The Headteacher's Half-Term Trap

A question for every headteacher reading this during half term:

Why are you working?

Not "why do you work hard" - I know the answer to that. You care about the children. You care about the staff. You feel the weight of responsibility every single day. I get it. I feel it too.

I mean: why are you working right now? During the holiday? When you told your staff to rest?

Be honest. Is what you're doing genuinely urgent? Or is it that low-level anxiety that whispers "if I just get ahead on this, next term will be easier"?

Next term is never easier. There's always something.

I caught myself last half term. Tuesday evening, three days into the break, reorganising the monitoring schedule for the summer term. Nobody had asked me to. Nobody was waiting for it. But it was nagging at me, so I opened the laptop. "Just ten minutes." An hour later my son asked if we could play football in the garden and I said "in a minute" without looking up.

That's the trap. And I suspect most of us fall into it every holiday.

Guy Perkins' work on the Wellbeing Charter in Surrey has been instrumental in highlighting the issue of leaders' wellbeing. As well as being a workload problem, school leaders have a boundaries problem. The work is infinite. It will consume every minute you offer it. The only person who can draw the line is you.

And we're terrible at drawing it because our profession rewards the opposite. The head who was in school over Easter. The colleague who "used the holidays to get ahead." We nod approvingly because we did the same thing - and because stopping feels like a dereliction of duty when you're responsible for 200 children and 30 staff.

But get ahead of what, exactly? The next set of things that will fill whatever time you give them?

I've been a headteacher long enough to know that the work expands to fill whatever space you give it. Give it your evenings, it'll take them. Give it your weekends, it'll take those too. Give it half term and it will swallow the whole week and leave you walking back into school on Monday feeling like you never left.

The SDP will wait. The budget forecast will wait. The policy review will wait.

Your energy won't. That's finite. And nobody is coming to replenish it for you.

So put the laptop down. Take your own advice. Rest like you tell your staff to.

The children don't need you to have spent half term answering emails. They need you back with something left in the tank.