The Pinnacle of Education

A dear friend is coming to the end of his career as a headteacher. This July, he will hang up the mortar board and cape and head off into the sunset for a life of golf, writing, good wine and family.

My friend is rare. Because my friend has been the headteacher of the same school for 25 years. He started as a fresh-faced and naïve thirty-eight-year-old. Full of energy, drive and hubris. Like all headteachers, he was, of course, rather rubbish at his job in the first year. A little less rubbish in the next couple of years and increasingly great over the subsequent years. Today, he is a phenomenally talented headteacher, full of wisdom and wit, patience and kindness. His school is in his blood, in the very fabric of his being. He has been an honest custodian for quarter of a century, bucking the trend today of young headteachers doing a few years, moving on, doing a few more at another school, and then eagerly exiting the role for some support or administrative title in a multi-academy trust, LA, quango, awarding body or regulator.

When I look at him, I find myself asking uncomfortable questions about the system we have created.

When did we lose sight of the importance of stewardship? When did we forget that being the leader of a school can and should be a life’s work? And that such a life is a life well lived? When did we begin to treat headship as something to survive for a few years before moving on to something supposedly more senior?

I believe headship to be the pinnacle of accomplishment in the world of education. There is no greater role, no higher purpose, no more senior a position. It is the role where educational leadership is most real, most human, and most consequential. No other position in education has such direct daily influence on the lives of children, families, and communities.

I also believe society would be a better place if we reinstated headteacher as the most revered and most valued position.

Multi-academy trusts work best when they do not view their central teams as some kind of superior beings, but instead understand that the MAT HQ is, in fact, a central service – there to serve, support and remove blockers from headteachers, who are the true leaders.

But they only become such leaders with time. And the system should reform itself to create the conditions where doing so is encouraged, admired and rewarded.

We need to dismantle the perceived status hierarchies that now pull people away from schools rather than deeper into them.

Nobody becomes a great head in a year or two. It is a craft learned slowly through mistakes, sustained relationships, and long acquaintance with a place. The most impressive headteachers I know are not those who have collected a string of short appointments. They are those who have grown roots, who have weathered storms, and who have earned the trust of a community over decades.

Longevity is not, by itself, a guarantee of greatness. Some heads stay too long. Some schools need fresh thinking. Some people choose to move on for entirely good reasons. I am not arguing for immobility or for the preservation of mediocrity.

I believe, where possible, a headteacher should be the custodian of a single institution for a generation. And we should significantly reward this behaviour. Imagine, for example, those with a decade of service in a single school receiving a £100k bonus, with two decades of service with £250k and with 25 years’ service with an additional £250k. These numbers are deliberately provocative. But, if this sounds unaffordable to you, then you are seriously underestimating the costs involved in continuously replacing the headteacher. It is not just the obvious tangible costs, such as the eyewatering recruitment fees, but also the enormous intangible costs. When a new headteacher joins a school not as a custodian but as a reformer, initiatives abound and huge amounts of time and effort from staff are wasted reinventing wheels. Institutional memory is lost. Progress is disrupted.

We pay a heavy price for this churn, even if it rarely appears on a balance sheet.

If we truly valued stewardship, we would design incentives that reward it.

We could also use the honours system to celebrate those who dedicate a lifetime to one community. At present, national recognition often favours people who move between roles and organisations. The King could favour stewardship when gongs are handed out.

None of this diminishes the importance of other roles in education. Inspectors, advisers, directors of education, and trust CEOs all have valuable work to do. Many of them are deeply knowledgeable and expert. But their purpose is to serve and support school leaders, not to diminish them.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the personal choice to not wish to run a school for decades and nothing wrong in doing jobs such as school inspector or quango director – everyone should have the personal choice to pursue careers that interest them. But the system is best when we recognise that those on the periphery of schools are there to serve schools, not there to dictate.

When heads stay in a place for many years, their wisdom creates an effortlessness to the day-to-day and they can, instead, attend to higher-level problems that often go unsolved in schools because nobody attains such a level.

In an ideal system, many central leaders would be emeritus headteachers who have already given decades of distinguished service. Schools would purchase and value their counsel precisely because it is grounded in long, hard-won wisdom. These roles would be honoured, but they would not be regarded as promotions away from the real work. They would be regarded as acts of service to it.

This perspective also has implications for pay. The headteacher of a school should attract the highest salary in that organisation because the responsibility is greatest. Reward should grow with experience and impact in one place. If a head moves to another school, the progression should begin again. True custodianship deserves recognition.

I am not arguing that every head must remain in post for life. People should be free to make the choices that suit their circumstances and ambitions. Nor am I claiming that system leadership is unimportant. Large trusts need capable executives, and the education sector needs strong national bodies.

But I am arguing that the closer a role is to the day-to-day running of a school, the more important it is.

The health of our education system ultimately depends on the quality, stability, and wisdom of those who lead individual schools. If we want better outcomes for children, we should make headship the most admired, most supported, and most rewarded position in education.

For too long we have built structures that draw our best people away from the place they are needed most. My friend, quietly and faithfully giving a quarter of a century to one community, shows the power of turning that logic on its head.

Headteachers are the heart of the system. And they should be treated as such.