When the Corridors Are Empty
A short note as the school year ends. The summer isn't quiet for everyone, the readership has grown in ways that continue to surprise, and September will bring the KCSIE deadline and everything else. Thank you for reading.
Somewhere this weekend, a Head is enjoying quality time with a family they have barely seen since March. A coach driver is starting a fortnight off. A Year 13 pupil is a week into no longer being a pupil, and a Year 7 pupil is trying to work out what to do with a school day that is not one. Somewhere else, a Deputy Head is looking at a diary with genuine white space in it for the first time since Easter.
Meanwhile, in the IT office, the calendar for the next six weeks already has more entries on it than the term that just finished.
This is the annual honest moment worth noting. The summer holiday is not a holiday for everyone in a school. It is when the network gets refreshed, the MIS gets migrated, the imaging pipeline runs against a fleet of laptops, the safeguarding audit takes place, the CPOMS export gets checked, the DBS reassessments happen, the classroom AV kit gets rehung, the DPIA backlog gets caught up, and the summer projects that could not be done during term time get squeezed into the six weeks when the corridors are empty and the pace of interruption is finally survivable.
If you work in IT, estates, HR, finance, boarding, or admin services, you already know this. If you do not, this is the acknowledgement that you deserve one, and it is not always what you get.
There is a version of this note that gets sentimental about the school year. I am going to spare you that. What I do want to say is that this blog is now six months old, and the readership has grown in ways that have continued to surprise me. Thank you for reading, for sharing the pieces around, for sending the occasional email, for putting the templates in front of your bursars, and for the slightly nervous "are we the only ones doing this?" question that reminds me why I started writing in the first place. You are not the only ones. The blog exists to make sure of that.
September will bring the KCSIE 2026 activation on the first of the month. It will bring Ofsted's new interest in enrichment as part of Personal Development. It will bring, at some point, the arrival of the DfE's new Director General for Digital and Infrastructure. And it will bring a set of arguments about AI in schools that have not resolved and will not for some time yet.
None of that is a reason to spend the summer thinking about it.
The blog will publish lightly over the next few weeks, mostly shorter pieces and reflections rather than the news-driven posts of term time. If you are a subscriber, the KCSIE 2026 Summer Checklist and the Generative AI Procurement Policy template will do some of the work during any quieter afternoons in July or August. If you are not, they are there anyway, and I would rather they were used than saved.
For those of you working through the summer, whether that is on the network, the MIS, the estate, the boarding houses or anywhere else the pupils have just vacated, thank you. The rest of the school owes you a summer they rarely get to give you. For those of you off from now until September, enjoy the break. September will still be there when you get back.
See you in the digital staffroom.
