Pat Thomson and Toby Greany explore how time relates to sustainability of school leadership.
Our research is concerned with sustainability, the sustainability of school leaders and the current practices and organisation of leading and managing a school, or group of schools. We will make sense of the term sustainability by reading the literatures to see what other people have said, through our empirical case studies and interviews, and through doing targeted analyses of data. One of the issues we’ve been grappling with is time.
Research into leaders’ work consistently shows a problem with time. Or rather, a lack of time in general and a lack of time to focus on “instructional” leadership. Researchers highlight the amount of time spent on managing which means time unavailable for family and non-school related issues.
Official data on time
The most recent data from the DfE (Adams et al, 2023) shows that, pre-pandemic, school leaders in England on average, school leaders worked more than teachers (56.8 compared to 48.7 with full time leaders working on average 57.5 hours). However, four in ten leaders reported working at least 60 hours a week, with secondary heads being more likely to work longer than their primary counterparts. The report also documents the reasons for these extended hours.
Leaders most commonly reported spending too much of their time responding to government policy changes (68% reported this), while around half reported that they spend too much time on general administrative work (50% regarding administration within the school and 45% for administration with external bodies). (Adams et al., 2023: 14-15)
The report connected workload with career intentions, with a quarter of teachers and leaders reporting that they were considering leaving the state school sector in the next 12 months for reasons other than retirement. This figure was lower than we saw in our two pandemic period surveys, which found that 30-40% of heads were planning to leave within five years (Greany et al, 2021; Greany et al, 2022). The most commonly cited reasons given in the DfE research for considering leaving were high workload (92%), government initiatives or policy changes (76%), and other pressures relating to pupil outcomes or inspection (69%). (Adams et al., 2023: 14-15)
Time and the pandemic
Our research into school leaders’ work during the pandemic showed that school leaders’ work was dominated by management tasks. Leaders had little time to concentrate on school improvement, or what is usually thought of as leadership (c.f. Duff, 2021). Instead they were almost entirely concerned with management (c.f. Fonsén et al., 2023).
While management was familiar, the actual practices expected during the pandemic – such as deciding how best to open or close the school – were largely new. Furthermore, some of the management decisions leaders had to make had no “right answers”, often on high stakes issues such as public health.
Once the main lockdowns ended and schools ‘re-opened’ (of course, in practice, they had remained open for the children of key workers throughout) re-establishing pre-pandemic routines was a priority for leaders. They knew that regular lessons, lunch and break times were vital for students’ social and emotional wellbeing as well as for learning (Maag Merki et al., 2023). Leaders saw their post lockdown tasks directed towards “always working” – attending to “student behaviour, the lack of routine and getting back into that routine, and the combination of that, with staff absence and anxiety” (primary head).
Getting school back to predictable routines was vital, no matter how much work was involved, no matter how much workload it entailed. And that work was, inevitably, done out of hours, “after “ school had finished and on weekends and holidays.
A recurrent pattern of work
We saw both differences and continuities in leaders work pre and during the pandemic. School leaders’ work was – but is always – both in and out of the school day. School time is more than when schools are open for teaching and meetings (Midha, 2021; Midha, 2023). When staff and students are in schools, leaders prioritise tasks that involve them (this is a well established pattern, see Wolcott, 1973; Southworth, 1995).
Administrative work is often left to times when leaders can work alone or in small management teams. This is very often “out of hours” and generally includes working at home. During the pandemic, the organisational “out of hours” demands were so great that there was often no time for even the accustomed time for holidays and weekends. Our analysis, backed by existing government and union evidence (NAHT, 2021; Adams et al., 2023), suggests that leaders’ usual in- and out-of-school extended hours routine was stretched and intensified during the pandemic – there was more to do, and much of it was new. Many thought seriously about leaving.
Is this pattern of work “sustainable”?
In a recent paper (details below) we argued that rather than see the pandemic as only making exceptional demands, there were also important continuities. While there is more to be done to document the multiple rhythms and cycles of leadership work, there are fundamental questions to be asked about an education system that produces and depends on these everyday-everynight extended work routines in order to function.
If we understand leadership sustainability as meaning that leaders are emotionally and physically healthy, and have a manageable work routine which does not routinely require long hours and high pressure, then we can see that the current education system has a problem.
We suggested in our paper that a fundamental examination of work in schools is required. Rather than relying of the removal of a few ‘red tape’ practices, supplying business managers who can only do some of what is necessary, or offering remedial programmes such as coaching and counselling, as necessary as these might be, it seems clear to us that more is needed. If a healthy system is to be achieved, school leaders’ work, as well as that of other school staff, is well overdue for redesign. And this means attending to central demands as well as what happens on the ground.
We are exploring these issues further through our current case studies.
You can read more in our full paper, which is open access in the journal of Educational Management, Administration and Leadership. Just click on the DOI.
Thomson, P., & Greany, T. (2024). The best of times, the worst of times: Continuities in school leaders’ work in uncertain times. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432231218544
Sustainable School Leadership 