10K Schools’ Post

Really well articulated Jonathan! Sadly few leaders understand this unique perspective and still believe HR only needs to pay people on time and make sure staff are onboarded and off boarded properly. Great leaders value their HR. Strong leaders treat finance and HR as their right and left hand and seldom make big decisions without getting input on both people and commercial aspects. Your competitors can copy your product and processes but cannot clone your best staff - not yet anyway 😃

Ohhhh now you're going to get me on my soap box Jonathan Price I think the issue is that majority of schools are traditionally akin to an SME, and as such the 'CEO' needs to wear many hats because they can't afford someone with the years of strategic experience of a Talat Sheerazi Goldie, Sarah Siyani, Shorouk Habib Al Redha or myself, just as they can't afford a CFO or strategic supply chain professional An SME CEO is forced to be a jack of all trades and normally, master of none - Headteachers are juggling fairly alien work of Finance, Procurement, Facilities, Board/Stakeholder Management etc, typically without having had ANY formal development to prepare for it I strongly advocate the principle of fractional leadership for small businesses, and there's no reason in my mind why schools couldn't pay a retainer to have a senior HR professional like a Talat, a Sarah or myself supporting and mentoring Principals and more junior HR team members a couple of hours a week. Indeed, it begs the question for a 'people business' why there is no People Leadership expert ever on a school board, which would go some way to supporting the Principal bridge that knowledge gap

The multiple interfering situations of a principal, the numerous everyday issues and the often inadequate qualifications in the #HR area are challenging. Very good comments, thank you very much Jonathan Price. Due to often small size of schools in Germany, I would suggest bundling schools into clusters with a single professional management team. A complete centralization of human resources at the level of a federal state does not seem to be expedient.

Well said!