New heads need more than a one-off qualification, say charities

Two leading education charities have teamed up to devise a new programme to help “accelerate” aspiring headteachers’ careers and support them when they get their first big job.

Teach First and the Reach Foundation want a model that goes “beyond” one-off training opportunities, such as the government-backed national professional qualification for headship (NPQH).

James Toop, the chief executive of Teach First, said while plans were at an early stage, the scheme would crucially feature ongoing support from peer networks once new heads were in-post.

It comes as Teacher Tapp and SchoolDash research last week warned the proportion of deputy and assistant heads aspiring to headship had plummeted from 55 to 37 per cent over the past nine years.

“We definitely see a gap for an accelerated headship programme that really supports people, goes beyond the NPQH to develop the next generation of headteachers, but then also critically supports them when they’re in role,” said Toop.

“You do your NPQH, you get your role, but then there’s no support. There isn’t that network.”

Teach First has not decided what form the programme will take, and insists it will be “co-produced” with the sector.

Framework drawn up

However, it has drawn up a framework for the scheme, based on the traits it already looks for in “changemaker” recruits to its teacher training programme.

This framework focuses on four verbs: acting, learning, connecting and imagining.

The programme will also draw on the charity’s long-established model for teacher training, which keeps alumni linked through professional networks.

Ed Vainker, a Teach First alumnus who set up the Reach Foundation and Reach Academy Feltham, said there was an opportunity to “reframe teaching itself as much more of a leadership endeavour, and a thing that develops leadership qualities and skills which everyone kind of knows implicitly, but we’ve maybe gone away from articulating”.

A number of options are on the table for how the scheme will be funded.

It would be “great to see government innovating”, Toop said, but Teach First was also keen to look at apprenticeship funding routes, philanthropy and corporate funding.

Challenges ahead

Any organisation seeking to boost headteacher recruitment has its work cut out.

Last year, a poll by the NAHT school leaders’ union found the proportion of senior leaders aspiring to headship had dropped to 20 per cent, the lowest since it began surveys in 2016.

The reasons for the decline are many and varied. Serving leaders cite workload pressures, the weight of accountability and increasing demands outside the school gate.

Vainker said the creation of multi-academy trusts had also made headship “a less attractive job”.

“It was always a high accountability, but also quite a high autonomy role. So you had a lot of accountability, but you had a lot of space to play. And over the last 15, 20 years…headship has been devalued, I think, by the growth of trusts and the fact that there are so many more layers.

“And actually reframing school leadership, talking about imagining, talking about learning, about connecting, it becomes a bit more of a kind of creative endeavour. A bit more agency, a bit less ‘you just need to do these things’.”

Reach already runs several local leadership development programmes for aspiring heads, dubbed x100 initiatives.

The schemes aim to prepare an extra 100 people to lead schools and are “directed towards embracing local assets and addressing regional challenges”. They run in areas such as the south west, the east of England and Manchester.

The programmes are commissioned by trusts and councils, with a third of funding coming from philanthropy, a third from the commissioning body and a third from the school.

A tap on the shoulder

Andrea Daubney, the assistant director of education at Manchester City Council, said the schemes enabled school leaders “to see themselves as leaders in their community, and that they are part of a bigger network.

“You can become very isolated as a school leader  … and the problems in school or challenges in school sometimes need to be solved by using resource that doesn’t sit within your four walls.”

But funding and flexibility were needed. Daubney said Manchester was “quite fortunate” to still have the capacity to do this, “but in other local authorities, I know they’ve got so much less capacity.”

“We know our schools really well, and that supports this. My team is able to say, ‘there’s a great deputy at this school, but they don’t necessarily feel they are ready for headship’, so we’ve ‘tapped them on the shoulder’ for the x100 and that’s been really successful.”

She said some people were put off leadership because schools were sometimes expected to be “all things to all people, more so since the pandemic. This level of accountability can be seen by some potential headteachers as a real blocker.”

The government’s schools white paper, published in February, set out a targeted package of interventions for “excellence in leadership”.

It pledged an extra £500,000 a year for improved early headship coaching, which the government said would reach about 500 more heads, particularly from disadvantaged areas.

Newly appointed headteachers will also be offered retention payments of up to £15,000 to work in certain areas. A planned pilot that begins next year will aim to help heads “stay in the areas that need them most”.

Toop said the pledge “acknowledges a little bit of the problem, but is a small solution in what needs to be a much more holistic, systemic solution to leadership development and tackling the leadership pipeline challenge”.

Daubney said that “some of the white paper reforms and the links between best start in life strategy, families-first agenda in social care, potentially are there to support schools.

“However, if schools are not involved in the planning of it right from the beginning, it will just become a bolt-on.”

Don’t codify headship too much

Key to Teach First and Reach’s plans is place – the role schools play in their communities, and equipping leaders to face the differing challenges that different areas pose.

Orion Education, which runs eight schools in south east London and Kent, has been thinking a lot about leadership development.

Fiona Kelly, the director of primary at the trust, said: “There is an awful lot of CPD out there now, and there is an awful lot of knowledge around cognitive load and things like that.

“But what has been missing, we felt, is the wider development of the person in the leader.”

Kelly said schools had a “pivotal role in a community…so we’ve done a lot of work with the Reach Foundation about how we connect those two things, academic rigour, but also wellbeing, and wider than that, the issues that our communities are facing.”

She noted that some of the communities the trust served in London had “virtually no agency, they have no voice…but the school does”.

“[It’s about] getting leaders excited about that … that’s why you come into teaching. It isn’t just to get your maths and your English grades. It’s to make a difference.

“Headteacher jobs are really tricky, but they’re very exciting. If we codify them too much, they’re not going to be as exciting.”