If you’ve got to the stage in your career where you are looking to take the big step into senior leadership, you’ll probably be aware how tough it might be to land your first senior leadership job. The very nature of school leadership positions, the skill sets required, and the lack of opportunities compared to main scale teaching posts means that the environment is extremely competitive. Schools are on the lookout for the very best candidates—leaders of people, expert practitioners, visionaries, ambassadors etc. You may feel you fit the bill for these roles, but will your ‘performance’ in the interview stack up against your credentials that have gone before you?
If you’ve been settled in your current position for a relatively long time, you may feel out of touch with interview experience—a bit like I imagine people feel after a long-term relationship when they have to get back in the ‘dating game’. There’s always a certain ‘knack’ to these experiences and you can feel a little rusty if you’ve not been thrown into that unfamiliar environment for years. Not only are they unfamiliar, but they now seem to be a ‘survival of the fittest’ exercise, intent on weeding out the ‘also rans’ like a 1990’s Clive James Japanese game show!
Having been on both sides of the table for senior leadership interviews, I’d like to outline some key areas that may help you prepare for that all important opportunity.
Preparation
It is completely unacceptable to not have done your homework on the school. At this level, if you haven’t laid your hand on every publicly available document about the school, then you’ll be starting 20 metres behind the rest of the competitors at the start line. The school will expect that you know about them and will be asking you questions to check this. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of a head teacher when they are asking questions about their school.
Seek help from colleagues
In your current school you will have experts on every area of education. If you are not 100 per cent happy with your knowledge on a certain aspect of school leadership, get the expert to give you a lesson. Whether it’s school budget, performance management or data tracking, make sure you use the team around you to plug those gaps.
You may also find that you can use the experience of others to try and pre-empt some of the questions or topics that will be asked on the day. Some of your colleagues may have been out on interview recently, whereas others may have been a part of a leadership interview process. Use their experience and try to get a head start in the preparation you might need to do.