“Systematically and structurally, we need to do something different for headteachers. It is a different world our heads are living in now.”

While most people in the sector share the sentiment of this statement from Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) CEO Becks Boomer-Clark, she says she hasn’t seen much evidence of actual change in education.

Certainly, recruitment and retention statistics for school leaders indicate persistent problems.

“While the leaving rate of classroom teachers has improved slightly in recent years, falling to 10 per cent from its peak of 11 per cent in 2016, the headteacher leaving rate has risen back up to a peak level of 10.6 per cent after the pandemic,” says Jack Worth, lead economist at the National Foundation for Educational Research.

“Looking after headteachers needs to be an important priority for government, as well as trustees and governors.”.

Giving headteachers training opportunities

The lack of progress on this suggests we are failing to recognise that heads are “the most significant enabling or limiting factor” for pupil success, according to Boomer-Clark. Quite simply, she says, you can’t have a good school without a good head.

James Bowen, assistant general secretary at the NAHT school leaders’ union, agrees.

“The success of our education system depends on us having the very best leaders in place, firing on all cylinders,” he states. “Leaders set the tone, establish the vision and have a significant impact on pupil outcomes.”

There are multiple factors making a headteacher’s role more challenging that require government intervention (many of them are listed in this recent Tes Daily newsletter) but many in the sector feel there are also things that we can control as a sector ourselves.

“The success of our education system depends on us having the very best leaders in place, firing on all cylinders”

One of the key areas regularly cited is support for professional development for heads. But could more (and better) CPD for school leaders really make a difference?

There are plenty who think it could.

“Headship is an increasingly complex position and it’s so important to recognise the necessity for a supportive team of governors who encourage you to take opportunities to grow yourself,” says Chris Edwards, headteacher at Brighton Hill Community School in Basingstoke.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to work with organisations like PiXL to further my skills and have met so many senior leaders in those networks that have been invaluable to me across my seven years of headship.”

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says that having time for professional development was critical in his early years of headship, with “occasional days out of school in sessions with other new heads and visits to other schools”.

“It was invaluable, and gave a sense of solidarity in a role that can too easily feel lonely,” he explains.

And Boomer-Clark says the impact of professional development for heads cannot be underestimated. She says that more self-development for heads is critical to ensure that they feel valued in their job, that the role is a sustainable, long-term option that has status, and that every school has a headteacher with the resource to transform pupils’ lives and to be that “enabling factor”.

“The challenges they are facing day-to-day - many of which are not directly related to education - there is a challenge and an obligation on us to support them,” she says. “Not just to support them with the challenges but for them to be professionally fulfilled.”

She adds that evidence of the impact that a good headteacher can have is critical to justifying investment in this area, with one study from the Education Policy Institute suggesting that a good head can improve a pupil’s attainment by two GCSE grades.

Time and workload barriers

Most agree, though, that the CPD currently available to heads needs improvement, and that it is far harder to find time for it than it once was.

“I think they made a great error in making the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) optional,” explains Barton. “It allowed a powerful statement not only about the professional standards but also the expectations on support, mentoring and professional learning for new heads. High-quality professional learning, coaching and mentoring should be an entitlement for every new head.”

He adds that, for current headteachers, “thinking time is pushed to the margins of the school day or term” because the government has failed to signal its importance.

Bowen, meanwhile, has found that school leaders are “increasingly finding it hard to devote time to their own professional development as the demands of the role have become so great and the challenges so large”.

• School leader CPD: Is headteacher training and development fit for purpose?
• Training: DfE reviews heads’ NPQ to boost take-up
• The route to headship: In defence of the NPQH

Michael Tidd, headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex, feels this acutely. “Heads who want to be leading on teaching and learning, developing young teachers, fine-tuning curriculum, etc, find their time absorbed by safeguarding cases, family support, behaviour and SEND support and various other needs that previously were led by other agencies,” he says.

“It leaves heads feeling that they’re never getting to the core of their work, always fighting losing battles, and never getting the job done.

“That’s before you even begin to think about their own time and development. I can think of few heads who still are able to set aside ‘dedicated headship time’.”

Supporting CPD

Boomer-Clark believes the lack of time for CPD for heads is “madness”.

“On a day-to-day basis, are we investing in the right places for our most expensive units of time?” she asks. “A chartered accountant has an obligation to be reaccredited, and they do a certain number of hours of verified, and some hours of unverified, development to achieve that. How can it be that someone who is looking after money, essentially, has a more significant obligation to their personal growth and development than someone who is looking after children?”

“Heads are left feeling they’re always fighting losing battles, and never getting the job done”

There are signs that some heads, like Edwards, are managing to carve limited time out for development. And Hilary Spencer, CEO of Ambition Institute, points out that lots of headteachers have been doing the National Professional Qualifications (NPQs), “so we know it is possible for people to find the space and time if they’re supported to do so”.

But she says we need to ensure that all school leaders have access to ongoing high-quality support that helps them keep learning and developing in these crucial roles.

“Otherwise, it can be easy to keep doing the things that made you successful in previous roles or circumstances, rather than being able to adapt to different needs or help move your school and the system forward,” Spencer says.

How to develop a headteacher

Even if we did get the time and money for professional development, we would need to decide what the right developmental support for heads looked like.

Barton says there are models to imitate from the past (like older versions of the NPQH that he mentioned above) that may not have been perfect but at least provided some structured support.

Steve Rollett, deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, suggests it is important that academy trusts think about how they can help headteachers to keep up to date with the latest evidence and approaches, to learn from one another and to build supportive relationships with peers.

Bowen concurs, believing that mentoring, coaching, networking and formal training all need to be in the mix.

At Ambition Institute, Spencer says the belief is that the best professional development is a combination of building knowledge, motivation, developing techniques and embedding practice - “and that means getting a good balance between evidence-informed input from credible sources and the opportunity to reflect and apply increasing knowledge and expertise”.

There is also a cultural element to this, though, according to Boomer-Clark. She argues that headship is suffering a crisis of identity, with its status as the crucial cog in the school system being questioned. This can make the argument that we should invest in heads more difficult.

“It used to be that being a headteacher was seen as the pinnacle of someone’s career,” Boomer-Clark says. “Now we have people who have been heads for eight years being asked what they are going to do next: ‘When are you going to be an exec head?’, ‘What about a regional director?’, ‘What about a MAT CEO?’”

“We want people to feel it is possible to stay as a leader, to do that important work at the heart of communities. We need to make sure it is something people see as a good thing and that it is possible. And we need to ensure investment in headteachers is non-negotiable.”

Routes to leadership

Keziah Featherstone, executive headteacher at Q3 Academy Tipton, believes the role of headteacher has been diminished in status because other roles have opened up in trusts or organisations like Ofsted at more senior levels, while at the same time “the role of headship itself has become far less attractive”. This is because of “the pernicious accountability system, the relationship between school and families, and the headaches of funding, supporting SEND and recruitment and retention”.

These other more senior roles offer an escape from headship, worsening the effect, she says.

Despite this, Featherstone adds, there is still a huge respect for the job among those who do it.

“I love the role so much, even if it has a huge toll on my physical and mental health. It’s a privilege, and as [headteacher] Vic Goddard still asserts, it’s the best job in the world,” she says.

So how much of a leadership development revolution can the sector provide for itself without government?

Featherstone and Tidd both argue that without government action on the challenges to the job, it would be incredibly difficult to create enough CPD time. Edwards, however, as he states above, believes it is possible with supportive governors or trustees.

Bowen and Barton are both clear that the government is key to signalling the importance of development for leaders and creating the right conditions for it to happen.

But Rollett certainly thinks it is something that trusts have to lead on, too.

“We are already seeing trusts thinking carefully about how they can bring headteachers together to facilitate the sharing of experience and expertise, and to contribute collectively towards the strategic journey of the group,” he says.

“In some cases, this is through whole-trust networks; in others, it can be regional or local. It might also involve trusts working together.

“The key point is that the trust board and executive recognise the importance of galvanising their heads as an interdependent group of leaders and that they provide the direction and opportunities for this to happen in sustained and meaningful ways that speak to the challenges heads are facing on the ground.”

Dedicated cash for self-development

At AET, Boomer-Clark is trying to show that the sector can go some way itself towards defining and providing the time and financial resource for this: her trust is going to fund up to £100,000 of CPD for each of its headteachers over five years, with a professional sabbatical after that period.

In terms of time, this will consist of 10 per cent mandated CPD through a partnership with Ambition Institute, 20 per cent learning through networks (for example, through peer mentoring), and 70 per cent live experience on the job (for example, through stretch assignments).

“We need to ensure investment in headteachers is non-negotiable”

Altogether, the entitlement will be up to 100 hours per year of potential development time, with the money allocated to the head to be used to fund the opportunities and free up their time.

Financially, it breaks down as around £21 per pupil per year for an average-sized secondary school. And she says that looking at what is on offer for leaders in other sectors suggests even £100,000 is not enough.

“The average cost of an MBA from one of the five leading British business schools is £92,000 across two years. West Point [the US military training school] spends $250,000 on a four-year programme for each recruit. When you look at that, you think, ‘Why should heads get less?’”

This is where the cultural shift noted above may be key. Featherstone says that spending money on your development as a leader can make you feel “incredibly selfish”. But she says that “without a commitment to continuing professional learning, it is so easy to stagnate in a profession that evolves at a rate of knots, which is no good at all for anyone”.

The future of headship

Plenty more people in education are coming to this conclusion, Spencer says. “We’re in conversation with a number of other organisations looking at what more support headteachers and school leaders need and want, and are looking forward to developing these over the coming months.”

While no one above is claiming that CPD and restoring the perception of headteachers as the critical cog in education will solve all of our leadership retention and recruitment issues, what they are saying is that they can contribute to positive change and that they are things that can partly be achieved without government intervention.

As Bowen says, heads feel they have “one hand tied behind their back” because they don’t have the resources to do the job. Part of that is government funding, autonomy and respect. But part of it is also having the time to think, to learn and to be empowered by their own development.

Boomer-Clark sums it up succinctly: “Leaders need permission to prioritise themselves.”