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1 May 2026

Tag: school leadership

DfE names providers for new school leader NPQs

The Department for Education has named nine organisations that will be lead providers for its reformed national professional qualifications (NPQs). The Ambition Institute, Education Development Trust, Harris Federation, Teach First and UCL Institute of Education are among those picked to deliver the qualifications. Following reforms, there will be six new NPQs on offer from September […]

Headteacher vacancies fall despite Covid exodus fears

Fears of a Covid-fuelled mass exodus of headteachers this summer may be wide of the mark, although new figures suggest more leaders left their jobs earlier in the pandemic. The government was warned about a “post-Covid exodus” of headteachers after a poll last year found nearly half were less than likely to remain in the […]

Trustees beware: know your legal duties!

If there is a single part of the academy system that needs our urgent attention, it is trusteeship, argues Leora Cruddas There is still much that is misunderstood about the differences between governing a local authority-maintained school, governing a single academy trust and governing a multi-academy trust. At its most extreme, this lack of understanding […]

Challenge: How governors can challenge school leaders effectively, by David Marriott

How can governors challenge school leaders effectively? That’s a mighty difficult question to answer in such a short book. Challenge is one of those ethereal aspects of governance: you know it when you see it. As the author says: “Going beyond paying lip service to ’challenge’ is this book’s key focus.” As a national leader […]

NAHT: Senior leader recruitment getting even worse

Schools are increasingly struggling to recruit senior leaders, with the proportion of heads failing to hire a new assistant head or principal almost double what it was last year. The NAHT union’s annual recruitment survey has found that 19 per cent of leaders failed to fill one of these vacancies this year, up from 10 […]

School business leaders are on the front line

It’s foolish not to include business managers in all aspects of school planning, argues Paul Whiteman Like many of our school business leader members, I take exception to school business leadership being described as a ‘back office’ function. It’s irritating and misleading in so many ways. SBLs aren’t typically getting their hands dirty in the […]

What qualities will future teachers need?

As facts become more easily accessible, the role of the teacher is changing. Teachers of the future will need both more authority… and less authority, argues Andy Hargreaves Many of us think a lot about the future, what it will be like to live in a world of robots, a world where there’s more technology, […]

Ofsted: Small private school leaders don’t know how to improve teaching

Small private schools are not failing Ofsted inspections because they refuse to teach British values, as the media has suggested, but because their leaders are often unqualified and don’t know how to improve teaching. Ofsted is responsible for inspecting 1,080 non-association private schools, schools that don’t belong to a membership organisation like the Independent Schools […]