In your Diary (TES, November 25), you claim that the National College for School Leadership’s advice to new heads to spend time on their own learning, ideally in a community of other heads, is “banal, patronising”
and “bad”. Instead the Diary advises new heads to be “available at all times” in the school.
I find this a worrying statement. Those who actually do the job say that being a head can be a lonely role and that spending time with other school leaders can be of huge benefit in helping to cope with complex demands placed upon new headteachers.
Advising a new head to be available at all times and not to seek advice from others or attend to their own development is not only bad advice but a recipe for exhaustion, isolation and failure.
Steve Munby,
NCSL chief executive
National College for School Leadership, Marketing and Communications
Lime House, Ruddington Fields Business Park, Nottingham