September 2013, the first staff briefing of the Year and I stand looking at 125 members of staff eagerly waiting for me to say something inspirational. Anything will do.

Students fill the corridors, most walk on the left; new and old students look crisp in their newly bought uniform.

“Good Morning and welcome to a brand new term….”

Quite different to the good morning four years ago! September 2009, three members of staff including myself and the first day of a brand new school.  I was appointed Headteacher designate in Jan 2009.  The school was probably the last example of a new community school that you will encounter. Friends, colleagues and family lined up with words of wisdom, “There will be nothing to do.”

“ No Year 11?”

“ What will you do with yourself all day?”

I made sure that their comments were met with appropriate derision, but actually I was hoping they might be right. Like many, I started teaching straight out of university. This would be a professional challenge and it meant a change of pace. A Year to launch a school and to live life to a different rhythm.

Local schools and the Local Authority basked in the collective glory of winning a competition to start a new secondary school. I had a few meetings with the team in charge of the build and mostly they were the professionals that led the project. Little educational vision. In fact, none. I think that they hoped I might supply that.

I started in the Summer of 2009. Where to begin? No building, no staff, no vision, no uniform and my immediate concern-no prospectus. This was straight out of the old NPQH course guide. Design a vision for a brand new school. A dream come true.

It has taken me nearly fours years to put any of this in writing. Of course I meant to. It was a just a little more busy that I’d imagined. Certainly, a different rhythm.

Where would you start? I had been teaching for nearly 18 Years and I had to think of every  piece of the last 18 years that I wanted to leave behind.

I’d been lucky enough to accompany a Future Leaders trip to the States and I took a little from there, a lot from the four schools I’d worked in and I soaked up every idea I could find. I’m quite proud of the fact that I don’t think I have ever possessed an original thought. Every early idea was reshaped, remodelled and replanned. I agonised on the vision. I forgot what vision was and I held on to procrastinations from my own interview. I’d said I wanted the values of the school to shout from the rooftop. I had loved the way that those Uncommon schools had done values. Doug Lemov has shot to fame since those early visits but I held on to some key themes from that trip. Firstly, that you needed to create culture and ethos. It was a construct. Decide on the vision and build the ethos. Secondly, that silence was a great thing. I watched a teacher make the longest pause following a question that I have ever seen and when a student said they didn’t know the answer, he simply, calmly and positively said, “Well you should know.”

The vision was simple and it remains one of the constants today. I had worked in schools where visions and mission statements had been over complicated. Few, if any staff could recount the vision and no matter how much time you wasted on INSET; reforming it and reshaping the semantics, it seemed to exist somewhere in the ether. Our vision was simple and uncomplicated and while I may not have been a master at its application I have succeeded in holding true to it over the years.  I’ve also taken every opportunity to expound its values. A strong ethos, strong learning and strong partnerships. Not that original. In fact I think  ‘a commitment to learning’ was something that the late QCA were pushing. I didn’t mind that, it served a purpose.

We needed something more than that through. We played around with acronyms and ended up with the word SEARCH. Remember REACH? Well very similar. I’ve seen these words done to varying degrees of success but in our case we made a commitment to see it through and made it integral to the curriculum and to collective worship. It could have been a spectacular failure. What made it work was the people involved in making it real, the people that saw that vision through.