One of the greatest difficulties I have always faced with being a Head of Year is managing my workload and remaining organised. It is a constant balancing act and requires a lot of proactive planning to ensure workload does not becoming overwhelming. I have also imagined the role of a pastoral leader to be the spinning of multiple plates...none of which can smash! From managing your tutor team through to picking up behaviour, attendance and safeguarding issues, picking up day to day administration tasks and carrying out duties, as well as teaching, marking and planning - it can quickly mount up.

Over the course of the last 5 years, I have developed strategies which I recommend you use to manage your workload which I want to share with you in this unit.

1) Plan your lessons a week in advance - know the rough outline of your lessons and what you're delivering beforehand to avoid last minute planning.

2) Get yourself a notepad which you use consistently for to do lists, notes from meetings or phone calls - I've attached several to do list styles to this section to help you. You can also find to do list notepads in most stationary shops.

3) Prioritise your work carefully - to do this you can use a prioritisation matrix. This will help you to assess which tasks need doing urgently and those that can wait! I've attached a downloadable example to this section.

4) Have a desk planner which you can write notes on throughout the day! You can find downloadable desk planners for Head of Year and Head of House attached to this section.

5) Make sure you re-direct and delegate work - for example, can a tutor pick this up? Should the Head of Department deal with this? Can I ask my support assistant to make this phone call?

6) Have your space organised and all items easy to find - remember you'll usually be in a rush. So, save yourself the hassle and have a labelled folder with your student reports in, or a ring binder with your attendance documents.

7) Do your printing for the following day, the night before - then place into folders or an organised and neat pile to help you keep on top. It's highly likely you may not have your own teaching room and may not have the luxury of keeping everything in one space - make sure you are ready to teach without having to search for resources.

8) Designate time for marking each week. Hide yourself away in an office or classroom and mark for at least 1 hour to keep on top of it all!

9) Do the task you're dreading...first! Just get it done. Make the difficult phone call, have the hard chat or complete the data analysis first thing. Get it out of the way!

10) Set yourself a working deadline - work until 5:30pm and then stop for the day. Try to avoid taking anything home with you - keep that distance between home and work. It's not always possible, but you should certainly try.

Remember to look after yourself - in amongst trying to please everyone else and looking after students, we can often forget that there should also be care for us.

Keep your weekends for yourself, don't work late every night and remember the work will never be done....you can always leave it and come back to it tomorrow.