On the back of a DfES-commissioned study by PricewaterhouseCoopers [PwC], the government is predicted to respond to the current head teacher shortage by bringing in an additional management layer of non-teacher personnel. Bearing in mind the reason for the current recruitment crisis – a barrage of ever-changing and often contradictory directives – the government is responding in what has become trademark New Labour strategy: not addressing the issue but conjuring up an expensive sticking plaster. Unfortunately bolstered by the PwC report, the DfES’s attitude is not to trouble-shoot but rather to trouble entrench.
Extraordinarily, in light of a head recruitment crisis based precisely on the undesirability of becoming a school leader today, the report’s authors concluded that the current organisation of the school system was not really problematic. ‘By the time we got to the final report and had had the time to carefully consider the data, we were a little more firm in our view that the existing system was broadly OK and just needed some refinements around the edges.’ Apparently a little more in touch with the reality was a study of 67 schools commissioned by the National Union of Teachers [NUT], also released yesterday. The NUT’s findings showed that three-quarters of schools had teachers suitable for headship who did not want to go into leadership because of the vulnerability, high workload and comparatively low pay.
The report’s recommendations, which will very likely be at least partially adopted by the government, are to alter the law to allow for [the Times Education Supplement explains], ‘new leadership models, shared headships, federations with executive heads, chief executives taking financial responsibility from the heads and suitably qualified professionals coming in from outside education to lead schools.’ The PwC report argues that the ‘traditional’ head teacher role is now defunct, ‘born out of a different time and a very different set of circumstances.’ A preferable time perhaps, when head teachers were leading schools rather than the new bureaucracies. As Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson, co-authors of the NUT report, remarked, ‘the crisis, if there be one, seems to us to be government made.’ As long as working in education continues to centre on complying with endless bureaucratic diktat, it makes perfect sense to waste yet more money by introducing a layer of professionals expert in regulation rather than education.