react to negative experiences, that this is part of your instinctive flight- fight instincts and that there are good reasons our brain works this way.

Humanity has survived because we are acutely sensitive to threats to our survival. This is why one small safeguarding error, one critical parent or impending grievance procedure can outweigh all the positive things that happen on a daily basis. So much of our state of mind is dictated by our unconscious bias that attempting to apply pure willpower to solve the everyday challenges of school leadership will not be enough.

A coach will also help you challenge the imposter syndrome that haunts so many of us and makes it so hard to enjoy the success we have longed for, despite all the evidence that we are doing a great job.

This is a good reason to deliberately focus on the good things you have done today by keeping a gratitude journal. The inner commentary we have that dwells on the negative is powerful and personal. Understanding why that happens and how to get a peaceful, clear mind despite the turmoil surrounding you is the gift that a coach can give you.

A coach holds up a mirror to your thinking and helps you reflect on your limiting beliefs to uncover the lies your brain sometimes tells you. A coach absolutely knows that you have all the innate capacity to deal with everything this tough job throws at you – but not while you are getting in your own way with insecure thinking.

Becoming conscious of our thinking helps us be calm and less reactive to our own and others mistakes and so gives us more space in our head to become the outstanding leader we can be. Every school leader needs a coach. For me it was transformational.

The extra bonus of being coached is that we can then see the potential benefit and power of using peer coaching as a staff development tool and then, over time, as a student development tool. Self and peer coaching are levers which can help propel us out of present difficulties into a better future. Coaching helps us be the very best we can be because it

helps us leave behind the often-negative thinking in our heads and move into the reality of living in the moment.

As any sporting star will tell you, when you are in flow you are present in your body, connecting with the moment, allowing you to exceed all expectations and perform beyond your wildest dreams. For school leaders, coaching can bring the self-belief, clarity of thought and purpose, and the empathy for self and others that allow us to take the decisive actions congruent with our values.

We desperately need Headteachers and their staff to survive and thrive through these hard times and see the opportunities as well as the huge challenges. Coaching helps in this reframing process too.

Warning signs to look out for:

· Feeling a lack of clarity, direction or purpose

· Being defensive when criticised

· Dreading work on a daily basis

· Feeling empty with low energy, even when things go right

· Getting overwhelmed by small tasks that don’t matter

· Unable to share fears and worries for fear of judgement

· Not allowing yourself time to recover, replenish and restore

Tips for staying healthy:

· Keep a gratitude journal

· Take at least 5 minutes of quiet mindfulness meditation every day – use the Headspace app or similar

· Take physical exercise every day.

· Eat well and sleep as well as possible. When awake in the night listen to the radio or white noise to shut your mind up.

· Talk to friends – share problems

· Know you are ok and can survive anything and everything

· Get a coach or, for starters, read a coaching book

Later in the year I will be delivering a series of three webinars on mental fitness and how to develop it and use it to be happy and successful. Meanwhile, please get in touch if you feel you need a personal coach or advice. Please take care of your mental health.

Jackie Beere OBE. Leadership and Mindset Coach, Trainer, Author. Survivor of Headship. If you feel you or a member of staff would benefit from counselling plese contact enquiries@teachingtimes.com and we will pass this onto Jackie Beere

‘Grow – change your mindset, change your life’ Jackie Beere