“All too often (headteachers) seemed to consider their own needs last, if at all, and failed to reflect their development needs in staff development plans,” says Dr Derek Lewis, director of the project which was jointly sponsored by Unilever, Understanding British Industry. OFSTED and the Department for Education.

Senior school managers also want more quality control and a clearer national policy on school management development. They complained that the increasing range of providers of such training and the reduction of support from local authorities made it harder to plan staff development.

“Most heads and deputies considered they had no reliable way to assess the quality of provision and wanted a national quality assurance system for management training and development,” says Derek Lewis, former head of The Lord Silkin School, Telford, and a consultant to the Secondary Heads Association.

There was overwhelming support for the Headlamp mentoring scheme for new heads but some wanted it extended to all heads and deputies.

“The increased responsibilities that have been devolved to schools through the Education Reform Act and subsequent legislation have not been reflected in a similar increase in development training,” Dr Lewis concludes.

In order to study of the development and training needs of heads, deputies and chairs of governors, questionnaires were sent to 1,100 maintained schools.

A quarter of the heads replied, 49 heads and chairs of governors were interviewed and regional meetings were held with 59 heads and deputies.

Some heads felt professionally isolated, either for geographical reasons or because they or their neighbours were grant-maintained. One in five GM heads felt the lack of advisory support on management issues.

Deputy heads complained that their particular needs were not being addressed at a national level. They felt the definition of their role was vague and often task-oriented. They rarely had the benefit of planned professional development and had few opportunities to prepare for headship.

Chairs of governors wanted clarification of their roles and responsibilities (see left).

Many of the heads, deputies and governors replying felt that governors and senior managers should participate more in joint management development activities to promote teamwork and improve mutual understanding, More than three-quarters of heads claimed to have a systematic policy for identifying the development needs of senior managers but few could be precise about how this was done. Appraisal and discussion were mentioned most as ways in which senior managers’ training needs were pinpointed.

But some heads admitted that their needs were identified last, if at all. Many did not answer the questions about how their own development needs were identified and met. What Dr Lewis calls “a significant minority” did not consider them sufficiently important to use limited in-service training funds on.

Most heads who had been in post for more than 15 years did not respond to the question about their management development. Among these very experienced heads who had also undergone an OFSTED inspection, three-quarters said they did not need any help or made no response to the question.

The majority of those replying considered the increasing range of training providers and the reduction in local authority management training made it harder to plan staff development. “The reduction of both good LEA and HMI provision was regrettedIhowever, heads felt that in the past headteacher development had not always been well provided by many LEAs.”

The training needs senior managers mentioned most frequently were: * Monitoring and associated issues (mentioned by 70 per cent of heads) including accountability, evaluation, quality assurance, budget monitoring and target setting; * Team building (56 per cent of heads) including leadership, delegation, counselling, communication, induction for new managers and staff training and development; *Information technology as a management tool (31 per cent) for budget control, timetabling, resource management and record-keeping.

Other needs identified by senior managers included appraisal and curriculum development training, help with time management and health and safety issues, pay strategies, management qualifications and (presumably if all else fails) preparation for retirement.

Developing Senior Managers by Derek Lewis, Pounds 5 from UBI National Education Programmes Unit, co Rank Xerox (UK) Ltd, Northdale House, North Circular Road, London NW10 7UH. UBI is a project of the CBI Education Foundation.