Leadership: The emotional strain of moving on

Leaving a school is just leaving a job, right? Wrong.

In “How successful head teachers survive and thrive”, the late, great Sir Tim Brighouse outlined four distinct stages of headship, lasting around 10 years for the whole cycle of leadership in one school.

After getting established, Brighouse saw the third stage, around four to seven years, as the “thrive” stage for any school leader who got that far in one school. The final stage, seven to 10 years, were in decline and a school leader needs to think of renewal or a new challenge altogether. 

When I first started as a head, over a decade ago now, I was fortunate to be in a cohort of new heads who were mentored and coached by Sir Tim. I remember being very sceptical back then about this idea of a fixed term linked to effectiveness in post, especially knowing school leaders who had stayed in post between 10 and 20 years, some even longer. 

It is the wise school leader who thinks of their time in the post as finite.

But knowing what I know now, leading schools in the UK and abroad, the role is very different. It is the wise school leader who thinks of their time in the post as finite and sets out what is needed to achieve things before passing on the baton to the fresh faced, eager and earnest successor.

What no head or leadership conference has ever really conveyed is the emotional wrench involved when leaving a school community for the final time after leading them for a number of years.

The investment made in time, often through difficult times, emotional times, uncertain times, and believe it or not, good times as well. Headship is like no other job when it comes to how much personal investment a leader makes in the organisation, people and place. 

In those final moments of goodbye, the final assembly, the staff meeting, the leaving meal, the silly stuff fades and the reality of what you have all been through together takes centre stage of the mind and memory.

When I left my headship at Wyedean School in the Forest of Dean, UK, in 2019, I had already stated to the governing body and the staff that I saw it as a four year tenure, especially as we had so many intractable issues to put right. These included an ongoing staff strike, a falling roll, a million pound deficit and a redundancy programme to manage.

No leadership conference has ever conveyed the emotional wrench involved.

Thanks to a great team, a fantastic school community and a clear strategy to solve what we had to put right, we achieved this in four years. More importantly, I made sure we got people ready to lead and we didn’t base it on me but succession planning. 

When I left for the last time, staff and students all came out to see me off and as I drove back over the Severn Bridge and the next stage of my career, the wrench of leaving this school hit me hard.

I never imagined I would be leading Heritage International School and live and work in Moldova for nearly six years. On the plane flying east to the further corners of Europe in May 2019, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what lay ahead: The challenges of Covid, the war in Ukraine, societal destabilisation and just establishing the first international school in Moldova, the most Sovietized part of the old USSR.

Messages, gifts and cards only made the flight back to the UK even harder.

Flying home at the end of January 2025, I had a sense of “mission accomplished”. We had created a very established, successful and high reputation international school ready for its next director.

But the wrench this time was worse. It was even harder to leave behind an amazing school community, colleagues and wonderful students precisely because of everything we had been through and faced together. Sir Tim never warned us about how emotional all this would be when the time to leave finally came.  

Even being honoured by the Chisinau city Mayor and the wonderful UK ambassador to Moldova, at a special reception, didn’t make the pain any less. Messages, gifts and cards from across the community, only made the flight back to the UK even harder to bear. 

Having worked for so long with great friends and colleagues such as Tatiana Popa – my “Lionel Messi” – achieving so much for Heritage, my mind began to wonder about my new role as founding head of St Michael Abbey School, a new British international school in the UK.

There would be new challenges to face and the new team and community to make this all work in my new role. Where will the new “Messis” come from now?

I left Moldova knowing I would return, and that I will support it by being a member of the school board.

But the words in a quote from A A Milne seemed to sum up all that I was feeling, the wrench in my heart as I left for the last time:
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – Winnie the Pooh.