Presence Is Not the Same as Proximity
Brad Gaynor
Most school leaders are busy. That is not in question. The calendars are full, the corridors are walked, the meetings are attended. By any visible measure, they are there.
But being there and knowing what is actually happening are not the same thing.
There is a pattern that repeats across schools, regardless of sector or size. A leader moves through the day at pace – approving, attending, responding, appearing. Staff see them. The leader sees staff. And yet, somewhere in that constant motion, genuine understanding of what people are experiencing gets left behind. The leader is present. They are not proximate.
Proximity is something different. It is the difference between seeing a staff member in the corridor and knowing they have been covering three classes a week for a month because no relief is available. It is the difference between announcing that the school values wellbeing and understanding that your middle leaders are eating lunch at their desks because there is simply no other time. Presence is physical. Proximity is relational and informational. You can have one without the other.
The reason this matters so much right now is that culture does not announce itself. It does not appear in survey data or end-of-term reports. Culture lives in the small, repeated moments – what gets laughed off, what goes unsaid, what people do when they think no one senior is watching. A leader who mistakes busyness for connection will declare a culture that does not exist. They will describe their school as one thing while their staff experience it as another. That gap, left unexamined, is where trust quietly breaks down.
Closing it does not require a new programme or a restructured meeting schedule. It requires a deliberate shift in how leaders use their time and attention. Not managed walks with clipboards, not town hall forums where people say what they think is expected. What it requires is the discipline to slow down, to ask questions without an agenda, and to be genuinely curious about the answer rather than looking for confirmation that things are fine.
The leaders who seem to understand their schools most clearly are rarely the ones with the best data systems. They are the ones who have made proximity a habit. They know which parts of the building carry the most strain. They know which staff are holding things together quietly. They know, before it becomes a crisis, when something is starting to shift.
In a period when teacher retention is under pressure across every system, and when workforce conditions are being shaped by decisions made at the leadership level every single day, the cost of being present but not proximate is not abstract. It shows up in who stays, who leaves, and what kind of place the school actually is like to work in.
Presence is easy. Proximity takes intention. It is also, in my experience, one of the things that most determines whether a school holds onto its people or quietly loses them.
