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”.
We also had ‘Senior Teachers’ when I started and they took on some of the roles that Assistant Headteachers now fulfil. There are no Senior Teachers anymore and the expectations and nature of UPS 1 to 3, is not the same thing.
Was there any mention of the amount of work now expected in schools that used to be done by DfE, Local Authorities and other statutory authorities like Social Services? Not to mention the additional responsibilities demanded of schools by the innumerable government initiatives! Yes, cash has been saved elsewhere but only with the expectation that schools, who are at the bottom of the pile, will pick up the work.
Recruitment and retention are cited as an excuse to promote staff to senior positions. However, a consequence of this is that these staff members end up teaching less due to their senior roles.
So effectively, by trying to retain ‘good’ teachers you end up not utilising them for teaching anyway by promoting them. So what is the point.
This is the case at my previous MAT (Dixons). The number of executive principals and assistant principal is beyond belief. It is a top heavy. Some positions are created just to retain staff but then the staff don’t teach as much.
There may be a case for too many SLT in some schools (I have seen many a barely competent teacher moved to the higher payscales, as they are promoted beyond their intelligence)…but the good ones are worth their weight in gold and do so much good for their school.
Assistant Headteachers are already exploited in terms of duties and workload. If they are cut for budget reasons, the can will be kicked further down the road to middle leaders and the same situation will play out in a few years at most. An increase in teachers leaving the profession will happen at an even quicker rate and no one will be any better off. The removal of essential services in local authorities have lead to this and will lead to more schools forced into being privatised with academy CEO’s cashing in. It is a guarantee this happens before the next general election unless schools receive much needed funding.
Or just fund the pay increase as is the case in every other sector. Perhaps putting some value/investment in education will reap rewards in future? To imply that assistant heads are disposable to fund a pay increase is disgusting.