04 May 2007
The impending crisis in school headship is a problem of the government's own making, a leading education academic has warned.
Addressing a National Union of Teachers conference, Professor Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said head teachers were uncomfortable with being regarded in the same way as football club managers – vulnerable to the sack if their results fall below par.
Speaking on May 1, the tenth anniversary of Tony Blair's election to Downing Street, Smithers said it was a good time to reflect on what had become of the 'education, education, education' mantra on which New Labour fought the 1997 general election.
'Tony Blair's approach to education is fundamentally flawed,' he said. 'The approach they've alighted on is wrong. Test and examination scores are not the product of education in the way that cars or barrels of oil are [the product of industry]. Treating test scores as the output of schools has meant government has valued what can be measured over what can't… Results aren't the be-all and end-all of education.'
In a study commissioned by the NUT, Smithers and his colleague Pamela Robinson interviewed a representative sample of head teachers drawn from across different sectors.
They found that workloads, additional pressure and vulnerability to dismissal were the major barriers dissuading secondary school teachers from pursuing head teacher posts.
One head teacher interviewed by Smithers and Robinson said: 'If you are not meeting your targets, you are very vulnerable.'
Both the National College of School Leadership and the General Teaching Council have raised concerns about head teacher recruitment, estimating that 40% of posts are going to be very difficult to fill by 2011.
Smithers rejected arguments that such recruitment difficulties meant the role of the head teacher should be reassessed, suggesting instead that the government look at itself and rethink its own relationship to schools. 'A key task of the next government is to come up with a balance between autonomy and accountability,' he said.
The conference also heard from John Lakin of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who led the study into school leadership that was commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills last year and published in January. The study gained notoriety when it gave some support to the idea of a school 'chief executive', a non-teacher who would take on many of the administrative tasks performed by heads.
But Lakin said such a model was 'not the answer to future head teacher shortages', adding that it wasn't a key aspect of the study but just one option for change.
The DfES is considering the PwC report.
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