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There is a particular kind of headteacher who arrives at a school with enormous energy. They're in early, out late, at every meeting, visible in every corridor. In the first term, staff notice. Parents notice. The school feels different. There's momentum.
By the second year, that headteacher is exhausted. And so is everyone around them.
I've been that headteacher. I've also watched others burn through their schools with intensity — generating short-term movement but leaving behind something more fragile than what they found. What I've come to understand, slowly and sometimes painfully, is that intensity is not improvement. It can look like it. It can feel like it. But it rarely lasts.
The most effective leaders I've worked alongside don't do more than everyone else. They do fewer things — but they do them every single day, without exception.
What consistency actually looks like
Consistency isn't repetition for its own sake. It's the deliberate narrowing of focus to the things that compound. A greeting at the door every morning. A weekly line manager conversation that actually happens. Feedback that follows the same structure every time. None of these are dramatic. All of them, done without interruption over two years, change a school.
The trap is mistaking activity for impact. When there's a problem — a dip in attendance, a difficult parent, a weak department — the instinct is to intervene dramatically. New policy. New meeting. New initiative. Intense. Visible. Expensive in time and trust.
Often the better answer is to intensify something you're already doing consistently, rather than starting something new.
Three things I stopped doing
When I made the shift from intensity to consistency, there were things I had to stop:
1. Attending everything. My presence at every meeting was making it harder for middle leaders to lead. I wasn't empowering them — I was crowding them. Now I attend strategically, not comprehensively.
2. Responding to every crisis with a new system. Every school has weeks that feel like they demand a structural response. Most don't. Most demand a conversation, a reset, a reminder of what already exists. New systems have a cost. They dilute focus and create fatigue.
3. Measuring progress weekly. Improvement that compounds doesn't show up in weekly data. It shows up over terms and years. I stopped asking "are we there yet?" and started asking "are we still moving?"
The practical shift
If you want to move from intensity to consistency, start with a single question: what are the five things that, if I did them without fail every week, would most improve this school in two years?
Write them down. Protect time for them. Do them even when it's boring, even when there's a fire elsewhere, even when nobody is watching.
That's the work. It's less visible than the intense version. It's also more effective.