There are many challenges as a school leader. I am finding there is a new one on the horizon:

Trust.

In my role working in and supporting schools, I have noticed this over the course of a few years. Speaking to many school leaders, the battleground of trust has become akin to complex modern warfare. There seems to be less trust about motives, politics and actions than at any other time in my career.

According to Ipsos MORI, teaching was in the five most trusted professions in 2017 (87 per cent). Only Doctors (91 per cent) and nurses (94 per cent) scored higher. The least trusted were politicians (17 per cent).

So far, so good. But I can’t help but feel that education is in danger of becoming too political. Are we falling into the trap of sharing our politics and opinions as professionals and, therefore, creating divides within our communities? Add in the prominence and coverage of social media, especially Twitter, and we can see how this begins to play out. There are more school leaders and teachers sharing their views than at any time I can remember.

What is more, it feels like the politics of pedagogy have never been more discussed, scrutinised or shared. I know I have been very vocal about Sats testing and real term cuts to school finances. These are deeply contested political topics. Though the vast majority of parents have been very supportive, I have received very clear feedback from some saying, “We seem to be the only school who are making cuts.” I know that I can never do right by the whole community. As a school leader, you have to grow a very think skin, or, like many colleagues before me, your mental health will suffer.

Interestingly, in the Ipsos MORI poll, teachers drop 11 percentage points (to 76 per cent) when it comes to being trusted to “tell the truth”.

(In the Era of Fake News, I now ask, “What is truth?” When I started my second headship, the school had a mission statement from the 1950s that said “seek truth”. I got rid of it, and I often think…“Why did I do that?”)

The erosion of trust

Actually, I think people generally still do trust teachers. But the water has been muddied by school leaders. When we see them buying expensive art, staying in luxury hotels, buying expensive meals, being paid many hundreds of thousands of pounds, cheating, scheming and breaking the law; while telling the world that there is no more money in the coffers for books, teachers, support staff… Ouch! Trust will do one thing. It will dissolve.

Education cannot be unpicked from its moral purpose. There is a line in my school’s Ofsted report that makes me very proud: “leaders and governors work effectively together with a joint moral dedication.” It is important that school leaders go back to the moral purpose of what we do. We serve our communities and, therefore, we put decisions about them first. How many can truly say they do?

I feel that education is deep within the smoke of a 21st-century political battlefield; a place where it may win some small victories but is destined to lose the war. The accountability of school leadership is such that you are always looking over your shoulder. With the great rewards in pay that have sprung up in the academies era, we also have the brutal accountability of the EBacc, regional schools commissioners and, of course, Ofsted. But with this accountability there seems to have risen practice that is easy to question.

Anyone sitting in a school office right now, knowing that they are actively allowing unethical or immoral practice, should know the damage they do to the trust we have within the profession of teaching. It is easy to highlight the amazing things that happen. We probably just take them for granted. It is the dishonest practice that chips away at the foundations of a principled profession that makes it so hard to be a school leader right now.

We have never needed ethical leadership in our system more than we do today.

Brian Walton is headteacher of Brookside Academy in Somerset. He tweets as @Oldprimaryhead1

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