The riddle introduces an article by Lynn Gee describing the findings of her MBA thesis in which she compared two groups of managers. One group consisted of five primary headteachers while the other was made up of five senior industry managers. Ms Gee found that both groups shared similar perceptions about their role and carried out the same sort of tasks but managers in industry had a clear identity of themselves as managers while the primary headteachers did not.

And this is where I come to my confession. I have been a headteacher for many years and for the past 15 I have been told that I am a manager.

However, I have never felt like a manager and am still unclear as to how I reconcile my management role with the many other tasks that fall to me as a head. Assuming that everyone else knew something that I didn’t, I have kept silent about my confusion but now that Ms Gee has given me the confidence to come out of the closet, I declare that, like her headteacher group, I am the possessor of my own identity crisis.

It’s not that I haven’t been trying. On my bookshelves are Charles Handy and even Stephen Covey with his nauseating Mormon puritanism. Another volume carries the blurb: “I’m a One Minute Manager. I call myself that because it takes very little time for me to get very big results from people.”

Oh, come on. Where do these guys get such an inflated opinion of themselves?

I blame my confusion on a purple-covered document from the mid-seventies entitled, The Role of the Headteacher. It emphasised that the main duty of a headteacher was to teach. Under such an influence, I regarded anything which kept me in an office as faintly sinful and encouraged the growth of teacher confidence as I went about my business in classrooms.

Managerialism brought development plans, annual reports, appraisal, career paths, school improvement and policies about everything from the worthwhile to the downright stupid. All required additional time but nobody changed my title. I was still a headteacher, not considered worthy of the gravitas and status which is conferred on secondary heads by the title of rector.

I remained a first among equals whose influence depended on my ability to teach and face up to classroom crises. Health and safety, anti-bullying and the expectation of accessibility meant even less time to be a manager. I patrol playgrounds, picking up litter and stray jackets as I go, or check the dining room, collecting knee-high mince stains on my trousers.

Later, parents approach me to ask why their offspring’s lunch box has disappeared followed by the janitor with news that half the cleaners are sick and what should we do about it. The whole day can be filled with such low-level, yet urgent, activities although the real stopper is sudden teacher illness requiring the headteacher to abandon his plans and take over the class - in a primary school no teacher has free periods.

It is this curious mix of daily activities, some teaching, some managing and some just childminding, which is seen by Lynn Gee’s research as causing a crisis of identity among primary heads. Industry managers involve themselves in managerial activities only - and that is what their companies expect - while the nature of the job ensures that the primary head can only be a part-time manager.

Thanks to Lynn Gee, I now feel that I am not alone in my confusion. It’s just a pity that this continuing “crisis of identity” is a major cause of stress and depression among primary headteachers.

“Headteachers as Managers” by Lynn Gee is in the winter 2001 edition of the newsletter of the Scottish Council for Research in Education.