Dame Rachel de Souza is the current children’s commissioner. She was formerly CEO at the Inspiration Trust and, before that, a headteacher. She writes:

A key part of my leadership journey was being sent to Cranfield School of Management early on. It was so tough - 360 feedback, with everyone who worked with me giving me very honest feedback. I realised that I had been giving my team a huge level of challenge. My tutor sat me down and this theme that I was driving the team far too hard kept coming out. He wouldn’t let me off the hook - he forced me to face up to that - and I came out of that far more conscious of my effect on others.

Being a headteacher is so different from any leadership role you might have held before. It is often the first true leadership role you do in education because the buck stops with you and, certainly before trusts were established, you were on your own. That is exposing and it is important to acknowledge that this is the reality for headteachers.

Having a head-in-the-hands moment when you think everything is going to go wrong and fail - we’ve all been there, multiple times. The first time it happened to me, I felt strangely liberated by it. If all was lost, I had nothing to lose. It allowed me to free myself from all the outside noise and focus on what I thought mattered, to break away from the usual paths. That great success that followed was a lesson in how to deal with those situations and I have never forgotten it since.

You have to be courageous as a leader and the most important way you can show courage is by having self-awareness. True courage is facing the truth about things - how things are going, how difficult things are going to be, how you are performing. Only if you can do that can you truly be successful and make progress.

Really good mentors have supported me on my journey. They have changed as I have gone along. I think finding mentors that give you different things you need is so crucial - it is rare to find everything you require in a single person.

I really hope that those I lead feel like they are part of a team. I’ve always known you can’t achieve anything on your own and that’s certainly true in my role as children’s commissioner. Creating a highly functioning team is difficult as a leader but so important. You have to sell the vision to your team and you have to bond with them in a way that enables genuine challenge - and it has to be sustained through difficult times. The key is genuinely listening and showing you have listened in what you do next.

There is this idea that leadership training needs to be embedded in school practice. I don’t believe that. I think high-quality leadership development is actually high-quality personal development. And most of the things you need to learn are better learned outside the school environment and then brought back in.

I am the daughter of a steelworker from Scunthorpe, and I have three brothers. I have never found being a working-class person from that background a hindrance in my career. If anything it has been a benefit. I don’t get intimidated easily. I understand the children I have dedicated my career to serving. For a time, at the start of my career, I perhaps ignored my background, but I quickly realised it was actually my superpower.

You need to stay optimistic. If you want to force change for children, you need optimism to bring people with you as it will be an undulating pathway to progress. You will need your team to try things that haven’t been done before and to be able to instil them with the confidence that it will work.

Always look at the data. If you get the right data collection in place and the right tools to interpret it, then data can be your clear guiding light in everything you do as a leader.

People talk about models for developing trusts, but really you need different models at different stages of growth - and each trust is likely to differ in that. So leading is really about being sensitive to those stages of development and working out if you are the best person to lead at each of those stages.

I keep family and work separate. I switch work off now. I could never do that as a young leader and I wish I could have. But would my younger self listen to my older self on that point? I don’t think they would. Work was one of the loves of my life, really. I was obsessed with it.

I’ll never stop working. And whatever I do next I want it to excite me. I would love to be a headteacher again…I think it’s the best job in education.