A headteacher in a disadvantaged secondary school today is managing a 56-hour working week, an expanding safeguarding role, worsening student behaviour and a curriculum that is about to be reformed.
They are five times more likely to quit before retirement age than their predecessor was in 2010.
That matters because when they go, replacements are hard to find: over half of deputy heads report having no interest in stepping up.
Widening headteacher experience gap
The result is a widening experience gap.
A decade ago, heads in disadvantaged and affluent secondary schools had equivalent levels of experience; today, the gap in experience is three years. This is a profession with a problem, particularly for disadvantaged students.
Thankfully, the government aims to do something about it and set out its plan in its schools White Paper.
It intends to spend over £2.5 million on coaching, mentoring, wellbeing support and a place-based retention incentive of up to £15,000 for newly appointed heads in hard-to-staff areas.
These are sensible, evidence-informed measures.
However, they are all measures to help heads cope with an increasingly difficult job, with none on the other side of the ledger to make the job more manageable.
Supporting great heads into the schools that need them most has huge payoffs. Replacing an ineffective head with an effective one improves students’ results by the equivalent of two GCSE grades across all subjects.
In a typical 1,000-student secondary, retaining an effective head for five years is associated with an estimated £16 million in additional lifetime earnings for young people.
What impact will proposals have?
So, how do the proposals stack up?
The coaching and mentoring offer leans into research showing that leadership support is one of the most influential non-financial factors in whether teachers stay in their jobs.
New heads in isolated or challenging schools are precisely the group most likely to lack it, and it is possible that targeted coaching could reduce the early attrition that leads to the experience gap.
The pilot retention incentive for heads in challenging areas is generous: £15,000 before tax is nearly 20 per cent of an average head’s salary.
The difficulty is reach - and timing. Over 2,000 schools appoint a new head each year, and the £1 million budget only covers around 65 of them.
The government is rightly testing whether it matters before committing a large budget to it, but this is not a measure that will make a significant difference in the remainder of this Parliament.
A lack of evidence
There is also a deeper question about whether pay is the right lever for this group. The international evidence on financial retention incentives comes overwhelmingly from early career teachers in shortage subjects.
Heads are at a different career stage, and pay satisfaction has only a modest association with retention compared with workload, behaviour and the pastoral burden.
When leaders explain why they are considering leaving, they talk about the demands of the role, not the salary.
This is where the package falls short.
The White Paper asks heads to implement ambitious special educational needs and disabilities reforms, curriculum changes and a new accountability framework, which is a substantial programme of work on top of an already expanding role.
The support on offer will be welcome, but does nothing to reduce heads’ 56-hour working week, limit the scope of the job or address the pastoral and safeguarding burden that has grown rapidly for a decade.
The theory seems to be that heads can absorb more if they are better supported, but there may be limits to how far that theory stretches, particularly for heads without the support of a large multi-academy trust central team.
Potential benefits
To be fair to the government, there are elements elsewhere in their offer that could help on the demand side. ”Experts at hand”, the planned SEND support service, could reduce the time heads spend scrambling to find support for the growing number of pupils with SEND.
The forthcoming Child Poverty Strategy, if it delivers, might ease some of the social pressures that make schools the first responders in their communities. But these are promises of future implementation, not guarantees.
Whether they lighten the load on heads will depend on how they are designed and resourced.
Retaining effective leaders in the schools that need them most is one of the highest-return investments available in education.
This package is a step in the right direction - but if the government is serious about keeping good leaders in post, it needs to tackle what is driving them out, not just offer support to those still hanging on.
James Zuccolo is director for school workforce at the Education Policy Institute
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