Among a number of sensible and welcome pledges for education in its manifesto, Labour says it will “create a new Excellence in Leadership Programme, a mentoring framework that expands the capacity of headteachers and leaders to improve their schools”.
Educational leadership is crucial. As we seek to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in our sector - special educational needs and disabilities, closing the disadvantage gap, recruitment and retention, behaviour and attendance - we need leaders who are supported and equipped to make a real difference for children.
Labour’s plan for Excellence in Leadership
What’s the problem Labour is trying to solve?
School leaders are committed to the fundamentally important work of educating children, but educational leadership is complex. Headteachers and leaders are responsible and accountable for an extraordinary breadth of activity: educational outcomes, deployment of resources, engagement with parents and communities, and an array of regulatory requirements.
School leaders often report feeling under significant pressure. They face a range of demands, often feel out of their depth, they work long hours and they have an acute sense of personal responsibility.
There are also significant challenges around diversity in leadership roles. Women are proportionately under-represented in leadership roles in schools and trusts, and people of colour even more so.
Where are we on leadership development in education?
The National Professional Qualifications have now been taken up by almost 100,000 leaders across the country - and that is an unprecedented investment in leadership capability.
It means that almost one in five of our workforce have now had access to a well-evidenced, carefully sequenced and quality-assured training programme, and hopefully these numbers will continue to grow.
These qualifications are also cost-effective and widely accessible, and aim to increase both leadership skills and specific educational expertise.
We have a leadership framework for multi-academy trust CEOs, published last year and now in its inaugural year of delivery. There are also leadership-level apprenticeships, and there are many organisations offering leadership development to school leaders - some focused on the education context and others more focused on more generic leadership skills.
Meanwhile, there are many trusts providing development and support for their leaders.
So in that context, what do we need from a new intervention?
What have we learned from previous leadership programmes?
Strong programmes for education leaders need to be designed around the persistent problems of their roles. We know that there are common challenges faced by all school leaders, and that there is solid evidence about effective approaches to addressing some of those.
We have found that creating opportunities for leaders to build relationships with each other is important.
Some of this is about seeing how others are doing things, which can spark new ideas and a stronger sense of what is possible in similar contexts.
Some of it is about knowing that others are in the same boat - that other people are wrestling with similar things, and that you’re not alone in finding things new or difficult.
Some of it is also about a shared sense of purpose: former participants on the Future Leaders programme repeatedly tell us about the impact of being with other committed, mission-driven professionals, sharing a determination and moral purpose to do the very best for all the children in our education system.
Mentoring has been proven to be a powerful intervention as part of the Early Career Framework, particularly where mentors have specific time allocated to perform their roles and where they themselves are also being supported and developed.
Supporting people at this transition point into teaching, to set a strong foundation for their careers, is also an important founding principle of the programme - and mentoring rather than generic “coaching” is likely to be more applicable to leaders stepping into new roles or new contexts.
There are important things to learn from other countries and other sectors and settings. All sectors can fall into the trap of being quite insular, and it is important to take into account other approaches or theories from different places - so that we can maximise our collective human knowledge and experience.
Things like financial management, human resources, technology, communications, risk management and behavioural economics all have underpinning professional disciplines that can be relevant and helpful in different aspects of education leadership.
But any intervention focused on school leadership - where leaders play such a powerful and influential role in their schools and trusts - needs to be anchored in the best possible evidence or based on the most robust emerging insights.
Collectively, we do not have the time to waste on gimmicks or fads or techniques lifted uncritically from other sectors: the time and energy of our school leaders is too precious to squander.
What should the next steps be?
Labour’s commitment to “excellence in leadership” is powerful and promising. Our view is that any new programme should:
- Identify some of the key areas where leaders need most support to improve their schools, and that are crucial for improving children’s outcomes: SEND, closing the disadvantage gap, recruitment and retention, behaviour and attendance are pressing priorities.
- Build on the success of the National Professional Qualifications, particularly with their focus on building evidence-based, education-specific knowledge and expertise.
- Commission a rapid evidence review to explore properly the conditions in which leadership mentoring is truly effective, including which styles of mentoring, who those mentors are and what skills and knowledge they need.
- Consider how best to bring education leaders together to focus on their core purpose and build relationships. This process should be delivered with clear structure, purpose and challenge.
- Have an explicit focus on improving diversity, both at leadership level and within schools.
- Support school leaders to reflect on good practice from other settings, sectors and countries.
Hilary Spencer is CEO of Ambition Institute
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