In schools across the country, there is a phrase seeping into more and more meetings and sneaking up towards the top of priority lists: talent management.

“We’re all forced to get better at this because recruitment is so tough,” explains Lucy Heller, CEO of Ark Schools. “We need to make use of all the talent that we’ve got.”

Talent management is a well-established strategic approach to retention and development in the corporate world. The basic idea is that you identify high achievers and those with the potential to achieve highly, and you put in place a plan to develop, track and place these individuals across your organisation. It is data intensive and heavily structured, as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development explains.

In education, we’re just beginning to get to grips with talent management as leadership teams are being forced to “grow your own” in an increasingly under-resourced and competitive recruitment market.

To help schools and trusts put their own plans in place in this area, we gathered some experts for the latest Tes Magazine Leadership Forum Big Debate webinar.

Joining Tes editor Jon Severs for a roundtable discussion are:

• Lucy Heller, CEO of Ark Schools.
• Rebecca Boomer-Clark, CEO of Academies Enterprise Trust (AET).
• Kim Lafferty, formerly vice-president for people effectiveness at GlaxoSmithKline and now visiting professor at Cranfield University.

You can watch the webinar and read a summary of the discussion below. If you can’t see the video, you can also watch it here.

Managing the pipeline of future school leadership teams has traditionally been done through two key channels: a centralised system of qualifications, which were meant to prepare teachers for leadership, and informal pathways in schools, run with no real scaffold or framework.

“You had your government courses, like the national professional qualifications (NPQs) - which were awful - and then you had a sort of ‘try before you buy’ approach where your head would ask if you fancied stepping up to cover a leadership role and if you didn’t mess it up, you might get the job,” reveals a current senior leader who wishes to remain anonymous. “There wasn’t really any preparation or strategy involved. But there were enough teachers in the system that it didn’t really matter - enough people could do a decent enough job of it anyway.”

The present recruitment and retention catastrophe means there simply aren’t enough people in the system for this ad hoc version of talent management to continue. And its inefficiency and poor quality also meant many heads felt ill-equipped and overwhelmed when they got the job - leading them to leave soon after or perform below their own standards. So, something had to change.

The government made the first move with the reform of those “awful” NPQs: new qualifications were launched in 2021. And now schools are beginning to build more strategic and data-driven talent management pathways.

The Tes Magazine Leadership Forum webinar this month focused on the latter.

So, how exactly do you build a data-driven and strategic talent management pathway?

Build from your existing base

The government’s NPQs are designed to help nurture talent in schools and ready teachers for more responsibility. Rebecca Boomer-Clark, CEO at AET, says that, since the reform of those courses, they are something that should definitely be a part of any plan for talent in your school.

“[The reformed courses] are definitely an improvement…If you look around the world, people are watching what’s happening in England with interest,” she says. “[Qualifications are not always] used across the whole of the sector in the same way with the same intent, but it does set out a universal entitlement and says that if you are coming into teaching, we will be committed to your professional development and it will happen regardless of which school you go to.”

She adds that there is a good base level of ambition in the sector, too, despite data suggesting fewer teachers are open to making the step up to leadership. What we need to do, she believes, is convince those teachers that leadership is a viable option.

“One of our big challenges is making leadership an attractive prospect,” she says.

That means telling positive stories about leadership to counter the challenges that more often get prominence in discussions around headship and other leadership roles.

Understand one size doesn’t fit all

Lucy Heller, CEO at Ark Schools, believes a key factor in getting people excited about leadership is to make the different routes to attain it clearer.

“We don’t want people to think that [the only career path] is straight on up,” she says. “We need to fit career paths to the individual.”

A good example is that headship is not the only stepping stone for those wishing to have wider regional roles in multi-academy trusts. For some, becoming an expert teacher or curriculum lead in one school and then having a wider curriculum role may be the right option.

Kim Lafferty, formerly vice-president for people effectiveness at GlaxoSmithKline and now visiting professor at Cranfield University, says schools also need to understand that people can change their minds about leadership routes depending on their stage of life.

“I do think ambition maps on to life stages,” she explains. “People make different choices [depending on whether they have] children or elderly parents.”

She says that in other sectors, leadership pathways are adapting to this.

“We are becoming more flexible and that will have to continue to increase [if we want the best people to move into leadership roles],” she explains. “Organisations are going to have to meet individuals where they are, to understand what they need now and how often that would need to be reviewed.”

The Department for Education has consistently pushed flexible working over the past few years, and has published some useful resources for schools.

Talent identification: the first steps

Any identification process for talent should begin with an organisation having a very clear idea about what they need at a leadership level: the skills, roles, job descriptions, personalities and timelines involved. And leaders need to be aware that this is not a one-time process of finding out the answers for each of those areas.

“What are we looking for [in our future leaders] and are we in constant conversation about whether that is still true?” asks Lafferty.

That said, she says there are three fundamental questions you should always be asking when identifying talent:

1. Capability: do they have the flexibility and resourcefulness required for a leadership role?
2. Do they have the capacity to do it? Leadership is very demanding.
3. Do they have the ambition and motivation to lead? Personal drive is crucial.

Boomer-Clark cautions that you have to be cautious when you are making these assessments, though.

“One of the challenges is that we always use past performance to judge future potential, and that’s flawed,” she explains. “We need to develop conversations with individuals so we can assess their self-awareness, their relational expertise, their ambition and draw conclusions, rather than [making a judgement] at a fixed moment in time, which is too rigid.”

Heller says the person making those judgements should also not just be the CEO or school leader.

“This is the single most important thing we do, so it’s the job of everybody [to identify talent],” she explains.

Continuous conversations, not rigid structures

When setting up talent pools and development pathways, Heller and Boomer-Clark urge caution around talent management approaches such as the “nine-box grid”, a classification system that sorts employees into groups based on data points. It can vary, but common groups include “stars”, “workhorses” and “bad hires”. You then roll out development plans for each group.

Lafferty agrees that the grid - and other variations on it, such as the four-box grid - should be abandoned.

“The nine-box grid is overcomplicated for what it tries to do and, in my research, [I have discovered] managers find it quite cumbersome,” she reveals.

Lafferty says her own research has looked at what employees see as a fair talent identification process to counter the nine-box grid. She found the key points were:

• Clear criteria about what is required to be singled out as talented.
• Consistency of assessment over time - they want assurance that whoever is doing the assessment, the process is free of bias or changes that may advantage or disadvantage an individual.
• Transparency that the process is open and that it is clear how decisions have been reached.
• Individualisation of the process - that conversations on career and development are two-way rather than specific ideas being pushed down from the top.
• Variation of roles that can be applied for and the ability to speak to those currently doing those roles.

Heller also makes the point that the rigidity of the nine-box grid can mean that, once labelled, staff are stuck in those groups. She says there needs to be a revolving door of who is in a talent pathway and who is not.

“People can surprise you,” she cautions.

Be proactive in countering bias in the selection process

One of the most important aspects of talent management is ensuring that you can counter bias, which can lead to barriers to progression for women and minority-ethnic groups in particular.

Lafferty says organisations need to be conscious of the need to proactively seek diverse staff in their talent programmes.

“Challenging the pool of people is a [key job of management],” she reveals. “The Hampton-Alexander review advised putting targets in place for women on the boards of FTSE 350 companies. While this can be difficult and [risks people thinking someone was] promoted because of the diversity that they represent, actually it’s made a massive difference.”

She adds that as well as considering targets, simply having a culture of looking for people different from yourself can be hugely effective.

But she says we also need to get more people to put themselves forward for promotions and talent programmes.

“Role models are super important in this,” she says. People need to see people like themselves in leadership positions.

The talent pipeline needs to be data rich and long term

Boomer-Clark says that you need to have detailed long-term plans for your talent pipeline.

“When I joined AET, one of my priorities was to properly understand how our workforce was segmented,” she reveals. “We now have a really clear view of our principal pipeline. We know those who are ready to step in now, those who will be ready in the next two to three years and those who we think will be ready in the next five years plus.”

She explains that you need to know a lot about these individuals: where they are and what they are doing, but also who they are.

“Men make up 30 per cent of our workforce overall, and yet they make up 40 per cent of the talent pipeline,” she reveals. “We definitely have a huge amount of work to do to become more diverse as an organisation. [We have] 11.4 per cent of the workforce [who are BME], but more positively [this group makes up] 16.5 per cent of our talent pipeline.”

She believes that only through good data about where you are as an organisation with staff and having a transparent pipeline can you really be precise strategically about who you develop and how.

“We can often get drawn into emotive discussions when we’re talking about how we progress people with different and diverse characteristics and backgrounds but the most important thing is to know your workforce very clearly, and then you can be more precise about how you build that diversity over time,” she says.

Development pathways: build a structure

Once you have the people in your talent management programme, you need to build a development package for them.

Lafferty says a lot of organisations use the leadership pipeline, developed by Ram Charan.

“It lays out the six stages of organisational life, what the jumps are between each stage and the development that should go with [those jumps],” she explains.

You don’t have to use Charan’s model, of course, but having a clear idea of the steps between each leadership level, and the general development needs that go with each jump from which to build your training programmes, is a standard approach across all businesses.

Lafferty stresses, though, that you cannot forget about everyone who is not in the talent pool.

“You have your pools of people you want to progress faster, but we should not ignore everyone else,” she says. “You have to balance the accelerated development for the 10-20 per cent of your staff in the talent pool with development for everyone else. Everybody needs learning and development.”

This goes back to the revolving door Heller spoke of earlier: people’s priorities and ambitions will shift over time.

Balance general development with specific pathways

To optimise your development pathway, you need to balance having programmes that everyone in your pipeline does with approaches that are more specific to individual needs, says Lafferty.

“You need programmes that are aligned with the organisation’s priorities but within that have a range of different opportunities - some will need mentoring, some peer development, some stretch assignments. You need a mix of options that can be personalised for an individual.”

Heller agrees. She says you need the transparency of specific pathways so they can see the route up, and what is expected, but you also need that personal view.

“Schools are not like IBM, we don’t have lots of identical jobs people can do - teaching can be very different in different Ark schools,” she says. “So you need the general pathways but you need to work with every individual to work on their specific needs.”

One of the big challenges in development is mobility and geography, says Boomer-Clark.

“How do you move the talent to the places you need it most,” she asks.

She also picks up on Heller’s point about differences in skill set requirements across schools.

To address both these challenges, she reveals that AET has regional talent forums, “which are helping us to have a much clearer picture of how distinctive the challenges are in different parts of the country”.

Getting the timing right

Even with the right talent identification and a really clear pathway of development, it can be difficult to know when someone is really ready to make the next step up - and difficult for them to have the self-awareness to know when they are ready, too.

So, assuming you have all the above sorted in your talent management strategy, how do you tackle this last stage of the “timing” of promotions?

“Sometimes you have people who think they are ready before they possibly are, but we have more people who don’t feel they are ready and we need to give them that confidence,” says Heller.

She says that to do the latter, sometimes an interim role can work really well for an individual to try a role without so much expectation being placed upon them and with the knowledge they are able to step back again easily.

She adds that support is also crucial - having the proper systems of support when a person does step up can minimise risks and increase confidence.

Boomer-Clark agrees. She says the best marker of when someone is ready to step up is that you have confidence they have the experience and the support to be successful in that role, while acknowledging that the role will stretch them.

Key points

So, what are key take-home points for your own talent identification and development strategy?

1. Use the NPQs as a starting point, not the entirety of a talent development plan: they should form a foundation for your own approaches.
2. Make leadership roles transparent and accessible so people can see the variety of options and routes to the available options.
3. Understand that talent identification is not a one-time job: people change and ambitions shift, so you need to recognise flexibility is key to how people access your talent management programme and what leadership roles look like. You also need to have a structured way of combating bias in your selection process.
4. You need to build a clear plan of the leadership steps in your school or trust and what is required at each level in terms of skills and character traits. This forms the structure for your development pathway.
5. You need an additional layer of requirements detailing the core skills you look for in a leader in your organisation.
6. Data is key - you need to have a detailed view of your workforce: who they are, where they are and what they want out of their career. You then need a detailed breakdown of your talent pipeline, so you have people at each step of the leadership ladder and you know who they are and what they need.
7. Avoid off-the-shelf models like the nine-box grid and create a development pathway that fits the cohorts you have: this should be a mix of general training programmes that are aligned to the organisation’s objectives and individual personalisation to ensure everyone has the resources they need to progress. It’s important to ensure that anyone outside the talent pool also has good training opportunities.
8. Each step up the ladder should happen after a detailed discussion between the individual and their manager, recognising that sometimes the individual may need to be given the confidence to step up.
9. Review, review, review. If there is one thing that all the experts recommend, it is that everything about your talent programme should be open to interrogation and revisited regularly.