After eight years in educational leadership, this year I returned to a full classroom teaching load. No allowances, no extra entitlements, just a full teaching load comprising roll call, playground duties, and some of the most challenging classes within my new faculty.
I expected to rediscover the joy of teaching, which I have. I expected to reconnect with students, which I have. I expected to miss some aspects of leadership, which I have.
What I didn’t expect was to be reminded of just how relentlessly full a teacher’s day is, particularly in a challenging school. Returning to the classroom has reminded me that the scarcest resource in schools isn’t funding. It isn’t technology. It isn’t even staffing.
It’s teacher attention.
Before the first bell, I’ve already exercised to ensure I bring my best self to school, checked emails, organised photocopying, spoken with colleagues about the day ahead and set up practical lessons. Then comes four to five one-hour classes, attendance follow-up, behaviour incidents to manage and document, parent emails, rehearsals, lunch-time student support, playground duty, cleaning up, preparing for tomorrow, and somehow finding time to eat. None of these tasks are unreasonable in isolation. Together, they demand constant shifts in attention.
This has led me to reflect on a concept that has gained significant traction in education over recent years: cognitive load. We rightly spend considerable time discussing how to reduce unnecessary cognitive load for students so they can focus on learning. Yet I wonder how often we stop to consider the cognitive load experienced by teachers.
Behaviour is a good example. In many schools, behaviour isn’t simply a classroom management issue. It’s one of the biggest consumers of teacher attention. Every incident carries decisions, documentation, conversations with colleagues, communication with families and emotional energy that often extends well beyond the lesson itself.
The same applies to the countless small demands that accompany teaching. Staff meetings. Whole-school emails. Surveys. New initiatives. Updated templates. Compliance tasks. Individually, most are worthwhile and begin with good intentions. Collectively, they create friction.
Teachers aren’t rejecting accountability, improvement or leadership. They’re responding to the accumulation of small demands that quietly compete with the most important work: teaching the students in front of them.
Having held a combination of both middle and senior leadership roles in recent years, I understand how easy it is to believe that one more initiative is only one more initiative. More often than not, I’ve been the one introducing new frameworks, leading professional learning, asking staff to complete surveys and driving school improvement. Looking back from the classroom has been both humbling and instructive.
From leadership, another initiative often feels manageable.
From the classroom, it rarely feels like one more thing. In fact, it feels like one more claim on an already finite resource, my attention.
Throughout this year I’ve found myself returning to a metaphor shared during the very first semester of my Master’s degree, one that has stayed with me ever since.
A dam wall.
Behind it sits everything that inevitably arrives at schools. New curriculum. Community expectations. Department priorities. Compliance. Parent concerns. Behaviour. Budget pressures. New initiatives. Every week, the water rises a little higher.
The role of educational leadership isn’t to keep filling the dam. It’s to decide what never reaches the other side.
This idea reminds me of Dr Simon Breakspear’s Pruning Principle, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and sharing with colleagues back in 2024.
Great schools don’t improve simply because they keep adding new initiatives. They improve because leaders have the discipline to continually prune, creating the space for the things that matter most to flourish.
Returning to the classroom has reinforced just how important that discipline is.
Teachers should absolutely be challenged. They deserve opportunities to grow, to innovate, and to continually refine their practice. But every new expectation should first answer a simple question:
What are we prepared to stop doing in place of this?
If we never ask that question, we slowly erode the one resource every great teacher depends upon.
Their attention.
Yours in education,
Chris English
Chris English 