A Shocking Loss: Remembering My Boss
As a person who fundamentally believes work under a capitalist system to be inherently exploitative and unjust, I have always tried to keep an emotional distance from my employers. If you get too close, believe them to be your friend, it becomes easier for them to take advantage of that friendship, even unwittingly, and therefore take advantage of you. A small favour here, and extra unpaid responsibility there. I have also seen too many people over the years lose their jobs despite an apparent friendship with their boss and be hurt by the shock - fired by their so-called “friend”, who was ultimately forced to do what was required by their role and the economics of the situation rather than able to act in the best interests of their now unemployed “friend”.
At the same time, the boss is not a monster. They are simply acting the way society and culture has shaped them to act. Good people can be bosses and many of them are. It is just that personally I try to keep the relationship at an arm’s length so I don’t fall into the trap of conflating a professional relationship with a personal one. Colleagues, not friends, even those people I like very much.
On Sunday we got an email telling us that our boss - the Head Teacher of our school - was dead. Heart attack. Unexpected and devastating. A total shock. And although my hardened anarchist mind had tried to keep the man at the prescribed arm’s length, and we had, over the years, and more-so recently, had the odd heated exchange about his leadership and places where we disagreed on how things were being done around the school, the email was a punch to the gut. Because take away the role, the employer/employee relationship and all the baggage of structural exploitation, and the humanity remains undeniable, stronger than any social construct or defence mechanism I might have tried to put in place. Even kept at an arm’s length for the ten years that he was my boss, he was still the man whose personal vision guided the philosophy of the whole school. Kindness and compassion in all things. “We are a forgiving school”, he would say time and time again. And even in the staffroom as we grumbled about students whose repeated transgressions never seemed to lead to any serious consequences, when we saw those same students years later - older, more mature - succeed in their studies, or rise to one of the school’s student leadership positions, we would understand the value of such forgiveness, and the more important consequences of their behaviour our boss had been concerned with all along. A chance to do better. The school a place where reputations didn’t have to haunt you forever.
The day I was hired the Head had been elusive. Despite a brief hello from him right at the start of the morning, he had business elsewhere that day and the rest of the interview had been conducted by the subject leader and deputy. I remember being slightly worried therefore that maybe he wouldn’t really know me when I started working there - like I still wasn’t properly hired because only the deputy had signed off on it. But he soon made it clear he knew exactly who I was, discussing briefly with me my PhD thesis on anarchism and making me feel very welcome.
Within the year I would go from part time teacher of RE to head of department. Our deputy was leaving for a headship elsewhere and my head of department was to become our new deputy. When I was offered the job - completely inexperienced and still in my first years of teaching - the Head gave me his support, acknowledging my life from before I’d ever stepped into a classroom. “You might be fairly new as a secondary school teacher but you’re not new at teaching, DaN. You have plenty of life experience to draw from to be successful at this. We wouldn’t offer you the role if we didn’t think you could do it.” And as I continued working there I noticed all the similar opportunities given to other members of staff. Encouragement to take a chance on a new role. Age and experience not being perceived as a barrier. Staff moving on to bigger and better things with full blessing of the man who enabled them by giving such equitable opportunities to all. It is no surprise to me that all three of the deputies I have seen work under him have become, or are in the process of becoming, head teachers in their own right following their time spent at his side. Even when we fail, there was always encouragement. I remember going for the role of house leader once, and basically writing an application letter saying I wanted to be head of this particular house because I didn’t really like the house system and wanted to radically change it. Not only did I still get an interview (if he could give us interview experience he always would, even in jobs for which we were the only applicant) but the Head, after offering the job to someone with more conventional ideas about leading the house, came to see me and suggested I should think about becoming a head teacher myself because I obviously had big ideas of how schools could be improved. Even then there wasn’t any pressure or a sense of careerism in his suggestion, just the offer of help in that direction should I want to pursue it.
I asked him if he ever missed the History and Politics he used to teach but had no time for now that he was in charge.
“Every day” he said. And he understood exactly then why I had no interest in being a head myself. He never pushed me about it again, but reminded me occasionally, “the offer is always there”.
He liked bold decisions. In my first year as head of department in RE and Philosophy I came to him with a five year plan to completely change what we did. Change the A-level, change what year groups studied GCSE and when, change the curriculum and really shake a lot of things up. He agreed to it without any qualms, even accepting that there would be years of difficulty, slow exam uptakes and possibly poor results at the start and giving me the room to let the new approach take root and grow. The only thing he wanted ensured - a rarity in many schools - was that every student in the school would still study RE and that every student would continue to do it as a compulsory GCSE subject. Where other heads of similar departments elsewhere were fighting for curriculum time, I never had to worry about that at my school under this Head. He knew the value of giving students space on their timetable to contemplate big ides and develop understanding and mutual respect for their own beliefs and the ideological and theological differences between themselves and their peers. Whenever a parent of a child at our school tried to exercise their statutory right to remove their child from RE (usually because they didn’t like us teaching them about things outside of their own faith or asking philosophical questions about the very existence of God), the Head would not simply acquiesce. He would call the parent in for a meeting with him and myself first and we would make the case for why the student ought to continue studying RE. If the parent still wanted to pull their child out, they could, but we would remind them they still had a statutory duty to ensure the religious education of their child. Sometimes the Head would ask the parent to send him detailed lesson plans of what they would be providing at home. Other times he explained when RE was on their child’s timetable and asked them what arrangements they were going to put in place to pick them up during that slot, teach them RE elsewhere, and get them back to school in time for their next class? In most cases these extra impositions made the parent re-think and the student was allowed to stay studying RE. In several cases those were the students who ended up excelling at the subject, even going on to study it at A-level. More than once I would speak to a parent at a parents evening, years later, and be told how thankful they were that we hadn’t just let their child withdraw without a fight. It was always the Head I had to thank for that more than any leadership on my part.
He was supportive of the subject and supportive of innovation. His eyes would always light up when I came to him with another wacky idea for my department. As long as we could afford it, he was always on board with letting us do whatever we felt was right. As an anarchist I appreciated that light touch of leadership. Though it could be frustrating at times because of an occasional lack of joined up thinking around the school, as a leader he was rarely heavy handed and just let those he’d put in charge of things run them the way they thought was best, even if he didn’t always agree with what they were doing. I benefitted the most from this as coordinator of the school’s Student Council, where I was expressly told to “shake things up” and “cause trouble” rather than allow the Council to simply be a mouthpiece for the school. He always enjoyed the challenge of a minor student rebellion or Council uprising and was never too busy to meet with the student representatives about their problems.
My last real conversation with him was on Friday, thanking him for sending both the winners and losers of the recent whole-school election for a new Chair/Deputy of the Council an encouraging letter, and thanking them for contributing to the school’s student democracy. Even at the end of a hellish eight week term tackling teaching under a global pandemic, he found the time to thank them and offer support and encouragement. Because that was the sort of person that he was. When the Student Councils across our multi-academy trust wrote a joint letter to Heads last Spring when the schools were closed, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, seeking to address issues of race and structural racism across the schools of our organisation, even with all the other tasks of managing a school amidst COVID-19, our Head started up a Black Lives Matter committee with some of the students and staff to figure out a way to move forward. Another piece of business we did on our last ever training day with him last Friday was our department improvement plans. Each one had to set a target in relation to the school’s new improvement target on diversity and inclusion as a direct result of those meetings. He was a Head who listened to his students.
He listened to his staff too. In my first year at the school we were asked to consult on something. I can’t remember what, but he asked us to email him with any comments. I did, and when he thanked me later, having incorporated my suggestions into the revised policy, he took me aside and asked if I could encourage other staff to speak up in future too as only two of us had actually got back to him. I’m sure he would agree I took that advice to heart, and was never afraid to give feedback when asked for it (and even, often, when not asked), and have tried to encourage my colleagues to do the same. Of course, my feedback was not always incorporated into revisions in the way I would like. After a few weeks of not wearing a tie to work a few years ago because I discovered the school dress code merely said we should dress “professionally” and ties were not specified, instead of being allowed not to wear one after making my case to the Head he wrote ties specifically into the policy the next year. Touché. But the desire for dialogue remained. Where some school leaders simply force and assert their vision onto their schools, our Head always sought consent and compromise. A discussion, not a dictatorship.
Speaking of discussions, despite my best anarcho-Marxist instincts to keep all bosses at arm’s length, I’m not sure how it happened but at some point early on the subject of movies came up and the Head discovered I liked going to the cinema too and was, like him, a Cineworld Unlimited cardholder. From that point on, and for nearly a decade until COVID killed the cinemas, we would talk at some point every week - usually when I was trying to rush off and register my form - about any good movies we might have seen lately. Many’s the time I was late for registration with my class because I’d been delayed in the staff room discussing Ryan Gosling or Oscar Isaacs’ latest performances with the Head. He usually had far loftier tastes than me, but for every historic drama or American epic he got me to see I think I managed to successfully promote a Marvel movie or smart comedy back to him and we both benefitted from each other’s recommendations. He was that rarest of Headteachers who actually would come and tell me there was a movie I needed to show to my GCSE class, rather than telling me off for showing them films instead of teaching. I missed our chats about movies during the school closures last year, and it breaks my heart to think we will never have such discussions again. I know any normal academic year he would have probably spent the last Friday night of his life, being the end of a very long term, at a cinema somewhere decompressing and relaxing. To think that instead he was most likely looking at the latest frustrating email from the DfE, this time reducing the allocation of laptops for disadvantaged students despite them being necessary for meeting the new legal compliance for schools to provide access to remote learning within 24 hours of a student or year group being sent home to self-isolate, chills me. I know nothing about the state of my boss’ overall physical health or family history with heart attacks before this weekend, but I have to believe that had the stress of running a school during COVID-19 not been the overriding thread of his existence since March, taking away countless weekends and holidays due to the DfE’s deliberate strategy of sending changes to guidance out late on a Friday night, often at the end of a term, my boss might still be alive today.
Because it is important to remember that in an exploitative system even the boss is being exploited. That there is always someone further up the chain, themselves being exploited too. That what remains important is seeing the humanity behind the systemic unreasonableness of our economic and political system and remembering that these are not just bosses and colleagues but people. Real human people. Not to be kept at arm’s length but to be cherished for the humanity which survives in spite of the pulleys of a distorting and corrupting system. As much as I would like to be able to coldly stay unaffected by the death of my employer, it turns out he wasn’t merely my boss, he was a fellow human being I have spent the last ten years of my life working with and getting to know, even when I tried my best not to. Worse - he was a fellow human being it turns out I liked very much. Someone I will miss being a part of my life going forwards.
One thing I noticed about the Head’s collegiate style of leadership, was that the day after giving a talk, or assembly, or presentation on any new idea or policy, he would often come up to me (and I presume others too) and ask “was that alright?” Checking that the right message had been given clearly, or that he hadn’t asked for anything too unreasonable from us. Although he has left us all far too early (and I feel particular sorrow here for his family, who have lost a husband and a father; a terrible feeling I know all-too well from my own father’s sudden and unexpected death from heart failure at the age of 59) and while his work at our school was far from complete, as Halloween draws near and the mind turns to thoughts of ghosts and spirits, I feel confident that were the Head to appear in apparition form and ask any one of us about his tenure as Head of the school, "was that alright?", once we got over the initial shock of being haunted by our dead boss I'm sure every one of us would reply in the affirmative. It was far more than alright, we’d tell him. It was exceptional. Dare I say, it was even outstanding.
For those, like him, who believe in such things, I hope there is a good cinema up there, in the “land at the top” where he is now hopefully at peace. A man of faith, forgiveness, optimism, good humour, intelligence and integrity, his death is a shock and a great loss to us all. He will be greatly missed.