The head of the first secondary free school in the country to be rated as “outstanding” has called for new programmes to be set up to identify the next generation of school leaders in the North.

The executive principal of Dixons Trinity School, Luke Sparkes, has voiced concern that there is no system in place to identify “high potential” people who could be school leaders in three to four years’ time.

Mr Sparkes, who came through the Future Leaders Programme, helped open Dixons Trinity, in Bradford, in 2012 and led it to become the first secondary free school in the country to be rated as “outstanding”.  Last summer it achieved among the highest Progress 8 scores in the country with its first set of GCSE results.

In an interview with Tes, he said that he wanted to play an active role in raising standards across the North.

He believes there are two issues that need addressing to achieve this: teacher recruitment and retention, and leadership.

He said: “If we want to transform education in the North, it’s not just about having people to fill positions - it’s about having high-quality people to fill the positions. 

 “What we have got to get right is leadership. If you get a really strong leadership in a school then they should be able to develop capacity and help teachers along.”

Mr Sparkes’ route into leadership was fast-tracked by the Future Leaders programme but he believes more needs to be done to identify and develop teachers with the potential to be great school leaders.

Finding future leaders

He said: “The Future Leaders programme now is for people who are two years from headship, so it’s looking for high-perfoming deputies. 

“But where are the programmes who are developing people like I was - as a head of department. We need to find the high potential in the North.

“Who is identifying the high-potential people who could be really top heads in the next three to four years and who is developing them? Hopefully academy trusts are but not every school is part of a trust and not all trusts are good at developing people.”

Three years ago Sir Nick Weller, the chief executive of Dixons Academies, produced a report for George Osborne on how to develop a Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy.

It made a series of recommendations on strengthening leadership and recruitment in the North, including a Teach North scheme and a programme to allow high-performing academy trust leaders elsewhere to mentor those in the North.

However, these recommendations have not been implemented by the government with Osborne having left office by the time the report was published.

Mr Sparkes believes more national focus is needed on raising standards on the North.

“The North is important to me. I do feel like we are underrepresented in the media. Dixons Trinity has had lots of attention but there are lots of other great schools in the North,” he said.

“There needs to be more funding but it needs to be spent on the right things and we need to identify the right talent and make sure the right people are driving improvement.

“It’s a real challenge because you have got the Northern cities, but you have also got the coastal areas of the North, the rural areas and their challenges are different.”

To read the full interview with Luke Sparkes, see the 29 June edition of Tes. Subscribers can read the full article here. To subscribe, click here. This week’s Tes magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here.