In Argyll and Bute Council, it’s being called “collective leadership”. In North Lanarkshire Council, it is known as the “multi-establishment leadership model”. In Fife - where it was briefly considered for a group of schools in the East Neuk before the council decided to delay its decision amid a storm of protest - it was referred to as “cluster leadership”.

The nomenclature differs but the concept is similar: increasingly, Scottish councils are considering bringing together primaries and secondaries under the leadership of the same headteacher.

In Scotland, such arrangements are rare. Shared headship - where one headteacher is responsible for leading a number of primary schools - has become increasingly popular. It is seen as being preferable to closing small rural schools or having a head who, as well as being responsible for running a school, also has a teaching commitment. 

Now, however, councils are increasingly exploring the possibility of bringing primary and secondary schools together under the leadership of one headteacher. 

The councils pushing to introduce these leadership models argue that they will encourage cross-sector working and smooth transitions for pupils, and that the “super-head” roles - the shorthand term often favoured by local papers - that are created will command higher salaries, and will therefore be more attractive. They also promise an increased number of other promoted posts below that of headteacher, which will offer career progression for classroom teachers and allow aspiring school leaders to cut their teeth.

But the fear among parents and Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, is that this sudden enthusiasm for “executive headship” is being driven by the savings that can be achieved by shedding primary headteacher posts, and is not in the best interest of pupils, whatever the rhetoric.

• Background: Teachers strongly oppose ‘executive heads’ plan
• Interview: We need big changes in education, says new Glasgow boss
• Long read: Is this the way to get teachers into rural schools?

Councils that fold savings into their school leadership plans add credence to these arguments. North Lanarkshire, for example, has attached a saving of almost £500,000 to the creation of its “multi-establishment leadership model”, which would mean one head “leading two or more establishments, comprising any arrangement of early years, primary and secondary education facilities”. 

According to the council, these heads “will be supported by depute headteachers, which will grow in number” and the “overriding ambition is that the multi-establishment headships will derive educational and operational benefits”. But it adds that “this role will also achieve a saving as there will be fewer headteachers”.

Meanwhile, in papers published in June 2021, Argyll and Bute Council put forward its proposals for its “cluster leadership model” - as it was then known - saying “there will be no cost demands and implementing the model could deliver potential savings when implemented”.

It envisaged one executive headteacher leading up to eight schools (Dunoon Grammar and seven primaries were earmarked as one of three potential “early adopter clusters”), with at least one promoted member of staff retained in each school. It said some of these leadership posts could be given the title “head of school”.

Now, the model has been rebranded the “collective leadership model”. Argyll and Bute Council is saying that “individual school collectives have not been pre-decided” and that communities will be consulted “in depth” before decisions are made. It is also insisting that while headteachers will be renamed “heads of school”, they will have no teaching commitment, will spend “the same time there as they do in the current system” and could even be paid more because each head of school would “be responsible for a specialist area” across the collective, such as early learning, which could boost salaries. 

This suggests investment and the council says the collective leadership model has not been designed as a cost-saving exercise. But the EIS says the council has not shared any figures and teachers working in the area remain unconvinced. Earlier this month, 85 per cent of 385 EIS members in Argyll and Bute who responded to a survey opposed the introduction of executive head posts.

Alison Palmer, the local association secretary, said the overwhelming feedback was “categorical opposition to the proposals”, with the EIS saying “the educational rationale for this proposal is entirely insufficient”. Palmer added: “Our members cannot see the benefit of the proposals, other than for the purposes of budget cuts.”

Jim Thewliss is the general secretary of secondary headteachers’ body School Leaders Scotland. He says executive headships should only be embarked upon for “good educational reasons” - not because it is more cost-effective to have one head lead multiple schools.

“If you are going to amalgamate a primary and secondary because it is cost-effective to do that, then what you are doing is taking two systems and melding them into one for non-educational reasons.”

That set-up would lack the foundation stone that long-established all-through schools have: a strong education rationale for their existence, says Thewliss. And under those circumstances - when there is a lack of understanding about why something is being done - it is hard to take people with you.

Ultimately, he says, the result is that young people are disadvantaged.

Of course, bringing together secondaries and primaries under the leadership of an executive head is not unusual in England. And there have been some success stories, says Alma Harris, a professor emeritus at Swansea University in Wales, who is internationally known for her research on educational leadership.

Equally, though, Harris - who is also a member of the Scottish government’s International Council of Education Advisers - says that the idea that you can take a headteacher who has been successful in one context and expect that they will be able to replicate that over multiple contexts has largely been disproven. Super-heads were trialled in England and had “very little success”, she says.

It may seem logical and efficient to put one head in charge of multiple schools but Harris warns that this fails to take into account the emotional investment that staff and communities make in their schools - and in their school leaders. And the pandemic will likely have strengthened these bonds.

The incoming leader would not just have to manage the amalgamation of the schools but also “win the hearts and minds of staff and parents who are used to a very different sort of leadership”, which would require a highly skilled individual.

“The school community will experience a sense of loss for what was, and a fear about what is now,” says Harris. “That’s just the way human nature is. People take huge pride in a school - pride in the entity it is and its place in the community - and then, suddenly, it is part of a group of schools with one headteacher. 

“There’s that loss of that community status and that pride in that individual school. That has to be carefully managed.”

She adds: “[Executive headship] is not a panacea - it is not just a case of putting schools together, or one head is better than five. It is more complex than that and there has to be an element of caution. 

“We can rush to practical or rational solutions but they don’t take account of the emotional toll.” 

The danger, says Harris, is that the expected benefits - like sharing of resources or improved transitions - do not “arise as we might anticipate” and that the change “destabilises the school”.

“The parents are the first teachers. Their opinion and involvement in that school is critically important to its improvement. That’s what you can’t lose - that’s the high-stakes bit of this. Their engagement and involvement make that school what it is - leaders come and go but community stays.”

But Harris also says there are no good or bad ideas in education and it is how these ideas come to fruition that matters. If councils are to be successful, there must be “absolute transparency about purpose and engagement from the start, and constant communication to avoid suspicion or worry or stress”. 

However, it is precisely that kind of honesty and clarity that has been missing in North Lanarkshire, says Leigh Moore, secretary of Chryston Primary Parent Council.

Chryston Primary, in North Lanarkshire, has been without a headteacher for more than a year and has been the reluctant test bed for the authority’s multi-establishment leadership model (MELM).

The headteacher of Chryston Primary announced her intention to retire in September 2020; the authority advertised the post but failed to recruit. From January 2021, parents understood that the headteacher of secondary school Chryston High would be leading both schools on a temporary basis while the authority continued to try to recruit a new primary headteacher. Chryston Primary and Chryston High sit on the same campus but the primary will move into a new building next year.

However, when Chryston High headteacher Jonny Mitchell announced his imminent departure in November last year, Moore says, it transpired that the schools were actually being used as a pilot for the multi-establishment leadership model.

Now, a headteacher from another secondary has been seconded to lead the two schools on a temporary basis. 

Using freedom of information legislation, Tes Scotland obtained a copy of the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of the executive headship carried out by the council in October 2021 at Chryston Primary and Chryston Secondary. 

Staff, pupils and parents’ views from both schools are documented. The analysis highlights some of the potential advantages of the model, such as the two schools becoming “a learning community”, where good practice and staff expertise can be shared, and primary and secondary colleagues can learn from each other.

But the first “key strength” listed in the council summary of the SWOT analysis is that the model “supports council’s strategic plan”; the second is “financial savings to council”. 

Overall, the weaknesses and threats identified outnumber any positives and the analysis also lays bare the lack of planning. The primary school leaders talk about not knowing how long the executive headship is going to last - “Thought we were only agreeing this until March”, says one - and the secondary managers talk about a lack of clarity about “roles and responsibilities”. 

The primary senior leadership team says that, in nine months, there has been “no sharing of resources”, their workloads have increased “immensely”, staff are “unclear who to turn to” and the changes have come “all at the wrong time” - presumably a reference to schools already grappling with the huge impact of the Covid pandemic.  

Primary staff, meanwhile, identify no opportunities and just two strengths of sharing a headteacher with the secondary: excellent links between primary and secondary, and all members of the senior leadership team working extremely hard. 

The staff talk about the loss of a “sense of identity”, having “too many chiefs” and the children being unable to identify who is leading them.

They say the executive headteacher is meant to be in the primary one day a week but, in reality, is in the high school almost all of the time and that staffing is “stretched throughout the school”.

The secondary staff are more positive than primary, but the SWOT analysis also highlights the feedback from the executive headteacher, who says strengths include “deep understanding of where P7 are in their learning” and potential for the sharing of resources.

However, the executive head also says there is “not an attractive financial incentive” to take on the role and they are concerned about spreading themselves “too thin”. They also highlight the “hugely increased” headteacher’s workload.

The executive head says there is “far too much admin”, which takes up “far too much time” and means they are “losing the strategic aspect to the role”. 

Jonny Mitchell was the acting multi-establishment headteacher for Chryston Primary and Chryston High for just over a year until, in February, he left to take up a “once in a career opportunity” to lead a brand new secondary, which is due to open in August. Initially, Winchburgh Academy in West Lothian will have just 50 S1 pupils.

He says he was well supported by North Lanarkshire Council and it was a privilege to lead Chryston Primary and Chryston High. He also believes that executive headship has “huge potential” because it can help to break down the barriers between the different sectors. For instance, he says, the staff from the two schools had started to develop a shared understanding of assessment and moderation.  

However, he stresses that when bringing schools from different sectors together like this, there needs to be “lots of opportunity for thorough planning and communication with stakeholders and communities”.

Mitchell says: “The 3-18 model is something I’m a real advocate of because it brings with it so many opportunities. There is no doubt it could be successful but there needs to be a clear leadership model in place - how many deputes will there be in the primary? How many principal teachers? Does the high school need an extra depute? It all needs to be carefully considered.”

North Lanarkshire Council refused Tes Scotland’s request for an interview but issued a statement and responded to questions via email. The council said it was only when it became apparent that the two headteacher posts at Chryston were going to become available late last year that “the council recognised there was an opportunity to potentially implement the full multi-establishment headship model”.

It said the SWOT analysis carried out in October “only captured a small number of views and is not considered as representative of the views of all stakeholders”.

The council said that, like many local authorities, it had found headteacher recruitment “challenging” and “such leadership models are a way to attract high-quality candidates”. 

It added that the creation of the executive headteacher role would also provide a promotion route for “our more able and experienced school leaders”. It said that school inspectors - in a report published more than a decade ago, in 2010 - had “stressed the value of a more integrated approach to the 5-18 curricular journey”.

The council said attainment data showed that both schools continued to perform well and that a consultation was underway “to explore the possibility of implementing the full multi-establishment headship model across the two schools”, Chryston Primary and Chryston High. That consultation closes tomorrow.

The council spokesperson added: “Importantly, no decisions will be taken on the future leadership of the two schools until the consultation closes. We would encourage all parents to take part in the online survey, which has been developed to support the consultation.”

But Moore is clear about why she thinks the council wants to bring the two schools together under the leadership of one head: it is about money.

She questions why teachers are trained to practise in a specific sector, yet a secondary head is deemed capable of leading a primary.

“Our children have already missed out on so much because of Covid. This should be a time that is about rebuilding but, instead, there is all this upset and the children are not getting the support they need. 

“The headteacher is the key driver in a school and we haven’t had one for 15 months. As parents, it’s our job to stand up for our children and get the best for our children. This model is not about what’s best for their education, it’s about saving money.”

But even a council such as North Lanarkshire - in Scotland’s Central Belt and bordering Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city - is arguing that part of the problem is being able to recruit headteachers.

The far more rural Argyll and Bute Council is also stressing that its plans for collective leadership are about making its schools sustainable. Its original paper, published in June 2021, referred to “the need to attract and retain highly qualified teachers” but added that, especially in rural schools, “many job adverts are unfilled”.

In fact, the Scottish government is sufficiently concerned about the situation to have recently established a headteacher recruitment and retention working group, which is being led by the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland. 

Laurence Findlay, Aberdeenshire Council’s director of education and children’s services, is chairing the working group, which he says will begin by looking at the attractiveness and appeal of the headteacher role by seeking the view of current heads, deputes and principal teachers. He also says the group will gather data on the number of headteachers leaving the workforce, how that looks by sector and what the age demographic is of heads, as well as diversity of background. 

The latest teacher census, conducted last year, shows that just seven primary heads out of 1,675 were from a minority ethnic background. The figure for secondary is not available but it, too, will be small, given that it was “suppressed to protect against the risk of disclosure of personal information”.

Ultimately, Findlay says the aim of the group is to make recommendations and ensure “a good pipeline of future leaders”. His own authority’s recruitment woes have been well documented - in 2013, Aberdeenshire Council tried to recruit teachers from Canada and Ireland in a bid to fill vacancies in its schools - but Findlay, who took up his post in 2018, says the position has improved, with applications for school leader posts sometimes in double figures. He puts that down to increasing the number of shared headships in primary and investment in leadership training. 

“Growing your own is, I think, really important,” he says.

Thewliss says the job of headteacher has become more demanding and complex but that is not reflected in current pay.

He says salaries are largely determined by school rolls but little account is taken of the way the role has changed. The “job-sizing toolkit” was developed, he points out, before the inclusion agenda got underway, which now sees schools dealing with a far wider range of support needs. The latest pupil census shows that a third of pupils in Scottish schools now have at least one additional support need. There is also more of an emphasis, he says, on self-evaluation and improvement planning.

In Scotland, it is also now mandatory for incoming headteachers to have the master’s-level Into Headship qualification, which typically takes 12 to 18 months to complete.

It is possible for councils to appoint a new headteacher who does not have the qualification, but they have to commit to completing it within 30 months of taking up post.

Although the school leaders who complete this training are often enthusiastic about it, Greg Dempster, general secretary of primary school leaders’ body AHDS, says that in a tough recruitment climate, it is still another barrier.

However, the key issue for him is workload.

A survey completed by 1,300 headteachers, deputes and principal teachers carried out by AHDS in March found that the average number of hours worked by heads was 53.6 per week.

The survey also ascertained the extent to which deputes and principal teachers were interested in pursuing headship.

AHDS has been conducting the survey since 2016 and it can track whether interest in the top job in school is improving or waning.

Now deputes and principal teachers are much less likely to be positive about pursuing headship than they were in 2016 - fewer than a fifth of deputes agree that they are “keen to become a headteacher” (18 per cent) and fewer than a quarter of principal teachers (23.3 per cent). By contrast, in 2016, over a third of deputes (35.7 per cent) and principal teachers (38.6 per cent) agreed they wanted to pursue headship. 

The numbers in promoted posts who say they do not want to become headteachers has also risen.

Today, deputes and principal teachers are more likely to say they do not want to pursue headship (69.1 per cent and 65.6 per cent respectively). In 2016, around half of the heads and deputes surveyed said they did not want to pursue headship, with 49.1 per cent of deputes saying they did not want to, and 48.6 per cent of principal teachers

“That’s a 20-percentage point worsening in terms of negativity about headship,” says Dempster. “It’s not a pretty picture, given these are the groups you recruit headteachers from - you can’t get them from anywhere else.”

Dempster suggests it is the huge workload that is putting prospective headteachers off pursuing promotion. Increasingly, he says, his members tell him they do not have enough time to get the job done.

“There is a lack of desirability about the role and that comes down to a few factors,” says Dempster, who reiterated that point when he appeared at the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee last week (see clip below).

“Salary is one but it is not what people focus on - what they talk about is too much bureaucracy and the need for proper support for inclusion. Basically, what they are looking for is more management time. Lots of councils reduced the threshold for schools being entitled to deputes and principal teachers in order to make savings.”

EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan suggests that if councils want to improve headteacher recruitment, they need to “spread the burden” and create more leadership posts in primary.

In secondary, around a fifth of staff may be in promoted posts but, in a small primary, all the responsibility for running the school can fall on the shoulders of just one or two members of staff.

Flanagan describes the executive headteacher plans being put forward in Argyll and Bute and North Lanarkshire as “a sleight of hand”.

By removing headteachers and creating promoted posts to compensate, “you are basically wanting a depute head to be a headteacher for pedagogical purposes”. 

He adds: “It’s demeaning to the primary sector to think secondary heads can somehow just assume pedagogical leadership across a curriculum they are unfamiliar with. Pacing learning in the early years and play-based learning, for instance, are not familiar to most secondary headteachers. It does a huge disservice to the primary sector, which is largely where the leadership will be squeezed out.” 

Councils say that primary headteachers could become executive heads, and it is more common these days for them to lead more than one primary school. But when it comes to leading a mix of primaries and secondaries, the consensus is that primary heads would struggle to compete, given that they tend to run smaller establishments.

Secondary leaders, therefore, would likely have the upper hand, even though, as Dempster says, they are accustomed to dealing with adolescents, do not have the same knowledge of the “early building blocks in learning”, or the same experience of teaching the full breadth of the curriculum.

Ultimately - even if there are merits to executive headship - the sense is that the argument has already been lost because of the way the councils attempting to make these changes have gone about it.

Petitions against the plans have attracted hundreds of signatures and, earlier this month, Chryston Primary protesters staged a walking protest around the area, ostensibly looking for the school’s “missing” headteacher, with children wielding placards saying how many days their head had been missing for. 

Harris talks about the importance of transparency, and of winning hearts and minds, if educational change is to be successful. But it seems clear that if these executive headteacher plans go ahead, there is little hope now of parents, pupils and staff getting behind them. 

The price, in terms of the impact on staff morale and relationships with parents, seems high for small financial gains.

The obvious alternative is to take all the energy currently being channelled into reinventing school leadership models and direct it, instead, into actually delivering that “good pipeline of future leaders” Findlay talks about. 

At the moment, the message from headteachers is that the job is already too big - why, then, make it bigger?