Name: Paul Taylor

Title: Principal

Organisation: Westholme School

Before being appointed as Principal at Westholme School, I was a Secondary Headteacher at Kings' School Al Barsha. Prior to moving to Dubai, I was the Principal of Fulneck School in Leeds.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Educational Leadership!

I hope Paul's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as an Educational Leader?

Each phase of my leadership career has come with different challenges. These have ranged from leading a school in Ofsted’s Special Measures category to implementing change when results were lower than desired to manage a school through the Covid pandemic with all the health, academic, social and financial difficulties that period of time brought.

That said, leading an international school in Dubai brought the most interesting challenges of all. With 1200 pupils from 98 different nations, the school contained a wide range of cultural expectations and behaviors. Although I was not new to the independent sector, this was also the first time that I had worked for a for-profit organisation and learning to navigate a business culture very different from the UK was certainly eye-opening.

Much has been made in the UK media of late the loss of teachers to the UAE at a time when recruitment and retention is a major issue. The emphasis in these reports tends to center on the lifestyle, including tax-free packages. Much less is made of the long days, annual high-stakes inspections and the demands of owners and parents. My advice to any leader looking to work overseas would be to do a lot of homework on the organisation before committing.

2. How did you become an Educational Leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I had worked for 11 very happy years at one of the UK’s top independent schools based in my home city of York. It would certainly have been very easy to spend the rest of my career in such a fantastic environment. My Headmaster of the time was then headhunted by the government to take over a state-funded academy that had found itself in challenging circumstances. He rang me one morning in 2010 and asked if I wanted to join him!

I learned more about people and teaching and learning in those 4 years as an Assistant Headteacher than I ever would have done had I stayed in my comfort zone in York. It was also the era that saw more research published for teachers than we’d ever seen before. The work of the Educational Endowment Foundation remains central to school improvement in the UK.

I then went back into the independent sector as a Deputy Head (Academic) and later as a Principal of a 3-18 day boarding school. Since returning from Dubai last summer, I have been the Principal of one of the top independent day schools in the North-West of England.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

I have the great fortune to live in accommodation on-site at the moment so have a 2-minute walking commute to my office! I’m usually behind my desk by 7.30 am and start the day with a cup of tea and a catch-up with our Commercial Director. Whenever possible, my door is open during the school day for colleagues and pupils, and I try to spend as much time as possible on corridors and in classrooms. Unlike many schools, there is no overwhelming email or WhatsApp culture here: we still actually talk to each other!

I still teach and have always believed it is important that leaders never forget what it is like to be in the classroom; detachment is a dangerous flaw in educational leadership. Of course, I don’t compare my timetable of one A Level Politics group to the pressures felt by a full-time classroom teacher, but still believe it is important to walk the talk.

I am usually home by just after 6 pm. I try to keep my work at work, but my wife would probably say that I’m often home in body but not in mind! I usually do some social media activity in the evening, limiting myself to Twitter and LinkedIn, but 10 pm is always bed and book time!

4. What's a recent lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of as an Educational Leader?

Teenagers get a lot of bad press. I suppose they always have done it, but it seems to me that this generation gets it pretty badly. I do appreciate why older generations make references to snowflakes, but I think they are pretty awesome, especially when you consider their experience of lockdown during the pandemic. These students are remarkably resilient.

I’m grateful for having grown up in the 1980s. No phones, no WiFi, no social media, no reversible cameras; life was much more straightforward to navigate back then. I sense, though, that we were much less aware of what else was happening in the world.

What impresses me about this generation, and I’m reminded of this regularly by our student charity and Amnesty International committees, is how much this generation cares. They care about war and peace, they care about space and our planet, and they care about the gap between our privileged lives and those not so very far from here who live in a different world. In short, don’t worry: the future is safe in their hands.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your journey as an Educational Leader so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted you?

So much has been written about the technological revolution of the past 15 years, but I do believe that Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation will become the seminal work on its more negative consequence on humankind.

Haidt discusses the re-wiring of childhood, linking the reduction in the freedom that children have in the real world due to stranger danger and the freedom that they do have in the largely unpoliced cyber world. He looks at the time around 2012 as the key point when mental health amongst teenagers started to dip with the advent of the smartphone, readily available WiFi and social media.

His contention is that the brain is not developed enough in these formative years for the online exposure it receives and that, in fact, the brain has evolved over thousands of years due to actual human contact. This re-wiring has manifested itself in the increases in depression and loneliness.

With its new law, Australia is now leading the way in combating the dangers of social media. The UK has also tried with its 2023 Online Safety Act, but my guess is that the world is really looking to see what control the US federal government can exert against the tech giants. In the meantime, Haidt is right to look to schools to work with children and their parents to find the right balance of life in the real and cyber worlds. He is certainly going to influence my own school’s approach to the use of EdTech and wellbeing in the coming years.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young educator who aspires to be an Educational Leader, what would you say to them?

Find your mission. For me, the world needs a generation of people who can solve problems created by older generations and the inevitable ones yet to surface. This will require the education of the heart as well as the brain. That’s why our aim here at Westholme School is to develop Better Students, Better People.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as an Educational Leader, so far?

The West Wing is the best drama ever made for TV! My favorite characters are the Chief of Staff, veteran Democrat strategist and recovering alcoholic, Leo McGarry, and his deputy, the politically brilliant but unstable Josh Lyman. Their relationship is one of the highlights of the show.

McGarry is played by one of my favorite actors, the late John Spencer. In one of the most memorable scenes of the seven seasons, he tells this story to the troubled Lyman, played by the equally brilliant Bradley Whitford: ‘This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”’

The story certainly is not meant to undermine your faith in medicine or religion. I’m just trying to point out that we can’t always solve all our own problems and there is no harm in admitting that. Whether it be a doctor, priest, teacher, or friend, we all need people to listen to us, encourage us and advise us.