School Headship: Present and Future

1. School Headship: Present and Future Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson Centre for Education and Employment Research University of Buckingham The Future of School Leadership NUT Conference, London, 1 May 2007

2. Spotlight • NCSL and GTC claim there is a crisis in headteacher recruitment. • PwC has argued that the nature of schools has changed to the point that they need to be led in different ways. • The government is keen to reform, modernise and innovate.

3. Research • 1 in 1,000 primary schools in England and Wales – 19 out of 19,059 • 1 in 100 secondary schools – 36 out of 3,591 • 1 in 33 HMC and GSA schools – 12 out of 403

4. Teachers in England Primary Secondary Regular Phase Schools Ratio Qualified 174,600 202,200 17,504 3,367 10:1 60:1

5. Future Heads Among Staff? Primary Secondary %Yes But Phase %Yes %No Not Attracted 100.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 76.5 12.9

6. Barriers to Recruitment Salary Workload Accountability Primary % Secondary % 63.2 52.6 31.6 Workload Stress/pressure Vulnerability to sack Difficulty Exaggerated 44.4 30.6 27.8 11.1

7. Reasons for Not Wanting to be a Head Primary “If you are not meeting your targets you are very, very vulnerable aren’t you.” “Workload and pressure, but that is related to vulnerability. That is the biggest reason to stay in the second tier.” “The pay differentials are the key. I am not that far ahead of any of my SMT.” “Not enough extra rewards for the extra responsibilities.” Secondary

8. Current Role and Responsibilities Admin LEA Events Admissions Interviews ITT Community Partnerships Networking SIP Appraisal SEF School Profile Finance Bids and Awards Premises Personnel CRB Checks Health & Safety Unexpected Strategy Assemblies Leadership Team Pupils Teachers Parents Teaching Support Staff Pastoral Governors

9. Changes • Headship – ‘initiativitis’; SIPs. • School Organisation – specialist schools; trusts. • Staffing – workforce remodelling; TLRs. • Curriculum and Assessment – data management and pupil tracking; vocational diplomas. • Accountability – SEF; school profile. • Funding – devolved budgets; bidding culture. • Premises – BSF; health and safety. • Social Agenda – ECM; healthy eating.

10. Too Big for One Person? Primary Secondary Phase %Yes %No 57.9 27.8 42.1 69.4

11. Role LEA Reduced? Primary Secondary Phase %Yes %No New 61.1 65.5 38.8 24.1 0.0 10.3

12. LEA Quotes Primary “I deal with them as little as possible and find them an irritation putting up barriers to prevent me doing my job.” “I think the LEA role is diminishing and I welcome it.” “Sadly we cannot get the old levels of support and advice from the county in its new set-up.” “We need access to more expertise than there is in the school and we relied on the LEA for support.” Secondary

13. Support from Other Heads Primary Secondary Phase %Yes %Little %None 100.0 75.0 0.0 14.3 0.0 10.7

14. Head Quotes Primary “It is dog eat dog! We cannot work collaboratively because of parental choice competition.” “The competition around here is very, very severe and that has made the 14-19 agenda so hard.” “There is a great informal network that I could not manage without.” “There is a lot of picking up the phone and seeking a colleague’s advice.” Secondary

15. Alternative Models • Business Model – CEO with Heads of Teaching and Learning, Finance, Personnel and Facilities. • Hard Federation – partnerships formalised into single institution with different campuses. • Cluster of mutually supporting schools sharing some functions but retaining identity and automony. • Co-Headship to halve the stress and double the capacity. • PFI where premises manager in charge of use of school building.

16. School Headship? • Too few potential recruits so need to increase pool. • Change in the nature of schooling. • Government wants to.

17. Schooling Changed? • Superficially, ‘yes’, through ECM, extended schools, children’s centres etc. • But, fundamentally, ‘no’. Raison d’être is - as it has always been - educating young people to get the most out of their lives. • This must determine who runs the school. • The extra functions that have been loaded on to schools should be handled by support staff responsible to the person leading the teaching and learning.

18. Independent Sector • Actual businesses. • Bursar crucial, but head in charge. • Power of the head derives from income being dependent on the perception of quality of teaching. • Few successful examples of heads being appointed from outside teaching. • Not difficult to fill headteacher posts. • Mischievously suggested that many of problems state sector come from the govt as self-appointed managers having no classroom experience.

19. Government’s Approach • Blair government has adopted a distinctive approach to education assuming responsibility for ‘delivery’. • Targets and pressure from centre. • Test and exam results treated as ‘product’ like barrels of oil or tin of baked beans. • Schools thought of as just like other businesses. • This in turn opens the way to the belief that the leadership and management skills can be brought in from outside.

20. Heads from Outside? “My husband is in telecommunications and is a brilliant manager, but we couldn’t swap jobs, neither of us would have a clue.” “It is not like running a factory is it; here are your targets for the year, get on with it!” “My worry would be that you would end up with someone who looks at financial not teaching issues.” “It was a disaster. There was a sense among teachers that she didn’t really understand education.”

21. Flawed • Test and exam scores are not the ‘product’ of education; they are only a surrogate. • The government’s approach values what can be measured above what cannot. • “When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.” • Government has unwisely attached its reputation to targets. • In its desperate desire to meet them it has thrown initiatives at them.

22. Blair’s Legacy • For all the good intentions, the raised scores and extra money, it has to be said that Blair’s government has done quite a lot of harm to education. • The narrow focus on scores is linked to the alienation and truancy of many children, unhappiness, and a failure to develop self-discipline and other ‘soft-skills’. • Treating heads as football managers to be sacked when the results are not good has been a major factor in any current recruitment difficulties.

23. Conclusion • Any current recruitment difficulties are not a reason to rethink headship. • The crisis, if there be one, is government made and it should look to itself. • The next government needs to move beyond England Education plc to a new relationship with schools. • “The things that need doing are matters of undoing.”

24. Primary Head “There has got to be some intelligent and reasoned evaluation of what is happening in schools at the moment. It is all about meeting a narrow band of targets, everything is target-led and that is dangerous for the primary curriculum. Headship is being measured by public results. Someone has to take a good look at what is happening. It is being done on the hoof and if it will make the news.”

25. Secondary Head “They came in saying they’re not going to over-regulate and we’re going to be hands-off and according to needs, and then they over-regulate and do the exact opposite. The problems with the job are centrally and local authority imposed. So you’ve got to free schools up. If you free heads up I think more people will want to be one, creativity in leadership is of the essence and we’re not allowed to be creative.”

26. Reference The report School Headship: Present and Future, by Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson is available at: http://www.teachers.org.uk/story.php?id=3897 http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/education/research/ceer/publications.html#a