Five kids and a Headship— Our husband and wife partnership after twins!
By Cal Hurst with help from Les, Sam, Sally, Eilish, Gabriel & Seamas!
I had a dilemma. I loved being head teacher of Greenwood junior school in Nottingham, but the long hours meant I didn't get to see my own children as often as I would have liked. On maternity leave after twins Gabriel and Seamas had become the fourth and fifth additions to the Hurst brood, I started to wonder how I was going to cope with a high-pressure job and a hectic home life. Something had to give. One way of combining the joys of bringing up children with a fulfilling career is to job-share. But job-sharing head teachers were virtually unheard of. Besides, who could I work with?
I was still thinking about it when my husband, Les, came home from his job as head teacher of the local primary. The two of us began mulling it over, thinking of possi¬ble candidates. Then we had an idea: why not do it together? "A chill went down my spine,” recalls Les. Initially, the prospect of leaving Lantern Lane, the primary school in East Leake, Leicestershire, where he had been head for 18 years, filled him with dread. He had "the best job in the world"; why would he want to leave? But the more we talked about it, the more it seemed to make sense.
"When you have five children under 12, you have to be there for them. We decided the way forward for us as a family was that one of us needed to be at home. We had to make that commitment"
I explained my plan to my governors, who "quickly came round to the idea", and my post was duly advertised as a job-share. Even then, there was no guarantee that Les would be selected. He was interviewed and heard just before Christmas that he had got the job. "
I decided I was going to share my job, not relinquish part of it. It's a major, major life change for Les and for me. But it's an exciting change.
In some ways being a head teacher is quite a lonely job: going through processes of consultation, making decisions and so on. If you have another person you can sound those things out with, that has got to be positive.
. Les and I have worked together before; he was my boss when I was a class teacher at Lantern Lane in the early 1990s. We have very different skills that plait together nicely.
Having a married couple in charge at Greenwood isn’t a problem, After all, half the partnership is already well known to staff and pupils. I have staff employed on a job-share basis and there is sometimes an issue about who goes to staff development and that kind of thing. If you are a couple who live together the issues aren't going to be there. We are both head teachers anyway, so most of our evenings are geared around work. We think the same way, and now we are working with the same goals in mind."
But any fears that our personal partner¬ship might get in the way of our professional performance are misplaced, Les believes. "Obviously there will be times when we dis¬agree, but we will do our arguing at home.”
But for us as a family, while the rewards will be great in other areas, our family income is about to be halved at a stroke. That's the only negative, that we are one head teacher’s salary down. We are beginning to feel the pinch now after six months.
Our new lifestyle ensures that one of us is always at home to take care of the children. On our very first day in the new arrangement our daughter Eilish was ill and had to take a rare day off school,
What a huge relief, no arguments over who had to take the day off!!
Les and I have always shared the household chores and everything that goes with that so there have been no issues about having Daddy being at home.
Having said that I haven’t noticed Les going to twins club on his day off ….yet!
I feel that we are both getting the best of both worlds and a rare insight into exactly what each others lives are like. If you are at work full time you tend to think your partner has got it easy being at home. We see both worlds and appreciate how hard and tiring it is to be at home with twin baby boys. It is sometimes a relief to put on your suit and hop into the car leaving your partner holding two babies, making packed lunch for the other three, arranging the logistics of brownies, chess club and Irish dancing that evening, tidying up the morning chaos and trying to grab a quick shower before the school run! There is also something liberating about putting the boys for a nap mid morning and going down into a quiet house to make a coffee in the knowledge that your partner will be ploughing through that huge mound of work on the desk in the office. (Actually we have our OWN desks because I’m tidy and he’s not!)
One more thing to consider is that if you are playing two vital and demanding roles in your life it is utterly exhausting, more exhausting than full time work. The major benefit for us is that our two new (unexpected) miracles do not need childcare and that our other three children can still have a quality of life that would be impossible without a parent at home. Lastly I always wondered if my daughters had never been picked to play Mary in the nativity because their Daddy was the Head teacher. Guess what— Sally is Mary this year!