Sustainable School Leadership: Comparing Approaches to the Training, Supply and Retention of Senior School Leaders Across the UK
Funder
Sustainable School Leadership podcasts
In this series of four podcasts, members of the research team share and discuss the research findings with guests from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. These guests include policymakers, school leaders and researchers.
Each episode focuses on themes from the project conceptual framework:
- How does identity shape school leadership?
- How does place shape school leadership?
- Why and how does school leadership today reflect an ethic of education and care?
- What can be done to make school leadership more sustainable?
Project duration
Start date: 1 December 2022
End date: 30 January 2026
Project summary
The Sustainable School Leadership project explored the training, supply, retention, and wider sustainability of senior school leadership across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, seeking to offer a vision for where and how these approaches could be enhanced.
Senior school leaders play an essential role in shaping educational experiences and outcomes for children, particularly in the most challenging communities.
Policymakers around the world broadly agree on the features of successful school leadership. This is seen to combine transformational (vision and values), instructional (teaching and learning) and distributed (collective efficacy) approaches. This global consensus shapes how leaders are trained, recruited and held accountable. Our research asked whether this consensus holds true at a time when the needs of children, families and wider societies are changing rapidly.
Our previous Leading in Lockdown research in England indicated that between 30-40% of headteachers were planning to leave the profession early, due to the intensity of the challenges they were experiencing at that time (2021–2022). So we also wanted to explore whether the increased pressures on school leaders had impacted on aspiration, supply and sustainability.
Questions
The research questions were:
- How do England Scotland and Northern Ireland recruit, train and retain school leaders?
- How well do these approaches take account of individual, local and systemic needs, in particular in relation to the sustainability of leadership supply, its diversity, equity, quality and fitness for the future?
Methods
The mixed methods comparative study included:
- a review of international literature and practice on senior school leadership development
- interviews with policy makers and leadership development experts from the UK and internationally
- development of an original conceptual framework addressing four areas: leadership, identity, place and an ethic of education and care
- research in each nation comprising: documentary analysis; secondary analysis of workforce datasets; place-based case studies; and a UK-wide survey of school leaders
- comparative analysis which allowed us to refine our theoretical framework and address the research questions.
We worked with key stakeholders throughout the study, including through three national expert advisory groups.
Key themes
The final report sets out six themes from across the UK as well as recommendations for policy and practice in each nation:
- The nature of school leadership is widely seen to have changed in recent years – COVID as a hinge point
- Schools and leaders are often working beyond their ‘education’ remit – limited time for instructional leadership - an ethic of education and care
- It’s not a pipeline crisis (yet) – it’s a sustainability crisis
- Diversity – a problem that no-one really owns
- Preparing for headship – the importance of developmental experience
- One-size-fits-all policy does not fit all – place and the need for local solutions
Previous research
Work from a previous project led by Professor Greany and Thomson also feed into the project. School Leaders' Work and Well Being was a multi-phased project. Phase one focussed on leading in lockdown with stage two focussing on leading after lockdown. Further funding in 2022 led to a series of round tables around the country, looking at possible interventions to address the recruitment and retention crises. You can view all reports from each phases on 'the research' webpage.