This week on Manx Maxim I’m writing about a gap I’ve been circling for years. Who assures the quality of leadership in schools, at every level, and what happens when nobody does. This is the first of five.
Walk into any primary school on a Tuesday morning and count the people leading something.
There’s the headteacher, obviously. A deputy, probably. Maybe an assistant head. That’s the bit everyone thinks of when they hear the word leadership, and it’s the bit that gets judged.
Now keep counting.
The SENCo, coordinating provision for a caseload of children and directing the work of half a dozen adults. Phase leaders holding a team of teachers together. Subject leaders responsible for the quality of a whole curriculum area across seven year groups. A business manager running budgets that would make a small company blink. The office manager who is, at nine o’clock on a Monday, simultaneously the school’s receptionist, first aider, communications department, finance office and the first human being an anxious parent speaks to. A senior teaching assistant running an intervention programme and directing three colleagues while doing it. A site manager handling contractors, compliance and risk before most of the staff have arrived.
That’s twenty or thirty people, in a modestly sized school, leading something that matters to somebody.
And almost none of that is ever assessed as leadership.
What actually gets looked at
We are not short of accountability in schools. That’s not the complaint.
We assess teaching quality. We assess outcomes. We assess safeguarding with real rigour, and quite right too. We assess finances, health and safety, attendance, behaviour, the curriculum, provision for children with additional needs. There are frameworks and inspection schedules and audits for all of it.
And when leadership is assessed, it is largely assessed at the top. The headteacher and the senior team. That judgement matters enormously and it is not a trivial thing to get. But it covers perhaps three or four people in a building that runs on the leadership of thirty.
For everybody else, we have proxies. We look at a subject leader’s data and call that a judgement on their leadership. We look at a phase leader’s own classroom and call that a judgement on their leadership. We appraise them, usually against targets that describe outcomes rather than capability. We have a conversation about workload if we’re being conscientious.
What we very rarely do is look at the leadership itself. Whether this person can hold a team together. Whether they can have a difficult conversation without damaging a relationship. Whether they can take a decision, explain it, and carry people with them. Whether they know what to do when someone in their team is struggling, or brilliant, or quietly disengaging.
Those are the actual competencies of the job. They are almost entirely unexamined.
Why it happens
I don’t think this is negligence. I think it’s the accumulated result of several reasonable things.
The first is that leadership is genuinely hard to describe. Teaching quality has decades of research, observation protocols and a shared professional vocabulary behind it. Ask two headteachers to describe what excellent middle leadership looks like and you’ll get two thoughtful answers that don’t quite match. If you can’t describe it, you can’t assess it, so it drifts.
The second is that accountability tends to flow to whoever holds the legal responsibility. That’s the head and the governing body. Everything below that is delegated, and the assumption is that the head is assuring it internally. Sometimes that’s true. Often the head is assuring the outcomes rather than the leadership, because the outcomes are what they’ll be asked about.
The third is capacity. A head with three schools and a finite week will look at the things that generate risk and the things that generate questions. Nobody has ever rung me up to ask whether my subject leaders are being developed as leaders.
And the fourth, which I think is the most honest, is that we’ve quietly decided leadership is something you either have or acquire by osmosis. We appoint people into it and then we hope.
What it costs
The cost shows up in places you don’t immediately connect to leadership.
It shows up in retention. People rarely leave schools because of children. They leave because of how they’re led, and most of that leading is done by middle leaders rather than by the head. A phase leader who doesn’t know how to run a team meeting, or who avoids conflict until it becomes a crisis, will cost a school good people, and nobody will ever write that down as a leadership failure.
It shows up in workload. A subject leader who hasn’t been taught to prioritise will generate work for eight colleagues to prove they’re doing the job. That’s not malice. Nobody showed them what good looks like.
It shows up in the strange fragility that some schools have, where the whole thing feels like it’s held together by two or three people and everybody quietly knows it.
And it shows up, eventually, in children’s experience. Not dramatically. Not in a headline figure. Just in the difference between a settled school and an unsettled one, which is a difference every child can feel and very few adults can measure.
The question for the week
I’m going to spend this week on this, because I think it’s one of the more important unaddressed problems in education, and because it sits underneath a lot of things we spend our energy on further downstream.
Tomorrow I’ll write about what happens when we promote a brilliant teacher into a job nobody ever taught them to do, which is a story I can tell from my own record of getting it wrong. Then the people who lead schools every day without anyone calling them leaders. Then governors, who hold more leadership power than anyone and receive less assurance than anyone. And finally, who actually pays for all this.
I should say plainly that I’m not a neutral observer here. I’ve spent a long while working on something aimed squarely at this problem, alongside some colleagues, and that work has shaped how I see it. I’ll write about that properly another time. This week is about the problem.
Because before anyone can fix it, we need to agree it’s there. Twenty or thirty people are leading your school today. Somebody should be asking how well.
