It’s snowing. The children are arriving at school, but several staff haven’t made it in yet. One of the school’s boilers has just stopped working. And now a child has slipped and fallen in front of a teacher’s moving car.

Oh, and it’s our first day proving to all involved in the school that co-headship was definitely a good idea.

Right from this most testing of starts, co-headship was an absolute success for our school. That first morning brought home to us the efficiency, support and resilience that two colleagues can demonstrate when faced with a real-life “nightmare in tray”.

Co-headship was never meant to be a permanent solution. In 2009, as two full-time teaching deputies of a medium-sized primary school, we were about to embark on our own personal journeys into parenthood and had only ever considered headship a distant possibility. However, when the headteacher left mid-year, that distant possibility became a very distinct one. Initially agreeing to take on two terms of acting co-headship while a substantive head was appointed, little did we, or anyone else, expect that this would extend to a unique eight-year leadership structure, two successful Ofsteds and five babies.

At the start, it wasn’t easy for the governors or the local authority. How do you sort out pay when there is no “co-head” drop-down option on the LA payroll system? How do you carve up the headship role? How do you ensure accountability? How do you sell the co-headship model to parents? How many votes does the co-headship get on the governing body? How do you do headteacher performance management?

Understandably, the teachers and wider staff also had some unease about this new and untested model. Who would they go to with particular issues or problems? How would their performance and line management be affected? How would continuity of messages be ensured?

All these questions were surprisingly easy to answer with will, bravery, determination and an insistence on making it right for our school and our pupils. Here’s how.

Sorting payroll

There were various incarnations of our payslips, as the co-headship was a new set-up for both the local authority and the school. One of the strengths of the co-headship was its flexibility, which was reflected in the pay structure. Initially, we needed six days of headship (3+3) per week to establish the role and fill the gap left by both of us leaving our deputy roles. This adjusted, depending on various maternity leaves, to 4+2, and then 3+2 when a new leadership team had been fully established and there was no longer the need for a crossover day.

Carving up the role

The management workload needed to be shared out clearly and effectively for all concerned, including lines of reporting and communication. With two of us in the role, we did not want staff to feel that they had to report everything twice.

Much of the workload fell naturally into either camp - one of us oversaw key stage 1 and early years foundation stage, the other took on KS2, for example. One of us continued to lead assessment and governance, the other led on CPD and working with our teaching school alliance.

It was not just a case of continuing within our comfort zones, however: we both recognised that we needed to rotate certain tasks and roles in order to develop and grow as leaders. Governors supported this through their performance management. Anything that was new or for which it was crucial for us both to be present, we shared. The school development plan, the school self-evaluation form, the EYFS new intake open evenings and the Year 6 leavers’ assemblies were important for us to do together.

This required flexibility on our part - we had to reciprocate the flexibility that the school had allowed us and change our days, work a few more hours or move things around some weeks. We were offered the chance to have separate performance-management meetings but chose instead to share these, too, further highlighting our deep-rooted and genuine sharing of the role. It was interesting to note that our performance manager chose to implement a co-headship model as a succession plan when she left her school, after seeing how effective ours had been and helping us to navigate some of the initial discussions about accountability.

Disagreements

We hardly ever disagreed on the big stuff. We look back now and realise that this wasn’t just because we got along well and had been colleagues for a number of years before we took on the role, but because we shared the same values and love of education. Since the co-headship ended and we have shared responsibilities with colleagues in new roles, we have come to realise that most people in education agree on the big principles.

That said, we had to establish an open, honest working partnership from the outset so that we could disagree and debate smaller matters - practicalities, conversations to be had, ways to develop new systems or deliver training, for example - but this healthy debate is one reason why the co-headship provided robust leadership.

Voting on the governing body was limited to one vote. Although we shared the role as two separate people, we were a united front and, in order to reflect the fact that in a more traditional set-up there would be only one vote, we would vote as one voice (though we both attended full governing body meetings).

Selling the model to parents

With any change comes uncertainty - yet we found that this was not as marked among the parent body as we had anticipated. Being present at events together and writing newsletters and being seen as a pair around the school was reassuring and effective in promoting this new arrangement.

It is also worth recognising that education is relatively slow to catch up with the wider world of work in terms of flexible working arrangements and so many of our parents were already in flexible roles themselves at work and so saw the co-headship as a maturation of the education system rather than a radical change.

Long-term impact

The diverse nature and sheer workload of the traditional head’s role means that it can be an unappealing one for many, especially those with caring commitments or who wish to work flexibly. It can also be a potentially lonely role. Co-headship provides one potential antidote to these pressures. Like any complementary double act, when one of you is feeling a little Eeyore, the other can be guaranteed to bring more bounce as Tigger.

Another benefit is that of being in two places at once. This is particularly useful when there are the inevitable Sod’s-law diary clashes; it’s also an excellent way of rolling out ideas across a school swiftly and consistently.

Co-headship also provides a perfectly flexible dynamic for responding to the shifting needs of a school and its staff. During the eight years, we altered the number of days each other worked in response to multiple respective maternity leaves and the availability of other leaders in the school during different academic years.

If we were to give one piece of advice to anyone considering co-headship, it would be to find the Bert to your Ernie. When sharing the responsibility of leading something as precious as a school, it is imperative that you find someone with whom you share trust, vision and humour; with this, co-headship need not be viewed as a temporary fix but as a healthy solution to a leadership recruitment and retention crisis.

Emma Turner is research and CPD lead for Discovery Schools Trust, Leicestershire. Claire Mitchell is executive headteacher of Latimer Primary School in the same county. They were co-heads of Latimer Primary from 2010 to 2017

This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “Why co-heads should be given the go-ahead”