When the Future Leaders Trust released figures in 2015 suggesting 1,700 female headteachers were missing from the workforce, it didn’t exactly come as a revelation to those of us on the ground. Given that the workforce is 75 per cent female, women are still significantly underrepresented in headship. Indeed, in the secondary sector, only 36 per cent of heads are women.
As the sector’s gender pay gap has been revealed via official data, I doubt many people will be terribly shocked. Running a multi-academy trust is a logical next step after headship, and the majority filling those roles are male. Men are typically leading larger trusts and getting paid more.
Does this matter? Surely what we all want is for schools to have the best leaders, regardless of gender or any other protected characteristic.
Well, of course it matters. If we can’t get it right in education, then what hope is there? If we can’t ensure school leadership is representative of the workforce, what example are we setting for the next generation? For the thousands of children who come through our doors to learn, there is a subliminal lesson: women are teachers and men are leaders.
We are essentially reinforcing the patriarchy, the status quo; it won’t matter how many British Values posters we put up, how many girls-in-Stem projects we sign up to or inspirational assemblies we deliver, unless the context that children experience every day is more equitable, all they’ll learn is, in reality, their future won’t be equal.
Children are pretty astute at cutting through the hype - they don’t blindly swallow all the facts and “truths” we feed them. They know that they’ll probably never use algebra again and that they don’t really need to position their semicolons exactly. They know their future success is not purely down to doing homework and revising, that the other conditions of their lives will have an effect. We have a duty to provide the leadership that is visible in schools as being something aspirational, something they can see themselves reflected in: highly successful professionals that just happen to be the same race or religion as they are, gay, transgender, working class, disabled or - heavens above - female.
Sharing stories of inequality
The quantitive data has in some ways lagged behind the qualitative data. There has never been any shortage in staffrooms and those essential after-school pub meetings of women providing evidence of why they have not made the career progress they had expected. Now, through social media, these stories are more widely shared and more women are recognising their own experiences in the words of others.
#WomenEd is still less than three years old; its rate of growth speaks to the demand in the sector for an organisation that reflects women’s experiences. Naysayers say, well, where is the real evidence? Or point to the few examples of highly paid, highly influential women leaders. But we have thousands of testimonies via Twitter, our conferences and on our blog that provide a multitude of evidence of women’s experiences in schools.
Women are telling us about their gender pay gap stories at an alarming rate: the successful primary headteacher who, after six years in post, was still being paid £10,000 less than a recently appointed male counterpart at a nearby, similar school; the two secondary school deputy heads appointed on the same day, the man on £9,000 a year more because he’d asked for it and the woman had simply accepted the salary in the advert; the Year 6 class teacher who discovered that the less-experienced Year 5 teacher next door was on more than her because more male role models were needed in the school.
In the same way as the BBC’s Carrie Gracie and ITN’s Cathy Newman were shocked, but not necessarily surprised, by the gender pay gap in their sector, so it is in education. And at a time when some of those high-profile male CEOs seem to be harvesting incredible pay rises, the rest of the profession remains capped at 1 per cent - it’s hardly any sort of reward for those in the classroom.
Most alarmingly, for a job focused entirely on children, in many places education is incredibly family unfriendly. The myth persists that a woman must choose between having a family and a career; that part-time staff can never lead; that the work-life balance of school leaders is not conducive to having, well, a life.
Why in the world are maternity and paternity leave such a divisive issue in education? We know women are missing out on posts because they may or may not have children one day, and we have several reports of women being asked at senior-leader interviews about their contraception plans. As a woman promoted to her first senior post when I was six months pregnant, this seems archaic.
Why shouldn’t any teacher be able to work part-time or more flexibly if they wish? It is a retention no-brainer, keeping motivated and experienced professionals in schools. It does schools and children no harm, even if it can be more fiddly to timetable. And as Professor Becky Allen would remind us, flexible working must not become a way of paying people less for making their workload more manageable.
There are many schools, many multi-academy trusts and many parts of the workforce in which these issues do not exist or are minimal - we must learn more from these institutions and these people. The next generation deserves no less.
Keziah Featherstone is co-founder and national leader of #WomenEd. She is a member of the Headteachers Roundtable and an experienced school leader. She tweets at @keziah70
Keziah Featherstone was writing ahead of a special edition of tomorrow’s Tes, which looks into the differences in male and female pay in teaching and features a 20-page special on What to expect when you’re expecting. Tes magazine will be available at all good newsagents in the coming days. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
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