An Entrepreneurial Mindset for Teachers
Written by Janella Ajeigbe
Solving problems is one of the activities common to schools and businesses. I am interested in how concepts and tools from the business world might improve outcomes for children as well as working conditions for teachers. This is why I applied for the King’s E-Lab Social Venture Residential.
At the Social Venture Residential, we started with the definition, developed at Harvard, that ‘entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled’. This was the first time I had heard this definition and in the rest of this post I’ll explain what I believe it might mean for schools.
It is probably easiest to start by describing a typical day for a headteacher and then contrasting two of the ways that headteachers often think. A headteacher’s job is a practical one and you spend most of your time pre-empting problems, choosing or suggesting solutions and devising strategies to avoid future problems.
My mornings usually start with a visit to each classroom to check that my teaching team are ready for the day ahead. Teachers are expected to set up the desks and activities before children arrive so that time-consuming problems (finding missing pencils, photocopying enough work or setting out enough glue) are avoided. Next, I’m usually shaking hands with the children as they come through the gates. I have quick chats with parents about their child’s work to build trust and to avoid communication problems.
After greeting the children, my day is then filled with problem solving tasks needing immediate, short-term or long-term solutions. Problems needing immediate solutions might include deciding to send a child home because they have thrown-up in the classroom (and steeling yourself to clean the desks if the caretaker is also off sick that day).
By mid-morning, I tend to have moved to thinking about problems that need short-term solutions. These might include planning the diary for the following week so that we cover any teacher absence. Problems with short-term solutions, such as high levels of teacher absence, tend also to require a long-term strategy, such as helping all staff to feel productive at work. We monitor long-term strategies through things like staff surveys while implementing solutions such as booking a supply (cover) teacher for the day.
Recognising which short-term problems are masking issues that require long-term strategies to solve is one of the most difficult parts of headship. It is here that the entrepreneurial mindset is useful.
The headteacher who has not yet developed an entrepreneurial mindset tends to think first of resources and then how these can be used to deliver outcomes. ‘Outcomes’ are all of the benefits a school provides to the community it serves. They include obvious benefits, like achieving well on an exam or applying to a university, but also include non-academic benefits, like learning to draw or visiting a farm.
Outcomes tend to be affected by the problems that you face. For example, when teachers aren’t ready for the day and are handing out books and pencils after the children are settled and ready can lead to wasted time at the start of each lesson. These wasted minutes (a conservative estimate might be 7 minutes per lesson) add up across a day (35 minutes) or a school year (almost a week of wasted minutes). Many headteachers would agree that reducing the problem of wasted time can improve children’s academic outcomes. Managing our ‘human resources’ in this way seems valuable.
When resources are plentiful then thinking of resources first seems to pay off. There is enough money to solve problems, deliver outcomes and even provide for unexpected events (for example, employing an additional teaching assistant to support a group of children who require extra help). When other costs increase or budgets shrink, however, then headteachers face challenges that seem insurmountable.
It is at these times that entrepreneurial thinking pays off.
Headteachers who are driven by the opportunities they see, rather than by the resources they have, approach their roles in a different way. They do not start from the resources they have. In fact, they recognise that they do not have the resources required to achieve a particular goal. These headteachers tend to plan towards the opportunity they want to grasp. They deliberately set out to gain the resources required. They know that ‘resources’ refers not just to the cash in the budget but also the quality of your relationships with families, external partners and staff, and the physical resources of the school (such as how economically staff use the photocopier and printing facilities).
These sorts of headteachers are easy to spot. They are the ones where, when visiting their schools, one cannot help but ask, ‘where on earth do you get the money to do that!?’. They are the ones who achieve significantly higher results or provide more residentials, trips, music projects or sports than other schools. They are the headteachers who seem to be lucky or connected or well-resourced; except those explanations aren’t the reason why their school’s provision is so different.
These headteachers tend to spend hours thinking of ways around the limitations of their budgets (rather than just thinking of the budgets themselves). For example, believing that after school clubs allow children to discover their talents, and not wanting to wear down my teaching staff with longer hours, I recruited sixth formers and local charities to bolster our before and after school clubs. We were able to offer clubs in cricket, kayaking, Rubik’s cubing, Scouts, primary maths challenge puzzles, art, violin and cello practice, chess, reading and football. The sixth formers gained leadership skills and enjoyed being role models. Best of all, our children developed new friendships, improved their attendance at school and were awarded scores of certificates in competitions, fixtures and other events. We could not have achieved this, in a school where 40% of pupils were eligible for free school meals (and unable to pay the full cost of clubs), had I been focused only on the resources we had.
If I were to call a few headteachers and ask them for their first thoughts on entrepreneurship, I think they might mention Elon Musk, pitching for the Dragon’s Den or becoming rich. But entrepreneurship starts from seeing an opportunity that is not currently available to you because you do not ‘control’ sufficient resources. An entrepreneurial headteacher is one who works out how to get additional resources to achieve, for their pupils and families, more than is normally possible.
Janella Ajeigbe
Janella Ajeigbe is a primary headteacher currently completing her MPhil in Mathematics Education at Wolfson College. Her proudest moment was watching the maths teachers at her school lead pupils to win 31 bronze, silver and gold certificates in the Primary and Junior Mathematics competitions. This was at a school where exam results in mathematics had been below the national average before she served as headteacher. She lives in London, hates swimming and teaches Latin in her spare time. Janella has been a member of the E-Lab since 2023.