Ministers have suggested rising numbers of assistant heads could be the place to target cost-cutting as schools are forced to make savings to fund future teacher pay rises. So what’s behind the rise, and is a cut do-able?
Schools Week investigates…
In evidence to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB), which makes recommendations on teacher pay and hours, the Department for Education (DfE) recommended pay rises totalling 6.5 per cent for teachers over the next three years.
But the department was clear there would be no more cash over and above what was announced at the three-year spending review earlier this year.
While savings required will vary by school, the government said “several common themes have emerged” from those who have saved money.
That includes “reconsidering the composition of their leadership teams”.
“There has been a 45 per cent increase in assistant headteacher positions since 2011-12, indicating some room to drive better value from spending,” the government highlighted.
Rise of the assistant headteacher
Analysis of DfE figures show there were 22,652 full-time equivalent (FTE) assistant heads in the 2011-12 academic year, rising to 32,905 in 2024-25.
Pupil numbers have also risen in that time – but only by 11 per cent. It means there is one assistant head for every 255 pupils, compared to one for every 337 in 2011-12.
Professor Qing Gu, director of the UCL Centre for Educational Leadership, said reasons for the growth “might include larger school size in the secondary sector, with more school mergers and the growth of multi-academy trusts.”
The average number of pupils in a state-funded secondary has risen from 939 in 2015-16, to 1,062 last year, DfE data shows.
‘Schools are doing more’
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the school leaders’ union ASCL, said pupil population growth had also “been accompanied by ever-rising expectations on schools and a fierce accountability regime – while schools have frequently had to pick up the pieces from gaps elsewhere in local support services”.
He said: “Assistant headteachers take on a range of whole-school responsibilities in areas such as behaviour and attendance, inclusion, and wellbeing.”
Di’Iasio added that parental complaints were increasingly taking up senior leadership time. The number of complaints to Ofsted and also the Teacher Regulation Agency have soared in recent years.
But the biggest growth in assistant head positions was in primary schools, and occurred in the early 2010s.
Toby Greany, professor of education at the University of Nottingham, said this was when overall pupil numbers were “increasing most sharply…and when many schools were becoming academies and when local authority services were reducing”.
Between 2012-13 and 2015-16, the workforce increased by an average of 1,365 additional FTE assistant heads each year, peaking in 2014-15 with more than 2,075.
Since 2016-17, growth has averaged at about 600 annually, but there was a notable spike of 1,150 a year across 2022-24.
Greany said this jump was largely in secondary – and could either be due to rising pupil numbers or to meet post-pandemic pressures.
Recruitment and retention factor
John Howson, who runs DataforEducation, added that schools struggling to recruit heads of department – typically in shortage subjects – may also use the leadership pay scale “to attract them to apply for such posts”.
Meanwhile, Dr Cat Scutt, deputy chief executive of education and research at the Chartered College of Teaching, said that as well as being a response to challenging recruitment times, it could also reflect an era where headship is “perhaps increasingly unappealing”.
“Developing AHT and other specialist leadership roles has,” she added, “been a mechanism to avoid losing excellent teachers and develop a pipeline of future leaders”.
Assistant heads ‘mostly sinking’
But studies show assistant heads say they are also overworked.
The University of Nottingham’s Sustainable School Leadership report, published in September, asked leaders if they are “thriving, surviving or sinking”.
Assistant and deputy heads were more likely to be “mostly sinking” (11.4 per cent) than headteachers (7.1 per cent). Around 30 per cent were “sometimes” or “mostly” sinking.
Greany says this makes clear that “leaders today are hugely stretched”, and warned against assuming there are “easy savings for schools to make”.
On the DfE’s leadership saving comments, Di’Iasio added: “Make no mistake this is a cut, not an efficiency saving. It means having to do more with less, which risks professional burnout and poorer staff retention.”
Scutt stressed growth in assistant heads “has been driven by need” and is “not something that schools can just cut without having a considerable impact and increasing costs elsewhere”.
However, Howson said assistant head numbers may fall anyway with declining rolls, as schools “manage the turnover, so that if somebody leaves they’re not replaced”.
Your thoughts