You’ve watched them, haven’t you. The APs and VPs in your college. You’ve seen who’s still in the car park at seven, who’s on the email chain at half nine at night, who missed sports day again. And from all of that watching, you’ve built a picture of what the job costs. A picture detailed enough that you can already tell yourself you can’t afford it.
I did exactly the same thing before I became an Assistant Principal, back when I was one more woman in FE leadership talking herself out of the next step. I wanted it and I was frightened of it in equal measure, and the fear had a specific shape. A single mum with two teenagers, I thought a role at that level and that salary would want a piece of me I couldn’t spare. I thought they’d want all of me, all the time.
I was wrong about the shape of it. Not wrong that it took something. Wrong about what.
The thing that surprised me
Here’s the first surprise, and it’s the one I most want you to hear, because it’s the opposite of what you’re dreading. I got more flexibility, not less. My daughter started sixth form, hated it, changed into a different person inside six weeks, and one morning told me she couldn’t walk back in. I took the morning off, moved her to a college that turned out to be perfect for her, and phoned work to say I had a family thing and would be in later. Nobody blinked. Nobody questioned it. At Head of Department I’d have been covering lessons, finding someone to take my classes, feeling the whole building notice I was gone. Higher up, I had more control over my own diary, not less. The late Suzanne Duncan told me the same thing about becoming a Principal, that it was the most flexibility she’d ever had for her family. That collision you lie awake dreading, the one where your child needs you and you’re stuck in a meeting, I found I could handle it more easily at the top than I ever could in the middle.
The part I won’t pretend about
Now the honest bit, because I’m not going to sell you a version where it’s all upside. It did cost me time. I was on the 6.30 train to London more mornings than I’d have liked, ringing the kids at eight to make sure they were up and moving. There was an expectation that I’d turn up to things when things needed turning up to, and some of those things were evenings. That was real. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t. But notice what that isn’t. It isn’t every evening gone forever. It was specific, it was contained, and most of it I could see coming.
The cost nobody asked me to pay
And then there’s the thing I did to myself, which is the real reason I’m writing this.
For years I worked every Sunday morning. On top of the emails, keeping ahead of the board reports, staying on top of it all. Every single Sunday. And then one day it landed on me that nobody had ever asked me to. Not once. There was no rule, no expectation, no line in my contract. I did it because the people around me said they did it, and I’d absorbed the idea that this was simply what senior leaders were like. Busy. Always on. Sunday mornings at the laptop. I gave away years of Sunday mornings to a version of the job that existed only in my own head.
That’s the part I want you to sit with, because it’s the thing nobody tells you. You think the job will take a piece of you. Some of it will, and you’ll be able to see that piece coming and decide whether it’s worth it. But the bigger risk is the piece you hand over that was never asked for, because you decided in advance what senior leaders do and then made yourself do it. I costed the role from the outside, watching people, exactly as you’re doing now. And then I got inside and kept costing it from the outside, watching the same people, still taking my cues from the corridor instead of asking what the job actually required of me.
Why you can’t know from where you’re standing
Here’s what I know now. You cannot know the true shape of the cost from where you’re standing. You can only guess, and your guess is built from watching people who are almost certainly, like I was, paying for things nobody asked them to pay for.
So before you decide you can’t afford it, I’d want to know one thing. The cost you’re so sure of, the one that’s keeping you exactly where you are. Have you actually checked it? Or have you just watched it from across the car park and taken the worst reading you could?
You’ve decided what the job costs. I’d gently suggest you don’t yet know. If this landed, let me know, I’m always interested.
