Among the unexpected difficulties of losing one’s job, Mark Gibson says, is the awkwardness at parties. There is that inevitable moment when the person you are speaking to asks: “So, what do you do?”
“I’m stuck calling myself an ex-headteacher,” one jobless head told him. “I need to move on.”
Dr Gibson, senior lecturer in educational leadership and management at the University of Gloucestershire, is studying the impact of redundancy on headteachers.
There has been relatively little research into this area, in part because redundancy agreements tend to include non-disclosure clauses. However, it is becoming increasingly common for heads to lose their jobs following poor exam results or a bad inspection.
Heads have named the trend “football manager’s syndrome”, after the hiring and firing culture of the national game. And as it takes hold, more and more people are becoming concerned about the impact that redundancy can have on school leaders.
“There are big issues of self-esteem,” Dr Gibson says. “The headteacher post is quite high-status, and then they’ve lost that status.”
But, according to Sion Humphreys, specialist adviser for the NAHT headteachers’ union, job loss rarely comes as a surprise.
“I think anyone who becomes a headteacher, particularly nowadays, realises that people lose their jobs for various reasons,” he says. “It’s not just about capability. People can lose their job because it’s just not working out in that one particular context. Being a headteacher isn’t the job for life that it’s been in previous times.”
Malcolm Trobe, interim general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, agrees. “I’ve seen a head who’s been in a school for six months,” he says. “Then the school was taken over by a multi-academy trust and he was removed.”
But, no matter how much one might understand the reasoning behind the decision, Mr Humphreys says, it can still be hard not to take it personally. He lost his own job when his school took the decision to remove its layer of deputy heads.
“You still go through a feeling of rejection,” he explains. “You think: what am I going to do? Am I going to get another job? What sort of job? I’m quite a robust character, but there are quiet moments when you question your own competence. How might others perceive this? They might well see me as a failure.”
Crises of confidence
Dr Gibson observed similar crises of confidence among his interviewees. One head had trouble telling her children the news. Another struggled to tell her mother.
A third sought guidance from a higher authority. “Her husband called the priest round,” Dr Gibson says. “It sounds like something out of The Exorcist. But he talked some sense into her.”
Part of the problem, Dr Gibson believes, is the abruptness of the process. One of the heads he spoke to was pulled out of a senior leadership meeting in order to be told that she had lost her job.
“She didn’t have time to say goodbye to staff,” Dr Gibson says. “She never had the opportunity to speak to people and celebrate some of the good things they’d done.”
For Jo Riley, head of Randal Cremer Primary in East London, this is a very real fear. “All the time, anyone could summon you to the office and tell you: ‘You’re not making a quick enough impact - you’re going’,” she says.
This means that, often, heads do not have a chance to prepare emotionally for the change. “These are people in their forties,” Dr Gibson says. “They came into teaching at a time when, once you became a head, that’s the zenith of your career.”
He believes that the much-invoked football-manager comparison is invalid. “When you become a football manager, you know the chop is going to come,” he says. “And the remuneration is massive. It’s very different from the salary levels you’re talking about as a headteacher.”
Snakes and ladders
However, practical concerns inevitably take precedence over pride. “You think: I’m a big boy now. I’m going to have to sort this out for myself,” Mr Humphreys says. “Reality kicks in. What am I going to do to pay my mortgage? How am I going to support my daughters at university?”
He talks about the snakes-and-ladder principle of career rebuilding: “It might be that you’ve come down the snake and lost your headship, so you have to go for an assistant headship or a deputy headship and try and go up the ladder again.
“Rebuilding your career by taking a step backwards. Rebuilding your confidence and perhaps your reputation, and then going back into headship.”
But, says Mr Trobe, this is not an easy option. “It’s very difficult to step back into lower-key posts,” he says. “There isn’t a pattern of doing it.”
And, says Ms Riley, it would require a shift in perspective. “If it came to it, I’d go back into class teaching, because I love it,” she says. “But I also love being a head, because you get to see the bigger picture. It would be very difficult to relinquish that.”
