There is a pungent smell of educational rebellion in the air. Headteachers and multi-academy trust chief executives are uniting. Shrinking school budgets and the introduction of new grammar schools have provoked action. School leaders from around the country are proclaiming that enough is enough. It feels like a “Headteachers’ Spring”.

So what better time for Geoff Barton, the outgoing head of King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds, to be voted general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL)? An eloquent man of principle, he has never been afraid of speaking truth to power.

Barton’s overwhelming win against ASCL’s preferred candidate, the educationalist Chris Kirk, gives him a mandate to champion the cause of discontented school leaders from Kent to Cumbria, from Cornwall to Berwick-upon-Tweed. But is it that simple? Can Barton enable ASCL to capture the zeitgeist and bring this growing sense of discontent among secondary school leaders to national attention? He has an opportunity, but there will be some challenges too. Let’s take a look…

Barton’s mandate - he won ASCL’s first ever general-secretary election by attracting 80 per cent of the votes - will strengthen the body’s clout. His margin of victory is a clear message from members that they want it to be more powerful than its present incarnation. If the government is canny, it will listen to what ASCL has to say under Barton. His popularity attests to the fact that he is an inveterate networker.

Solving the leadership crisis

The good thing for the government is that Barton is no knee-jerk naysayer. More than anything else, he wants the school system to succeed. Take the worsening shortage of headteachers. He knows that the leadership crisis won’t be solved by government or people who haven’t led schools. Under Barton, ASCL can provide an opportunity for existing school leaders to speak more persuasively about the pleasures of the job, and - through the organisation’s professional development programmes - create outstanding leaders for the future.

When it comes to leading education, Barton is far from the only new kid on the block: Justine Greening is a relatively new education secretary; Sir David Carter has not been long in post as national schools commissioner; Amanda Spielman has just taken over at Ofsted; Roger Taylor has replaced her as the chair of Ofqual; the new Chartered College of Teaching is led by Dame Alison Peacock and the NAHT headteachers’ union will be replacing general secretary Russell Hobby very soon. We are coming to the end of a long period of significant educational change.

There is a unique opportunity, at this very moment, for this fresh crop of leaders to pool their talents for the good of our reformed school system.

Might we hope that we can reconceptualise teaching, ridding ourselves of too much restrictive, negative compliance and restoring some of the joy in the classroom? ASCL, through Barton, can help us to celebrate our schools and look towards the next decade of development. Indeed, even Sir David Carter claims that it is time to focus on school improvement and not on structures. We have to make the profession more attractive to the brightest and best graduates. Who better to help that cause than the expert classroom practitioner Geoff Barton?

And yet…Barton takes over at ASCL at a time when one of the main issues uniting headteachers is school funding. School leaders from Cheshire, Surrey, West Sussex and beyond are staring at deficits and making colleagues redundant. They are taking part in charity runs to raise money for their schools. Blu-Tack is rationed. Budgets are broken. Even people like Jonathan Simons - formerly head of education at the Department for Education’s preferred thinktank, Policy Exchange - are shouting for more cash for education (“If education is a priority, where’s the cash?”, 10 February).

‘No money tree’

The thing is, Barton is no money tree. Fast-forward 18 months: the budget pressures have hardened, post-Brexit inflation is running at 3 per cent, lone teachers are teaching 120 students English GCSE in the school hall with the aid of a teaching assistant, and people are asking questions about Barton’s election promises.

What then? ASCL knows it is unlikely that it will be able to persuade the Treasury to find more money for cash-strapped heads. Unless, of course, it is for new grammar schools.

Ah yes, grammar schools. Barton leads a comprehensive. He has supported a local school, but he is not the chief executive of an academy trust. He now leads ASCL, which is a broad church. He will be representing independent and grammar school heads. One argument is that ASCL’s wide remit has led to it being overcautious, slow to respond and a bit bland. Can Barton be incisive without alienating ASCL’s members? Can he voice the profession’s real concerns to the education secretary and still retain the association’s breadth of membership?

The grammar school issue will be a great test of Barton’s diplomacy skills.

What I have learned over the past 14 years as a head is that school leaders trust school leaders. We trust most those heads who are doing the job, who are grappling with budget deficits, who are still teaching - those who are still scraping up gum off the corridor floor tiles. Barton’s landslide victory in ASCL’s general secretary election illustrates the depth of trust in the avuncular Suffolk headteacher. My hunch is that he will repay that trust with aplomb and that, under his leadership, ASCL will make our Headteachers’ Spring a golden one.

John Tomsett is headteacher at Huntington School in York, and a member of the Headteachers’ Roundtable. He tweets @johntomsett

Read TES’ interview with Geoff Barton here.