In the Sustainable School Leadership final report, we set out 6 main themes from across the UK. In the next few posts, Professor Toby Greany will set out all six. Here he outlines the first two:
1. The nature of school leadership is widely seen to have changed in recent years
2. Schools are working beyond their ‘education’ remit – an ethic of education and care
Leaders explained that their role has changed substantially in recent years. The pandemic lockdowns marked a hinge point, accelerating longer-term trends. 88% of survey respondents agreed that leadership has become more difficult since Covid (66% strongly agreed). Key drivers include the increased scale and complexity of student needs, staffing issues, resource constraints & parental complaints. Meanwhile, levels of support for schools have reduced.
A phrase we heard several times was “everything rolls downhill to schools”. As children’s needs have grown and as wider services have been stripped back, schools have taken on care roles, such as running a food bank, that most people would not typically think of as ‘education’. Meanwhile, the complexity of inclusion, safeguarding, behaviour and pastoral needs within schools has increased, while staff are widely seen to have become less resilient.
The education and care role of schools encompasses 3 overlapping areas:
a) within school (creating inclusive, relational cultures that support educational outcomes)
b) beyond school (working with families and communities)
c) across school (supporting staff wellbeing).
Schools have a ‘duty of care’ and many aspects of this work, such as inclusion and safeguarding, are legally mandated and regulated. Beyond this, leaders’ motivation was partly pragmatic (i.e. if a child is hungry they cannot learn) but also a deeply human response to need.
Leaders are spending much less time on instructional leadership (teaching, learning and curriculum) than on care, inclusion and well-being. This was not the case in previous surveys of head teacher time use, emphasising the extent of recent change.
How leaders balance their care and instructional roles reflects both individual preferences and place-based factors, with clear differences between localities and among the three nations. A subset of leaders choose to prioritise the instructional aspects of their role. More commonly, leaders attempt to encompass education and care together, but such efforts are rarely straightforward. Care leadership is often emotionally and physically demanding. Where leaders have established trauma informed, nurture or restorative approaches this can help them and their staff to see how education and care are an integrated whole.
Sustainable School Leadership 