Leadership: Slowing Down to Move Forward

Blog from Sallie Stanton, Chief Education Officer, Advantage Schools 

On 20th March, 1986, McDonald's opened at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Appalled less by the burgers than by what fast food represented – the erosion of the table as a place of attention, enjoyment and hearty conversation - the response from Italians was one of outrage and protest, from which grew the concept of Slow Food. This now international movement encourages taking time over growing, preparing and enjoying local and sustainable food in place of standardised, mass-produced, rushed cuisine. It represents a refusal to let speed become the only value that matters, insisting instead that quality comes from roots sunk deep in the practice of a particular place, rather than constructed at speed elsewhere. 

The tension between the local and the standardised isn’t just a food story – it’s something anyone working across schools within the multi-academy trust system should be mindful of each day.  A trust exists, in part, to generate a trust dividend: the value of shared practice in not reinventing curriculum, assessment or safeguarding processes multiple times when good thinking, done once and done well, can serve multiple schools.  But, the tension is that we can easily mistake speed and uniformity for quality, rolling something out because it is efficient rather than because it is right for all the schools receiving it.  If leadership at trust level becomes disconnected from what is true in each school, leadership becomes distribution.

The answer is not to abandon alignment. In my view, a trust that never aligns isn’t benefiting from being a trust. The answer instead is to insist that alignment itself is truly rooted in what we know of our schools, and is tested against the reality of them. Sometimes this means we need to take our time in order to get things right.

Schools do not lack for reasons to move fast. Accountability, exams, staffing gaps, safeguarding concerns, the next email in the inbox… all of it pushes for an immediate answer. And the truth is we should not tolerate poor standards for any pupils that are being underserved in our schools today.  Timely action has to have its place. But this can lead us into a problematic state of high alert and impulsive reaching for a quick answer.

High-quality leadership, I'd argue, is not mostly made of fast answers. It's made of the much rarer discipline of slowing down at exactly the moments when everything is telling you to speed up: the moment someone brings you a problem, the moment something has gone wrong, the moment you're tempted to decide before you've properly listened.

Risking Being Wrong

Education researcher, Viviane Robinson's work on open-to-learn conversations offers a highly practical approach to slowing down and listening properly.  She encourages us to interrupt ourselves when making inferences and to pause at the moment we move from what we know to what we assume. Left unchecked, an assumption can set us off to solve the wrong problems: we move quickly and confidently, but are entirely misdirected and our actions fail to have impact not because of execution, but because of misidentification.  Robinson’s model features collaborative problem solving through open-to-learn conversations. We are invited to lean into the possibility that our own view is wrong, and to test our reasoning against the perspective of others, rather than defend a position we arrived at before the conversation started.

That's a much harder thing than "good listening" as it's usually described. It means a school principal may go into a difficult conversation with a struggling department to really explore what is holding them back. It means a trustee scrutinising a strategy, not to confirm what leadership has already decided, but to test it. Recently, it has meant me going into conversations about a curriculum development project that clearly wasn't working without a rescue plan already drafted in my head.

Open to learn conversations are, I think, an example of slow leadership in practice - tolerating the discomfort of not yet knowing takes discipline and an intentional approach.

The Saturation Problem

That discipline is hard enough to sustain on its own, but, recently, it has started to feel even harder. Whilst schools have always been fast-paced and dynamic places to work – something most of us love about our work - the pace of work is shifting.  We are pushed to work faster than I think is wise, and the efficiency drives of technology are playing a part. Tools like ChatGPT make it easier than ever to produce more - more emails, more strategy documents, more detailed complaints, more officious responses, more of everything - and there is a real risk that this is leading us to mistake volume for leadership.

As Secretaries of State for education, both Nicky Morgan and Damian Hinds responded to workload concerns of teachers by telling us not to respond to emails after 5pm. To me, this missed the problem, because the problem was never really about whether you're expected to reply at 9pm. Problems arise when leaders work twice the hours of everyone else, because this risks generating twice the work for everyone downstream of them: more to read, more to respond to, more to action, more to hold in mind. Long hours are part and parcel of leadership, but when leaders spend those hours producing, it taxes the whole system beneath them.

But at least that version of the problem had a natural limit.  There are only 24 hours in a day, and this established a boundary to what could be achieved.  Now it seems that AI has removed that limit almost entirely. We can generate a strategy document, a lengthy piece of feedback, a complete blog, a full CPD session, or a detailed complaint in minutes. What used to take an evening, takes moments.  The intention is to save ourselves time, but the reality is we still put the hours in and end up producing even more – of course we do, because we know our work matters and there is always more we can do to improve. The risk is that the fallout lands on our colleagues in an exaggerated but poorer quality, AI generated version of what went before.

Slow leadership pushes back against this directly. It says: fewer things, done with more attention, is worth more than many things done at speed.

Moving Forward, Honestly

None of this is an argument for mistaking inaction for wisdom. Leadership has to move forward, but the test isn't speed; it's whether the movement follows from genuine engagement, honest reckoning with what isn't working, and a willingness to change course.

We had to do this ourselves recently, and it was the trust dividend tension as I described it above: a piece of curriculum development and alignment work across our secondary schools that wasn't playing out the way we'd intended. It would have been easy and comfortable to locate the problem in the subject leaders and teachers closest to the work: to say they hadn't implemented it well enough, or bought into it enough. That would have been untrue (more than untrue – subjects leaders managed to do some incredibly valuable work, despite the issues with the model, and I am hugely impressed and grateful for the hard effort they put in to achieve all they did in less than ideal circumstances). It took longer, and was far less comfortable, to conclude that the real failure was structural and sat with leadership - my leadership - and not with the people doing the work on the ground.

Years ago, writing about a very different problem, I landed on a mantra for school leadership that I’ve returned to often since: Don’t oversimplify the problem; don’t overcomplicate the response.

Deciding our curriculum project difficulties lay with subject leaders would have been a comfortable, over-simplified story that would have let me off the hook.  To then respond with more process, more monitoring, more scaffolding of a failing model would have been a complicated and wildly unhelpful response.  Instead, rather than push on regardless, we explored with those leaders to find the problem’s real shape, and responded with something very simple: a pause and a commitment to invest in more time and expertise. And we wrote to everyone in the organisation to let them know.

It wasn’t grand and it wasn’t dramatic. We slowed down and we decided to invest in the local conditions rather than focusing on products and deadlines. 

I think that is what leadership is really asking of us. Not speed. Attention.