How difficult is it to run a tough school? Answer: enough to overwhelm many promising candidates without proper support. That’s why the Department for Education and Skills has set up a course to train the next generation of leaders for what many consider the bottom end of the market.

This term, 13 deputy headteachers will be seconded to work for a year as trainee leaders - with salaries paid by the DfES - to learn the art of headship in “challenging” schools. They are the second cohort of such trainees. “It demands exceptional skills to make such schools high-performing - but it is do-able,” says one senior DfES official. “In England, we are just beginning to identify the ingredients of high performance in traditionally low-achieving schools.”

One person who seems to have the recipe is Paul Grant, who was, until five and a half years ago, head of humanities at Robert Clack school in the London borough of Barking. Then, controversially, the governors offered him the headship because his department was succeeding against the odds in an otherwise struggling school. Under his leadership, GCSE top grades have jumped from 17 to 46 per cent, the average A-level points score has gone from 10 to 14, and key stage 3 level 5s have soared from 29 per cent to 80 per cent.

Last September, Mr Grant welcomed the chance to pass on his insights to Lynne Dawes, then deputy head at Stratford school in Newham and a trainee in the first year of the scheme. She was so determined to get a place that she resigned when her head refused to let her go because he had no one to replace her. “I was happy as a deputy, but the scheme was too good to miss, so I gambled on resigning,” she says. “I have no regrets and there are no hard feelings.” When she arrived at Robert Clack, she was given an office and areas of responsibility and joined senior management meetings.

“It was like getting an extra deputy head for the year,” says Mr Grant, who was one of the heads who pushed for the scheme to be introduced. “I was adamant that Lynne’s secondment had to be meaningful for her, so she had to be fully involved in the running of the school.”

Ms Dawes sat in with Mr Grant while he handled personnel matters, dealt with awkward parents or negotiated with the local authority and the unions. Later, the pair spent time analysing their decisions and discussing consequences and possible alternatives.

“I have tried to give her a clear view about behaviour, how pupils and staff should be motivated, how relationships should be developed with governors, LEAs and outside agencies,” says Mr Grant.

Ms Dawes says: “When I met Paul, I knew I would learn a lot from him. I negotiated my role with him and his two deputies. To a certain extent, I did a deputy’s job. But I also spent time questioning Paul about why he did certain things, what he was trying to achieve. I scrutinised his style of leadership, how he set the tone, how he reinforced the ethos he wanted to create. I had my own office because we felt it was important that I establish a presence in the school. I was conscious that I had to have a substantive role.

“In tough schools, you need a range of approaches to get the best out of children. The impact of the environment makes it difficult: parents are supportive but they sometimes don’t know how to give practical help. In most schools, one issue dominates at any time, but here you have to cope with many issues all the time. Paul is good at motivating staff and pupils. Senior managers too often run down staff - mistakenly, they see them as the problem. Staff must understand the values of the school. A lot of small things that Paul did during the year gave them and me a clear vision of where the school is going.”

She adds: “At the start of the year, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a head. But by the end of my time at Robert Clack, I knew it was a job I could do. Studying for the national professional qualification for headship (NPQH)was something you had to do to get a piece of paper, but this trainee scheme was about dealing with things as they really are.”

This term, Ms Dawes starts work as an associate head at Kingswood school, Havering, helping to support the management team. She had decided against applying for posts during her training year because they would have involved Easter starts. “And I wanted to see the scheme through,” she says.

At Broad Oak high school, Bury, relationships were even closer. Headteacher Andrew Mackenzie referred to trainee Bernard Knowles as associate head, and the two shared an office. “It became a drag only when we both wanted to use the phone or the computer at the same time,” says Mr Mackenzie. “But I had no problem about sharing; anything that walked through the door he was well placed to tackle with me.”

Under Mr Mackenzie’s leadership, Broad Oak has found the secret of success in a challenging environment. Despite serving the most deprived area of Bury, it has raised its top-grade GCSE percentage from 20 in 1998 to 36 per cent last year. And Bernard Knowles relished the chance of being party to negotiations between school, authority and community. “That is often denied you as a deputy head,” he says. “You don’t always get a taste of everything in the job.”

For four years he had been deputy head at the high-achieving St Hilda’s, Liverpool (77 per cent top-grade GCSEs). “There, it was parental expectations that brought pressures,” he says. “Bury is a different world - you need a whole raft of strategies to cope.”

Both men found their mentoring sessions beneficial. Mr Mackenzie says: “It was useful to me to sit down with Bernard and articulate my rationale. Headship can be lonely, so the mentoring helped us both.”

DfES officials are delighted with the way the scheme has benefited trainees and host schools. Three of the 12 trainees who began last September have started headships this term, while a fourth has been appointed as an acting head. Most of the rest have won posts as associate heads, giving extra support to management teams while awaiting a chance to lead their own schools. And most did not want to go back to their previous posts because they believed it was time to move on to new challenges.

This internship model has been so successful that it might bring about a change to the NPQH. Indeed, Whitehall and the National College for School Leadership are now considering the introduction of a one-term internship as part of the qualification.