The education system has lost its focus on leadership, the boss of one of the country’s biggest school leadership training organisations has said.
James Toop, the chief executive of Ambition School Leadership, said there was a “bottleneck” of people moving into headship, and that leaders were not given enough time to turnaround underperforming schools.
In an interview with Tes, Mr Toop said that the education system urgently needed to “reignite the debate about leadership”.
He said that while Justine Greening had put a welcome spotlight on teacher professionalism during her time as education secretary, school leadership had been neglected recently. “We’ve lost that focus on leadership,” he told Tes.
Mr Toop said that if England developed its school leadership capability, it could replicate the success of the London Challenge across the country.
“How do we start to do that nationwide? I think we do that through the critical mass of leaders that we have in the system starting to work together.”
He also said that better leadership training could solve the teacher retention crisis. “There are so many people who we could be keeping,” he said. “The two biggest reasons why people leave are quality of line management and lack of professional development opportunities. If we can get the leadership right, we can retain many more of our best people.”
Mr Toop said there was a “bottleneck” of people moving into headship, as well as a shortage of quality candidates to be heads of department in English, maths and science. He suggested the high stakes accountability system was putting people off.
“We don’t give people enough time to make changes,” he said. “It takes you three plus years to really start to turnaround a school; we need to find ways to give people time to really make those changes.”
This is an edited article from the 6 April edition of Tes. Subscribers can read the full article here. This week’s Tes magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
