“Where do failed headteachers go?”
That was the question keeping Patrick Cozier awake at night as he awaited publication of a critical newspaper article about Highgate Wood School back in 2009.
The piece detailed how the school, where he had worked as head for three years, had dropped from ‘good’ to ‘satisfactory’. It was in financial deficit, facing industrial action and exam results were sliding.
Cozier’s face was pictured on the front page.
With three young children at the time he was contemplating quitting the sector he loved, in disgrace.
But his dad, a postal worker who had come to London from Barbados, told him: “Son, there are other jobs. But you chose this one. Either walk away or dig your heels in and do it.”
So that’s what he did.
He’s now been head at Highgate Wood, in Crouch End, North London, for 18 years, and spends his spare time coaching and mentoring other school leaders to overcome such turbulent moments.
Gold standards
Cozier used that pivotal moment to make some bold decisions that he’d been reluctant to take.
For instance, “struggling” year 11 teachers were moved to different classes and retrained. He had been “overly worried” about the impact this would have on them, instead of prioritising pupils’ outcomes.
GCSE results quickly improved. Ofsted returned in 2011 and rated the school ‘good’.
Cozier felt “joy and relief”, knowing “it could have been a very different tale”.
The “North Londoner born and bred” has now come to embody his school in unexpected ways.
He has a distinctive gold tooth (he lost a front tooth after a friend elbowed him in the mouth in a primary school swimming lesson).
When his pupils were asked to design a mural representing their community they made its central feature a mouth with gold teeth as it was “symbolic of them and their school”.
While he sees being black and having a gold tooth as a “stereotype,” he’s “been fighting stereotypes my whole life”. And looking “a bit odd” helps pupils “relate to me more”.
Stop and search injustice
Growing up in Tottenham, Cozier was stopped and searched “more times than I could count” despite never having carried a weapon or stolen anything.
Instead of reacting with anger, it always made him feel “quite sad”.
Cozier said the suspicion of others “starts to make you behave as if you are guilty, even though you know you’re not because you’re anticipating it”.
This meant that if someone who looked “vulnerable” was walking towards him, he’d often “cross the road to avoid making them feel uncomfortable”.
“It made me feel better about myself, because I was taking their feelings into account. But I fundamentally believe that I should never have had to do it.”
Cozier’s love of learning comes from his older sister, who read to him every day.
His mum, an auxiliary nurse, was “adamant” he’d go to university, but as a young teen Cozier saw the route as “for posh people, not people like me”.
He changed his mind when his favourite teacher at the “struggling” Langham School in Tottenham he attended told him that “if you don’t go to university, Patrick, then nobody at this school will”.
He says: “What we say as trusted adults really does matter, sometimes in profound ways that we don’t acknowledge at the time”.
Cozier was one of only three pupils to stay on for A-levels, and the only subjects on offer were maths, physics and chemistry.
‘Scary’ career rise
Determined to study economics, he quit two weeks in, causing the entire sixth form to be disbanded.
“I was the one who ruined it,” he admits. Instead he attended Fortismere School in Muswell Hill, which was much more “white middle class”. Cozier “struggled” with feeling “out of place”.
Whereas his former common room had “some old staff chairs and a kettle in the corner”, Fortismere had a “games room, a ghetto blaster and table tennis” and students were served “teas, coffees and toasted sandwiches all day”.
But they “moaned all the time about their facilities” which Cozier found “really challenging” and planned to quit.
Enter his dad, again, who said: “There are plenty of jobs in Tesco – go stack shelves”.
“That was his way of saying, ‘don’t be so silly’,” Cozier adds.
He stuck with it, and started teaching at Southfields School (now Southfields Academy) in South London, before returning to Langham, which had been relaunched and renamed Park View Academy, as head of year.
He then joined Highgate Wood as deputy head in 2006 and was made head the following year. It was a “scary” career rise which happened “quicker than I was comfortable with”.
He also ruffled feathers with his governors.
Highgate Wood sits in an area Cozier describes as “affluent” and ‘artsy” with pockets of deprivation. He felt the school was “very much geared towards the middle classes”, and “very relaxed to the point where it wasn’t serving the needs of children who needed a bit more.”
There was no uniform, and Cozier disliked how children congregated in “obvious groups based upon how they were dressed”.
It took him three years to convince governors, but a survey showing overwhelming support from parents meant uniforms were introduced (despite a “vocal minority” of parents seeing him as the “devil incarnate”).
There are also the occasional fallouts with Haringey Council over admissions and SEND, but “at every point” he reminds them “there are not many of us local authority schools left, you need to look after us”.
Voice of experience
Cozier is doing his bit to influence government policy. He sits on the Headteachers’ Roundtable policy group and was part of the Beyond Ofsted inquiry which recommended scrapping one-word judgements.
But he was particularly irked by the former government’s low-key announcement to “ban” mobile phones.
His school insists phones are switched off during lessons but Cozier has not mandated a ban because “there are children whose parents need to be in contact with them on the way to school”.
Meanwhile, some parents are “trying to force the school” to go further. It links to a wider concern he has about the growing number of parents who “never accept the end point” in a complaint, “even though we’ve exhausted everything… it becomes quite vexatious in nature”.
He also believes that Covid left a “really difficult” legacy of strained relationships between staff and pupils, which his school has done extensive work around rebuilding.
He puts tensions down to how schools had to behave. “Lineups, bubbles and kids being sent home if they tested positive” left “staff on edge”. “Everything was pressurised,” he says.
Cozier’s own relationships with staff are not always easy; tight budgets led him to embark on a restructure which recently resulted in pay cuts for a handful of staff and prompted strike action.
Coaching his peers
When Cozier became head in 2006 he says there were only 11 black male secondary head teachers from a Caribbean background in the country. He knew four of them. Most of the spaces Cozier occupies are “still mostly white and middle class”.
He’s now trying to change that. A large proportion of those he coaches are from ethnic minority backgrounds, and he also provides coaching sessions for ‘Leaders like Us’, a programme run by the Church of England which helps ethnic minority senior leaders progress into headship.
His private coaching work is done over Zoom in the evenings, which “doesn’t always go down well with the missus”.
Sessions sometimes feel “more like counselling than coaching”. One recent client, the head of an overseas British school, was being undermined by the school’s owners. Cozier helped them reach the conclusion they needed to quit.
Whereas Cozier initially joined the education sector believing his “life purpose was giving children opportunities”, he’s learned through coaching that he derives “a lot of fulfilment from supporting people – not just children.”
As a young and inexperienced head, he reflects that he was guilty of “awfulizing” – where “the small stuff is magnified in your brain to see everything as a catastrophe”.
He’s realised that the secret of success as a head is to be “more resilient, deal with imposter syndrome and embrace the difficulty of leadership”.
“Once you do that, you don’t waste a lot of time lamenting the fact that it’s hard. You just stay focused on finding solutions.”
