In January 2009 I walked along to the post office and dropped in my application for the job of headteacher in Haringey. I attended a briefing for potential applicants at a local primary and was completely inspired by a presentation about the new school. I was lucky enough to get shortlisted, lucky enough to get appointed and then started an incredible journey as Head of a new school. On the eve of a new decade and as I prepare to start a new role in the South of London, I find myself reflecting back on a few of the key moments.

On September the 1st 2009 myself, one deputy and administrative assistant set up shop in the Haringey Civic Centre to make plans to open the new school. We were excited but felt acutely alone. The first job was to potter down to WH Smiths and buy a few pens and paper.

I hadn’t fully understood then how the the national context would impact my experience over the next 10 years. It came to define it far more than I thought it would. In 2008 the financial crisis after a relatively prosperous period for education. In the background this sparked a chain of events that I would be oblivious to until until the school opened in September 2010 and the new Conservative government was elected in May 2010. We had plenty to do.

What followed over the next few months is a bit of a haze. Myself and a deputy head, whose intellect overshadowed my own(not difficult), set about creating a blueprint for a new school. Looking back I doubt either of us fully appreciated what a privilege this was a the time. The vision was already in place based on something that I had developed the Summer before and we set about creating a set of operating procedures across the school that would bring this to life. Ambitious curriculum plans, assessment policies and pastoral structures were the subject of impassioned debates for the first few months. The weeks were packed and I hadn’t appreciated the project management skills I’d need to get this all ready and invariably I relied on my fantastic deputy and a great admin assistant to see us through.

To do lists and project management became a part of life. In the Summer I’d cobbled together a uniform with my wife to do a photo shoot at a school in Peterborough. These would be the pictures for the new prospectus. Why Peterborough, I have nor idea! We had two months to convince enough parents to take a leap of faith to join the school and so we needed to look like the school had a clear vision. By October, we had set all of this out in a prospectus and and before the 31st October I had already presented at two packed events at the Civic Center to eager parents and young people wanting to hear about the new school.

I entered a never-ending cycle of recruitment. We were looking for 14 members of staff or so to join us in Easter to get plans ready. This was a luxury, free schools are no longer given. Anyway, between the end of October and December we had written job descriptions, advertised for and recruited to to all of these posts to start in Easter. Local schools were kind enough to allow us to do the interviews with them. We went to Camden, Islington and Haringey using contacts we had both nurtured to get the interviews done and by Christmas we were finished. Physically and mentally finished! Christmas happened.

The Spring term was a chance to catch up plan and then by April all the new staff arrived. I’d planned an event to get the team together and really start with an explosion. I knew I wouldn’t get a Summer holiday so I’d taken the chance to go to Mauritius with my young family. Unfortunately, I hadn’t banked on the Icelandic volcano exploding and my plans quickly changed as the new staff arrived and I remained trapped in the Indian Ocean for another 5 days until I could get home. I had it better than my deputy who I think came all the way back form China on a bus.

The summer term, once it had finally started was fantastic. Lots of opportunity to plan with like-minded people who I could tell were going to make the school a huge success. That is exactly what they did. Because of their resilience and determination it opened in September 2010 and we had a challenging but exceptional first year.

My work as a leader hadn’t really started until September 2010. I was far more the project manager in the early days and had to learn quickly and make plenty of mistakes before I would in anyway consider myself a headteacher. Plenty has happened down the line. We’ve had three Ofsteds and plenty of results. Three great years and two very difficult ones in between. Academy status proved to be divisive and many of those early staff never really saw it as the same school again. However, it gave us the means to apply to open the school for autism and I have no regrets about that. It was exactly the right thing to do the the young people in our school. That school makes me as proud as the one I spent so long preparing for and I know just how hard leaders of new schools work to get them ready.

The schools we have developed are amazing places and there success is due, in large part, to the staff that work in them during this moment. They’re not really a legacy of those of us that were there from the beginning but belong to those governors, staff and young people that make them a success in the present and the future. I’ll always be looking out for how they do and rooting for them to succeed.