“Every decision I made that was ill-informed meant that people were losing a little bit of faith in me.”

Dan Edwards is the principal of Woodstock Primary Academy, a large primary school in the heart of Leicester City. He shares the best piece of advice he was ever given as a school leader, and how that’s shaped his leadership today.

This episode is especially helpful for those new to leadership or starting a new position in the next academic year.

We talk about:

• How to be the most authentic and genuinely humane leader. 
• The key steps to transparent leadership.
• Building or rebuilding parental engagement.
• Creating a healthy school culture and genuine staff wellbeing.
• The single thing that makes the biggest difference to staff wellbeing.
• How to know if you’re “getting things right”.
• How to harness the sense of being facilitators of learning, rather than positioning ourselves at the front of the classroom as “teachers and talkers”.
• And much more.

“(New leaders…) sometimes misplace trust by professing to know everything “the saviour is here – someone’s going to give us all the answers” and that’s wrong because we don’t know all the answers.”

You can connect with Dan

His website is leadinginthenow.org

Twitter  @danedwards_77

Woodstock Primary Academy @woodstockacad

Instagram dan_edwardsed

Also mentioned in this podcast

Kate Jones @KateJones_teach

Sinead Moxham @SineadMoxham

Connect with Maria

On Twitter @Mariabrosnan

On LinkedIn Maria Brosnan

On Instagram @pursuitwellbeing

Find out more about our 5-step Wellbeing Action Plan for teachers online course.

And Maria’s book, The Pursuit of Sleep for teachers, is available now.