In the wake of party conference season, there is widespread agreement about the problems with education in England: too many teachers are leaving the profession, too few young graduates aspire to join, the gap in attainment between affluent and disadvantaged pupils is widening, and schools are taking on an increasing pastoral burden.

As the job becomes more challenging, school staff become increasingly disillusioned and it becomes harder to motivate them, keep them in the profession, and provide the outstanding education that will close attainment gaps.

Heads at the centre

Unfortunately, this widespread agreement about the problems does not extend to the remedies. None of these problems can be fixed for free but both major parties are wary of making extravagant promises about teachers’ pay or school funding. The question they ask is always, how can we do more with the money we have?

At the centre of this web of challenges are headteachers. England’s headteachers have greater autonomy than in most other countries. They can hire and manage teachers as they choose and, in most schools, set the curriculum, budget and vision of the school, though that does vary depending on the governance arrangements.

Few people have as much influence over a teacher’s job satisfaction as the headteacher who sets the culture of their school, and few people outside the home have as much influence over children’s learning.

Our new analysis of headteachers’ influence over their schools finds that a highly effective headteacher can lead to pupils achieving additional grades in GCSE subjects compared to pupils in schools with an average headteacher. In primary schools, that is equivalent to an added three months of learning.

Effective heads improve working environments

Not only do these highly effective headteachers improve the learning at their school, but we also found that they do it, in part, by improving the working environment for teachers.

In data that covers all schools in England, we observed that the best headteachers reduce both absenteeism among staff and turnover of teachers.

These findings reinforce previous findings that the working environment and quality of leadership is the most important determining factor in teachers’ job satisfaction and decision about whether to stay in their job.

Struggling heads

The importance of headteachers and their central role in both supporting staff and driving improvements in the quality of learning shouldn’t come as a surprise.

What is more concerning is that we found the costs of having a struggling headteacher to be even greater than the benefits of a great headteacher.

Staff turnover and absence rise dramatically when the headteacher is unable to cope with the challenges they face. Worse still, those struggling headteachers are most likely to be found in schools with the weakest test scores and results for their pupils; exactly where the most able and confident headteachers are needed.

Policy change required

These findings point to a clear route for policy: attract great people to headship, support existing headteachers to improve, and encourage great headteachers into schools that are struggling.

Paying the best headteachers well is one obvious way to encourage them to take up roles at struggling schools, and to stay long enough to make a difference.

We found that it can often take several years for a great head’s impact on a school to be fully realised, which may need to be considered when thinking about the design of the accountability system.

However, that needs to be coupled with a recognition that headship today is not as attractive as it used to be. School leaders worked 10 to 20 hours per week more than classroom teachers through the pandemic, almost two-thirds became extremely anxious about work, and, today, only 24 per cent of assistant and deputy heads aspire to headship.

Headteacher recruitment crisis

The shortage of aspiring leaders willing to step into the role of headteacher is a severe problem that is often overlooked in favour of a focus on early career teacher recruitment. But, without great leadership, young teachers will not enter a profession able to adequately support them and foster their talents and motivation.

Addressing the barriers that deter educators from aspiring to these leadership positions and fostering an environment that encourages the emergence of the next generation of school leaders is a central question for school policy in England.

Solving our headteacher recruitment problem may be one of the few cost-effective ways to deal with the challenges the system faces.

James Zuccollo is director for school workforce at the Education Policy Institute