Kathryn Morgan and Professor Toby Greany argue that sustainable school and college leadership requires more than managing workload. For reform to succeed, leaders need the capacity and agency to lead it.

Conditions to lead

School and college leaders returning for the new academic year face an extraordinary amount of change. SEND and inclusion, curriculum and assessment, accountability, workforce and employment reform are all moving at pace, alongside a shifting political conversation about devolution, place and wider public services. Leaders will have to interpret competing expectations, make difficult trade-offs and turn national ambition into something that works for their communities.

There is much to welcome in the ambition for reform, but there are also tensions we must confront. We are asking more of leaders at a time when the evidence shows they have limited capacity to absorb it. The question is not simply whether individual reforms are desirable, but whether we are creating the conditions in which leaders can exercise the judgement and agency needed to make them work.

The latest Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders survey ( tinyurl.com/maw8y6jn) found that almost three in ten teachers and leaders were considering leaving the state sector within the next 12 months, with workload and stress or poor wellbeing the most cited reasons. ASCL’s own survey of 920 school and college leaders ( www.ascl.org.uk/WellbeingSurvey) found that nearly three-quarters typically work 55 hours or more each week during term time, while almost nine in ten say their work–life balance is affected often or very often by the responsibilities of their role.

Simply describing these pressures or looking for quick fixes to reduce workloads is not enough. If we want to understand whether leadership is sustainable, we need to ask what has happened to the job itself.

A different leadership role 

The sustainable school leadership research1 published earlier this year makes an important distinction. England does not face a headteacher pipeline crisis yet, although some areas and categories of school face sharp recruitment challenges. Rather, England faces a sustainability crisis, which could quickly morph into a pipeline crisis if not addressed.

Appetite for headship has diminished, employers report smaller applicant fields, leadership diversity remains woeful, and while overall attrition rates have remained steady at about 13% per year, younger headteachers are noticeably less likely to survive three years in post. Most strikingly, about a third (34%) of heads in England described themselves as ‘mostly surviving’, while approximately one in five (22%) described themselves as sometimes or mostly ‘sinking’.

The reasons for the sustainability crisis go beyond workload. The research highlighted that the nature of school leadership is widely seen to have changed in recent years, particularly since the pandemic. Schools have found themselves responding to increased care needs related to mental health, poverty, family support, inclusion, and safeguarding, while capacity in other public services has reduced. The phrase heard repeatedly through the research was that “everything rolls downhill to schools”.

One implication is that leaders are spending less time on instructional leadership than they were 20 years ago, while focusing far more time on care-related issues. Most leaders are attempting to integrate education and care together, but such efforts are rarely straightforward, can be emotionally and physically demanding, and all too often make the job feel undoable.

Many of the government’s reforms – particularly those concerning SEND and inclusion – seek to address the explosion in care needs that schools are facing. But unless we acknowledge the underlying shifts and equip schools to become centres of education and care, reforms will offer little more than sticking plasters.

The expansion in the role of leaders matters because headteachers occupy a distinctive position in the system, where policy, organisational capacity, professional practice and the lived reality of children, families and staff meet. Yet the more time leaders spend responding to immediate operational demands, the less space they have to think, make sense of complexity, exercise judgement and articulate a values-based route forward.

Autonomy is not the same as agency 

England has spent several decades increasing school autonomy, but autonomy and agency are not the same thing. A leader can have considerable formal freedom while having very little practical room to manoeuvre.

We rightly value leaders who are visible and close to the day-to-day life of their schools or colleges, but risk equating good leadership with constant operational presence. Time spent thinking, reflecting, building relationships and considering longer-term strategy enables leaders to navigate complexity rather than simply react to it.

Many of these challenges are not technical problems with known solutions. Inclusion, persistent absence, workforce sustainability and changing relationships with communities require expertise, but also adaptation, collective sense-making and difficult choices. More guidance, another framework or training package will not create the conditions for leaders to make those choices well.

Can place restore agency? 

This is why the renewed interest in place, devolution and civic leadership creates a genuine opportunity. Toby’s research on local learning landscapes and place-based change2 has highlighted how leaders can collaborate to forge local coherence, share knowledge and address complex problems that extend beyond any individual institution.

The opportunity is for leaders to become more connected locally, creating a place-based community of leaders who work together to address shared challenges, integrate support and build collective capacity. By shifting from what is best for my school or college to what we together can do for all children, leaders can strengthen collective moral purpose.

Strengthening place-based collaboration can also make leadership more sustainable: overcoming isolation and providing rich relational support. But there is an obvious danger. If civic leadership simply becomes another way of expanding the responsibilities of headteachers, we will have made an already demanding role larger still.

Devolution will not restore agency if it merely moves responsibility without moving capacity. England’s over-centralised school system must be rebalanced, with resources devolved and with a ‘local solutions’ mindset focused on facilitating productive change at local level.

Sustainability by design 

Rather than treating leadership sustainability as a problem to solve once policy has been designed, sustainability should become one of the principles through which reform is designed. That means asking not only what leaders need to know, but what capacity they need to think; what they should do, what might need to stop or be rethought; and where responsibility and expertise should sit across a wider system.

These are questions we will explore at an ASCL roundtable on sustainable school leadership this autumn. The next phase of reform will require considerable expertise, but expertise alone is not enough. Leaders also need the time, relationships, infrastructure and trust to exercise agency. Without these conditions, we risk asking leaders to transform the system while leaving too little space to lead it.

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Sources in this article

1. See: www.sustainableschoolleadership.uk
2. See: Understanding the self-improving school-led system (Understanding the self-improving school-led system - Nuffield Foundation); Local Learning Landscapes ( https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/ groups/crelm/projects/equalls.aspx), and LocalEd ( https://localed2025.org.uk/)

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Kathryn Morgan
ASCL Leadership and Workforce Specialist
Follow Kathryn on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-morgan-a31955184

Toby Greany 
Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University School of Education
Follow Toby on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/toby-greany-1975111b

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