Serve work in schools
Removing the unnecessary burdens
In the last post, I argued that leadership pressure in schools is probably not an issue with effort or expertise but a work design problem. Different kinds of work are collapsed into the same roles, meetings and people. Under pressure, the default response is to add another leadership layer, create a post or redistribute responsibility. But in Jaques’ terms, this is S3 work when what is actually required is S4 work: understanding what work needs doing, at what level of judgement and over what time span before deciding who should do it.
To make that distinction more usable, Leadership, Rewritten introduced a shift in language: Run / Serve / Change. These are not roles or job titles. They are types of work that exist in every school.
This post focuses on Serve work because it is where schools either remove unnecessary burdens or quietly export them into people’s working lives.
Why Serve is the hardest work to see
In schools, Run work is noisy, urgent and visible. When it fails, everyone notices.
Change work is aspirational and rhetorically familiar. It shows up in strategies, vision and improvement plans. But Serve work is different. Done well, it is almost invisible. Nothing dramatic happens. Fewer emails are sent. Fewer escalations occur. Fewer people are pulled into meetings ‘just to check’. The absence of friction is the signal.
What Serve work is not
Serve work might be interpreted from a relational point of view and most would recognise the idea of servant leadership. This approach is not unimportant but it is not Serve work in the structural sense. My take is that servant leadership is leaned on more to mitigate the effects of Serve work not having been done sufficiently. Serve work does something harder. When Serve work is missing, we unwittingly ask people to compensate with care, flexibility and resilience.
What Serve work is
Serve work is deciding what the system will no longer ask people to decide repeatedly under pressure. More concretely, Serve work shows up as decisions about:
what is fixed and what is allowed to vary for example, which elements of curriculum, assessment, safeguarding or communication must be consistent across the school and which are legitimately left to professional judgement.
where decisions stop and start so it is clear which issues can be resolved in classrooms or teams and which must move elsewhere without negotiation or escalation theatre.
how competing demands are reconciled by designing calendars, cycles and priorities so the system does not rely on individuals to hold contradictions in their heads.
where the organisation absorbs complexity and where it refuses it by embedding boundaries into routines, tools and roles rather than into personal resilience or goodwill.
In Jaques’ terms, this is where longer horizon judgement is turned into conditions others can reliably act within.
Serve work in schools
Let’s take some domains that deal with the core business of schools: curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, and the necessary Serve work that they do. In each case, the question is about the judgement that the system should settle so others don’t have to.
A well resourced and carefully curated curriculum
Why this is Serve work
A curated curriculum is about deciding at system level:
what knowledge, skills and concepts matter
what is worth spending time on
what coherence across classes, year groups and phases looks like
What it removes
repeated debate about what should be taught
local reinvention of core content (and inadvertent lowering of standards)
hidden curriculum drift between classrooms
This is Serve because it collapses curriculum judgement into a shared artefact that teachers can rely on, rather than renegotiating scope and sequence individually.
Deliberately designed assessments, mapped across the year
Why this is Serve work
Assessment becomes Serve work when it settles questions such as:
what counts as evidence of learning
when it is appropriate to gather that evidence
how assessment reflects what has actually been taught
Mapped assessment points across the year are not about accountability theatre. They are about temporal coordination.
What it removes
ad hoc testing driven by anxiety or external pressure
misalignment between curriculum intent and assessment practice
teachers having to write assessments instead of spending valuable time on curriculum adaptation
This is Serve because it embeds judgement about timing, purpose and coherence into the system.
A pedagogical framework grounded in evidence, suited to age range and subject
Why this is Serve work
A pedagogical framework decides:
how the school talks about good teaching
what evidence informed practice means here
which debates are settled and which remain open
What it removes
endless argument about pedagogy framed as ideology or taste
inconsistency in expectations between observers
performative compliance driven by ambiguity
This is Serve because it creates a shared instructional grammar that protects professional judgement.
A timetable that manifests curriculum intent and balances competing demands
Why this is Serve work
Timetables decide:
which subjects are prioritised in time, not just rhetoric
how learning rhythms are protected
how space, staffing and cognitive load are balanced
What it removes
constant negotiation over ‘just this once’ exceptions
subject competition played out informally
teachers absorbing structural contradictions in their workload
This is Serve because it turns values and intent into conditions others can plan within.
The pattern across all four
Across these examples, Serve work consistently does three things. It moves judgement upstream where decisions are made deliberately, not reactively. It reduces repeated negotiation so that teachers and leaders don’t have to re-decide fundamentals under pressure. It protects professional discretion by constraining the system, not the individual. This leadership work does not rely on goodwill or heroics, it is leadership expressed as architecture.
Why Serve work is always under threat
Serve work is routinely displaced because:
urgency pulls attention toward Run
structure lives in people’s heads rather than systems
relational fixes feel kinder than constraints
Relational work often appears where the system has avoided deciding and the result is predictable: coherence depends on goodwill and leadership becomes exhausting.
A practical test
Serve work removes unnecessary burdens by deciding once what would otherwise be negotiated repeatedly. When it is missing, schools function by consuming human capacity which leads to burnout. A useful diagnostic question for leaders is this:
Which decisions are we still asking people to make under pressure that the system should have settled already?
Curriculum
Which curriculum decisions are teachers still having to negotiate individually?
Where does coherence depend on informal agreement rather than shared objects?
What curriculum judgement is currently living in people’s heads rather than in the curriculum itself?
If teachers are spending time debating what to teach, Serve work is missing.
Assessment
Are assessment points mapped because they serve learning?
Which assessment decisions are still being remade term by term?
Where are teachers writing assessments because the system hasn’t decided what evidence matters and when?
If teachers are writing their own assessments and deciding when to do them, serve work is missing.
Pedagogy
Do we have a shared instructional grammar, or a collection of individual preferences?
Which pedagogical debates have we deliberately closed and which remain open?
How much observation anxiety is created by ambiguity rather than performance?
If there is wild variation in teaching approaches, Serve work is missing.
Fundamental Serve decisions leaders are accountable for
If Serve work is about removing unnecessary burdens, then leadership responsibility is not to ask for better effort but to settle these questions deliberately:
Curriculum
Ensure there is a carefully curated body of high quality lesson presentations and tasks that teachers adapt and improve over time, rather than expecting teachers to plan from scratch or rely on disconnected online resources.
Assessment
Ensure there is a mapped assessment cycle, with assessments already written to reflect the curated curriculum, rather than expecting teachers to write assessments independently and decide when they should happen.
Pedagogy
Ensure there is a clarified, evidence informed approach to teaching, within which teachers select and adapt strategies appropriate to age and subject, rather than leaving them to navigate every new fad or teach in isolation.
In each case, the Serve judgement is the same: what will the system make coherent by design, rather than asking individuals to hold together through effort?
It's always nice for a full time teacher to read about leadership that prioritises aspects like unnecessary burdens in school. Serve sounds really effective!
Fantastic work, Nick. I still owe you some essays. Haven’t forgotten. Just snowed under.