Argyll and Bute Council’s education service wanted to change the way schools were run. It wanted to introduce the post of “executive headteacher” - so-called superheads that would be responsible for multiple schools - with the existing headteachers being renamed “head of school”.
It said the changes would improve collaboration between schools and consistency across schools, as well as allow heads to develop specialisms and help solve recruitment and retention problems.
Yesterday, however, after much protest from parents and teaching unions, councillors on the council’s Community Services Committee threw out the proposals.
In the papers that went before the committee, the education service’s frustration is palpable.
The phrase “the status quo is not an option” - or variations on it - is repeated a number of times, giving the impression that a forward-thinking education department has been stymied by a public unwilling to face reality.
The finger of blame is also pointed at “lobbying bodies” and unions for “the promotion of misinformation”.
But the reality is the education service plan failed because it was badly managed and ill thought through and, as a result, it lost the hearts and minds of the people it was seeking to persuade.
The community groups and teaching unions are accused of spreading misinformation, but often they were repeating the information published in the department’s own early plans - the ones it tried to roll back on when it became clear just how deeply unpopular they were proving.
The early plans said that clusters of up to seven primaries and one secondary school would be “led by an executive headteacher” and depute heads and principal teachers would “make up the cluster leadership team”. The plans said there would be “a promoted member of staff in each school building” and that these staff members might hold the title “head of school” - but offered no reassurance that current headteachers would be retained.
The original plans also said there would be “no cost demands and implementing the model could deliver potential savings when implemented”.
Then - following the outcry from parents and teachers that the plans were all about cutting costs and shedding primary headteacher posts - the council tried to backpedal. It said clusters had yet to be determined, that the changes were not about saving money and that heads would spend as much time in school as they do currently - and what’s more, they would all be non-teaching (with the exception of those leading “the very smallest schools”).
The trouble was that the new approach - which was renamed the “collective leadership model”, as opposed to the “cluster leadership model” - ceased to make sense.
The council’s education service makes much of the lengths it went to to engage with all the different stakeholders - with council officials even making themselves available for one-on-one calls “to personally discuss the proposal” - but it’s questionable how much use this was when the model was so vague that they were unable to answer key questions about how it would work.
A consultation on the model ran from November to March and received over 800 responses.
A subsequent report stated: “Respondents wanted to know about individual school collectives (which have not yet been decided), to see detailed remits for new roles (which have not yet been written) and to see alternative proposals (which do not exist).”
If executive heads weren’t going to replace headteachers, how would the change help solve recruitment issues? And if all heads (or heads of school) were to become non-teaching, how would that be funded?
Also, crucially, if headteachers were still going to be, well, headteachers, why change the job title?
Whatever the logic for the title change, that in particular proved a huge misstep. The report on the consultation found that “the title of ‘headeacher’ holds emotional weight” and that “changing it will never be popular”, and proposing to do so had “disrupted the whole consultation”.
The report also found that the change of title among the authority’s serving headteachers was “causing mistrust in the whole proposal” and was “a major barrier to open discussion”. One school leader explained that being a head is more than just a job title - it is an occupation.
They said: “When people talk about how they love being a headteacher, it’s not the title. A doctor is a doctor, and we are headteachers.”
The consultation also made it clear just how much pressure heads are under, although this is not a problem unique to Argyll and Bute.
The consultation found: “Headteachers are struggling with expanding remits, overwhelming workloads and a severe shortage of supply teachers.”
Serving heads talk about their “enormous” and “relentless” workloads as well as working “way beyond” their hours every day, and feeling “very vulnerable” and “the heavy weight of so much responsibility”.
Under the collective leadership model, Argyll and Bute education officials said virtually all heads would be non-teaching.
That is likely a change all stakeholders could get behind, so if the status quo is not an option - which it clearly isn’t - why not start there?
Emma Seith is a senior reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith
