There is “no evidence” of primary headteachers leaving the profession “in droves” in the wake of the Covid crisis - which is a “tribute” to their resilience, an expert in the teacher job market has said.
Data shared with Tes by the TeachVac website shows that 1,292 primary headteacher vacancies have been advertised to date in 2021, compared with 1,496 in the whole of 2020 and 1,446 in 2019.
TeachVac chair John Howson predicts that the 2021 figure could rise to 1,592 by the end of the year, based on previous trends.
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While this would exceed headteacher vacancy numbers for 2020 and 2019, it would not represent a “significant increase” - suggesting that the pandemic has not led to an exodus of heads from the profession, as previously feared, Professor Howson said.
Last year, a survey suggested that nearly half of school leaders were more likely to leave their role prematurely owing to the Covid crisis.
The poll, by the school leaders’ union NAHT, also found that more than two-thirds (70 per cent) reported being less satisfied in their leadership role than at the same time the previous year.
The union warned that the government could face a “post-Covid exodus of school leaders” from the profession if it failed to provide more support.
But Professor Howson, who is also a qualified teacher and teacher trainer, said these fears have not played out in the data.
He told Tes: ”[Leadership is] the great conundrum. Because I thought that the pressures - particularly in the primary sector...if you’re a one-form entry primary school and you’re teaching half the week, and you’ve got three kids who are key-worker children, and you’ve got to provide for them in school, and you’ve got to provide online for everybody else, and your staff are getting Covid, and you’re worried about the furloughing of your dinner staff and everybody else - I thought they would say ‘Gosh, this is really hard work, we’ve had enough of this’ and leave in droves.
“There’s no evidence of that. Counterintuitively, there has been a slight increase [in vacancies] but not a significant increase…I have been really quite surprised.”
He said this could be down to “two possibilities”.
One was that multi-academy trusts are “covering some of the vacancies by not advertising them” - instead parachuting deputy and assistant heads into primaries to take over the top job on an acting basis.
The other possibility, he said, is that heads are “more resilient than we thought they were”.
“I do think it’s a tribute…particularly to our school leaders who have had to manage their way through an unprecedented situation, that they have carried on doing so,” he said.
However, Professor Howson did not rule out vacancy numbers rising to “high” levels at the start of next year.
He said primary schools tended to find headteacher vacancies harder to fill than secondaries, which were more likely to employ deputies who could step up.
Therefore, primary-level vacancy data was more likely to be indicative of where a school was struggling with recruitment, he added.
Overall, teacher vacancies have followed a similar pattern in 2021 to previous years, with numbers no higher than 2020 or pre-pandemic levels in the majority of cases.
The exception was for primary vacancies at the start of the summer, with numbers higher in May and June 2021 than at the same point in 2020, 2019 or 2018.
