Leadership, Time, School Culture and Me: A Reflection from Panama

What my first term in Latin America taught me about hours, habits, and leading learning in an international school.

Jan 19, 2026

💡 The Big Idea

We’re one week into Term 2 here in Panama. The rain has pretty much moved over for the dry season, the humidity has dipped just enough to notice, and the school feels like it has settled back into a slightly cooler rhythm.

It’s that strange January moment where you’re looking forward to a fresh year while still very much in the middle of the school one. You’re thinking about new starts and new habits, but also how to build on everything Term 1 has already set in motion.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what’s changed for me this year. I haven’t just started a new academic term, I’ve moved continent, started at a new school, settled into a new home and a new way of life. Our weekends look completely different. We’ve traded deserts and Middle Eastern beaches for jungles, rainforests, and the Pacific coast.

On paper, my job looks very similar. I am still a primary headteacher in an international, English curriculum school. Before Panama, I spent eleven years in the UAE doing the same thing: curriculum, teaching and learning, safeguarding, parents, behaviour, the usual headteacher stuff. Here, it could feel like a different skyline, but with the same job title.

But the culture feels different.

The rhythm of the day, how long people stay, how staff talk about workload, what parents expect, and how weekends are used. All of that has shifted. And that has forced me to take a look at some of my own habits and assumptions. How long I stay on site. What hard work looks like. How much structure staff really need. Where family life fits in.

This post is a bit different from normal. It is a reflection on that first term. What has felt familiar. What has felt completely new. And what it has nudged me to rethink leadership, time, school culture and me.

Hours do not equal impact

I’ve never really believed that staying longer in school made me better as a leader. But it felt like the culture in Dubai. I felt that, as the leader, I always needed to be the last one out of the door. One of the first things I have noticed here is that whether I leave at 3:30, 4:30 or 5:30, the actual impact is surprisingly similar.

In the UAE, long days felt normal. Late meetings, evening events, spending another hour on that document. There is a real energy to that culture and a lot of positives, but it is very easy to slide into a mindset where being physically in the building equals being more effective.

In Panama, partly because of the culture (and the heavy afternoon traffic jams) and partly because of where we live, my pattern has shifted. Some days I stay later. But most days I leave earlier, get home, have time with the girls, go for a run (or not), eat something nice, and then pick things up again later if I have to.

What I have found is that I am often sharper when I do this. The jobs get done more quickly. The thinking is better. The ideas are slightly better, too.

The big realisation for me this term has been that leadership impact is not a simple equation of number of hours = better leadership. It is much more about where your energy and attention are going. A well-rested headteacher who has had some time with their family and thirty minutes of fresh air will probably make better decisions than the one who has been in the office since 6.30 and didn’t leave until it was dark.

I am not pretending I have cracked the work-life balance thing (and I do sometimes like to stay late so I’m on my own and can focus), but I have noticed that it quite often makes no difference to the quality or amount of work I achieve.

Transience and the case for clarity

One thing my twelve years in international education have absolutely confirmed for me is just how important explicit curriculum and teaching frameworks are.

This was true in Dubai, and it’s just as true here in Panama.

In many international schools, staff movement is simply part of normal life. People come to Panama to travel and see the world. It is a transient place. Once, bucket lists and itineraries have been ticked, people move on. New colleagues arrive from different schools and systems, different training routes and sometimes different first languages. There is constant movement. In Duabi we had native Arabic teachers teaching their language. Here it is Panamanian teachers, teaching theirs.

For new staff, that leads to huge cognitive load in the first term particulalrly. New school. New country. New culture. New language. New safeguarding systems. New parents. Probably a new flat and a new route to work. It is a lot.

From the pupils’ side, none of this is their problem. They deserve a consistent experience whether the teacher in front of them is in year one or year ten at the school.

That is where playbooks, how-to guides, a detailed curriculum and explicit teaching and learning policies really matter. Not as paperwork for the sake of it, but as heavy scaffolds for the system.

If a new Year 3 teacher can sit down with:

a clear curriculum map and units
a simple, clear teaching and learning model
a handful of well-explained teaching routines for checking understanding, modelling, and independent practice

then they have something to support them. It may be the only thing they have that is familiar. It takes some of the uncertainty away and lets them put their energy into the class in front of them, instead of trying to guess how to fit into the school system.

It also means that as staff come and go, children experience continuity. The faces might change, but the routines and expectations feel familiar.

That’s been a big focus of my work again last term: establishing a playbook, making the invisible systems visible, and writing things down in a way that helps a new staff member who has just landed (jet-lagged, head full of Spanish vocab and immigration forms) feel like they’ve got something solid to start with.

Culture, context and giving yourself permission to adapt

The other thing I am learning is that you cannot pick up a school culture from one country and drop it onto another, even if the place looks similar.

Regulators are different. Expectations around hours and availability are different. Attitudes to holidays and family time are different. Even small things, like when parents are most likely to email, or what time staff socialise, shift the feel of the place.

If you try to recreate your old timetable, your old way of working, this is how and when we communicate to parents and staff, you are probably going to clash with the new context or burn yourself out trying to maintain something that no one else asked you to maintain.

Last term was a good reminder that leadership is not about importing what happens somewhere else, here. It is about holding on to your core values and non-negotiables of what research tells us works and being flexible about the rest.

For me, that has meant:

Keeping a relentless focus on teaching and learning.
Holding a high bar for behaviour and kindness.
Protecting staff meeting time for genuine CPD, not admin.

But being much more open about when I work, how visible I need to be, and what productivity looks like in a different climate and culture.

🎯 The Bits That Stick

✅ Hours don’t equal impact – how you use your energy and attention matters more than how long you stay.
✅ In transient international schools, clear curricula, playbooks and routines aren’t “nice to have”; they’re stabilisers for everyone.
✅ Children deserve continuity, even when the adults around them are changing.
✅ You can’t airlift one school culture into another – keep your core values, flex the rest.

In a bit,
Coops 😎