One statistic revealed in 2016 should make all stakeholders in education sit up and take notice. 

It was in the Education Policy Institute’s (EPI) report, Teacher Workload and Professional Development in England’s Secondary Schools: insights from Talis, and it was this: “England has one of the highest proportions of teachers under 30, and only 48 per cent of its teachers have more than 10 years’ experience.”

Internationally, England is an outlier when it comes to teacher experience. In other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, on average, 64 per cent of teachers have more than 10 years’ experience. 

This comparison caused the EPI to note: “The relatively young teaching workforce in England may therefore be a signal that teachers are experiencing “burn-out” before they even step into leadership roles.”

This is an issue taken up by a more recent joint report by The Future Leaders Trust, Teaching Leaders and Teach First, The School Leadership Challenge. We are, according to the authors of this report, heading for a school leadership shortfall in England of between 14,000 and 19,000 school leaders by 2022. 

This frightening figure is arrived at with the calculation that 8,000 executive heads and chief executive officers will be needed to run academy trusts (where are those economies of scale the government promised?); there is currently a need for 2,000 to 3,000 additional leaders and the predicted retirement or early exit of 8,000 school leaders from the profession. (Here, the government should take note: half of existing school leaders are expected to leave education in the next six years.)

So, we have a problem. We are not retaining teachers in the profession. Too many are leaving early in their careers or in mid-career, as they face the prospect of a working life that is unremitting, all-consuming and completely exhausting. 

This leaves too few experienced teachers able to support and guide their younger, less experienced colleagues in the challenging early years of their career and, as the EPI suggest, it cuts the supply chain of teachers to go into leadership. 

Even more worrying are the results of the qualitative research in The School Leadership Challenge report, which reveals that teachers do not want to become leaders because of the high-stakes accountability that leaders work under, combined with the breadth of additional responsibilities and the distance from classroom teaching. 

As one middle leader said to me last week, “I can only do my job properly by working all the hours God sends. I can’t take on anything more, and I don’t want to”.

But it is not only excessive workload that is a barrier to teachers progressing onto the leadership ladder. Another issue is that the recruitment of school leaders is inconsistent and school governors lack experience in recruiting to these posts.

Because recruitment is done on a school-by-school basis and many governors may recruit only one school leader in their period of office, there is perhaps a tendency to look for the qualities of the previous headteacher, rather than being open to new ways, and new types of leader.

The sad fact of the matter is, in 2017, you are proportionately less likely to progress to a school leadership role if you are black and/or a woman.

(When you consider that nearly 76 per cent of teachers in state-funded schools in England are women, but only 66 per cent of heads are female, and while 87 per cent of teachers are white British but 93 per cent of heads are white, you can see just how far the scales are tipped.)

So, what needs to be done?

As a profession, teaching lacks a culture of development and feedback, with access to continuing professional development that would support, nurture and develop leaders at all career stages, from new teachers to middle leaders to headteachers.  

Leadership potential is not being recognised early enough, and not supported well enough. 

Too many of England’s schools, as professor Howard Stevenson of Nottingham University asserts, have become compliant rather than collaborative places to work. 

A compliant school workforce has things done to it, rather than done in consultation with it. Compliant schools are places where the professional expertise of teachers, and their views and experiences, are undervalued. Teachers are directed rather than consulted. 

Too much time is spent on bureaucracy, which adds nothing to the quality of the teaching or the pupils’ learning. 

In many cases, compliant schools are led by under-confident leaders who, insufficiently supported themselves, pass down the accountability pressures onto their staff. It is not surprising that in these schools, teachers put their heads down, get on with their work and vow never to become leaders themselves because the role models in front of them are not appealing.

We need more collaborative schools where school leaders and their staff work together. Schools where experience is shared, talent is nurtured, and where continuing professional development is timely and targeted at professional needs. The leaders in collaborative schools know the most relevant research about effective educational leadership. 

They know, for example, that the practice of grading lessons is a nonsense; as Robert Coe, professor in the school of education and director of the centre for evaluation and monitoring at Durham University has demonstrated, lesson observations that aim to identify above-average and below-average teachers, and their impact on student learning, produce judgements that are, at best (with trained observers and moderation of judgements), right about 60 per cent of the time.

In a report by ATL’s leadership section AMiE, Business as Usual: the increasing corporatisation of education leadership and management, we highlight how the appetite for leadership roles is being crushed by the adoption of oppressive corporate practices in schools - ones which the business world has largely abandoned. 

We argue that ethical leadership is increasingly necessary to counterbalance the rise of a culture of business-style compliance in schools.  

School leaders need to nurture and empower their staff, so they feel able to stay in the profession and aspire to become leaders themselves.

Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of the ATL union. She tweets as @MaryBoustedATL

For more columns by Mary, visit her back-catalogue.  

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