Learn how subject passion can be the ‘anchor in the storm’ of leadership, with Kay Tinsley.
But if you catch me in a corridor and ask about the latest departmental deep dive in any one of our schools, my professional veneer often slips. If you mention a specific poem or a particularly nuanced grammatical structure, it disappears entirely.
The truth is, no matter how many levels of leadership you climb or how far you move from the daily chalkface, your subject passion is the bedrock of your professional identity. For me, that passion is English. And while my role has changed, my heart remains firmly rooted in the magic of syntax and the transformative power of a stanza.
The literacy of leadership
There is a misconception that moving into executive leadership requires a shedding of one’s subject skin – that to be a leader of teaching you must become a generalist. I would argue the opposite. Effectiveness as a director is not in spite of a love for English – it is fuelled by it.
When talking to a science lead about their curriculum, the focus is not just on best practice. It is about looking for the story of their subject. I recognise the passion they have for the periodic table because it mirrors the rush I get when deconstructing the social critique of Caleb Femi’s Poor or the profound beauty of Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist. That subject joy is a universal language among educators. It is the golden thread that connects the Early Career Teacher to the CEO.
That subject joy is a universal language among educators. It is the golden thread that connects the Early Career Teacher to the CEO.
The irresistible pull of poetry
People often ask me what I miss most. They expect me to say the holidays or the specific bond with a tutor group. While those are true, what is actually missed is the collective intake of breath in a classroom when a group of teenagers finally get the shift or volta in a John Donne poem or the unsettling gothic liminality in a modern prose extract.
Nothing, not even a successful funding bid or a glowing inspection report, gets the blood pumping quite like poetry. To the outside world, a poem is a series of lines on a page. To an English teacher, it is like a butterfly with wings that should flutter and fly rather than be pinned down by bullets on a PowerPoint.
When conducting school visits, I often find myself hovering at the back of English classrooms. I am supposed to be checking for attention to learning or evidence of adaptive teaching but I often find myself mentally arguing with the teacher’s interpretation of a metaphor. I want to intervene and let the poem breathe, through multiple readings, emotional scaffolding, and discussion rather than dissection, restoring the living, ‘fluttering’ nature of the text.
The joy of syntax
Then there is the geekery. Every subject has its version of this the niche technical detail that only true devotees appreciate. For the geographer, it might be the intricacies of the Gini coefficient. For the mathematician, perhaps the elegance of a non-linear sequence. For me, it is the architecture of the sentence.
In the grand scheme of educational reform, the placement of a comma or the deliberate choice of a subordinating conjunction seems minute. But to an English teacher, these are tools of empowerment. It is the moment a student realises they can control the pace of their writing. They can shift the reader’s focus or create a specific atmosphere through nothing more than structural manipulation.
When a student moves from simple functional prose to a sophisticated controlled narrative, it signifies the birth of a writer. Talking about the mechanics of English, teaching the grammar of the soul, is where I am happiest. It is the purest form of the craft.
Why subject passion matters
In our pursuit of systems prioritisation and scalability, we risk bleaching the colour out of teaching. As a director, the job is to ensure that systems serve the subject – not the other way around. If a curriculum is so rigid that a teacher cannot stop to marvel at a beautiful sentence, the system has failed. If assessment models are so clinical that they ignore the emotional impact of a narrative, the plot is lost.
Advocating for subject-specific professional development is vital because a teacher who is in love with their subject is a teacher who can inspire. You cannot delegate inspiration. It is a contagion that spreads from the teacher’s genuine excitement to the student’s burgeoning curiosity.
4 ways to maintain connection
Maintaining connection, while managing a large budget and overseeing a significant number of headteachers, requires intentionality. Here are four ways to ensure this (with an English specialism as an example):
- Engage with contemporary scholarship. Rather than just reading white papers, leaders should engage with contemporary fiction and niche literary journals to remain practitioners of the craft.
- Provide mentorship. Facilitating mentorship of at least one English ECT keeps leadership grounded in the current curriculum and allows for weekly discussions on extracts from AQA’s Worlds and Lives anthology.
- Participate in subject communities. Leaders should not just chair meetings but participate in debates about which texts to teach.
- Be present in classrooms. When schools are short staffed, taking a revision session is not a chore but a necessity for maintaining a pulse on the classroom.
The anchor in the storm
Currently, education is an industry obsessed with change. We change frameworks, we change technologies, we change structures. It can feel like standing on shifting sands.
However, subject passion is the anchor. Whether a head of department, a principal or a trust executive, one should never apologise for the nerdy thrill found in a specialist field. That excitement is authenticity. It is what makes someone a leader of teachers, rather than just a leader of businesses.
I am proud to be a Director of Teaching and Learning. I love the strategy and the scale. But at the end of the day, if you want to see me truly happy, do not show me a spreadsheet. Show me a student who has just discovered the perfect word or a poem that has just broken a teenager’s heart for the first time. That is where the real work happens. That is where I live.
Author
As the Director of Teaching and Learning for TKAT (The Kemnal Academies Trust), Kay Tinsley is dedicated to driving educational excellence across one of the UK’s largest multi-academy trusts. She focuses on empowering educators through evidence-informed pedagogy, strategic leadership development, and collaborative innovation to ensure every student achieves their full potential.
