Keeping the faith Transcript part one There s been a lot of debate lately in the education sector about schools of a religious character, but not much attention has been paid to the issue of leadership succession in those schools. Are the challenges they face the same across the board? Is there any common ground or does each faith group require a different approach? In this edition of Talking Points, I ll be speaking to representatives from three different faith education groups to find out just how they re planning for succession. Transcript part two We all know that the leadership recruitment challenge faced by today s schools is influenced by lots of different factors. Not every school has problems of course, but some face real difficulties in recruiting headteachers to fill current vacancies, and others in meeting the leadership needs of the future. Schools which really have their work cut out for them include those in inner-city areas, small schools in rural areas, and schools with a religious character. So in this edition of Talking Points, we ll look in more detail at the experience of schools with a religious character in recruiting and retaining good leaders. I m joined by representatives from three different schools with a religious character, Oona Stannard is Chief Executive and Director of the Catholic Education Service; Jeffrey Leader is Director of Education for the Agency for Jewish Education; and Nick McKemey is Head of School Improvement from the Church of England Education. Welcome to all of you and Oona, if I may, I d like to start with you. Why is recruitment for leadership jobs such an issue for, if I can use the popular term, I think most people say faith schools? What s your experience in the Catholic sector? I think one of the reasons why it s more difficult is that we share the challenges that any group has in trying to get a headteacher for a school. So we ve got all those community issues, but on top of that we re trying to get people for schools that are really quite distinctive in their character; and I think sometimes the responsibilities of that are what s seen before the support that will be given to people in those roles. So I think there s a bit of myth to get out of the way, so people know how welcome they will be to headship in Catholic schools. Do some people think that it might be a more rigorous job even than being head of another kind of faith school? I think possibly they do. They know that Catholic schools are deemed very successful by Ofsted and in all the statistics from DCSF and others. And they know that we do have additional requirements if you re going to be head of a Catholic school. I think sometimes in our own Catholic community, we Page 1 of 10
don t unpick that and explain it enough, so that those who would be very good heads don t always appreciate how suitable they d be and don t come to us. Additional requirements such as? Well you do have to be a practising Catholic to lead a Catholic school; and that, in a sense, also gives you a smaller pool to start from. And discipline, is that expected to be more rigorous perhaps than in other schools, non-faith schools? Well I d actually argue, and I think when I talk to Catholic heads what I find is that the ethos they create in the Catholic schools actually makes some of those tough issues easier to manage. Because Ofsted, for example, shows us that Catholic schools have far fewer exclusions; that social, moral, spiritual and cultural development, support from parents, support from governors they re all rated more highly in Catholic schools. So that s a really big positive in terms of the support that you ll get and the environment in which you ll be working. But the negatives are that the challenges there are, perhaps, are ones that some people don t wish to take up? Well I think they perhaps believe there are challenges that aren t always there. So, for example, you don t have to have always been working in a Catholic school to be considered to be the head of a Catholic school. You don t have to necessarily have always had your children in a Catholic school there may be very good reasons they couldn t get places or there wasn t one nearby. We have some really good examples at the moment of people who were even heads in community schools, who have now decided well actually, you know we are committed to our faith, we now know we would be welcome back in Catholic school. And they ve applied and they ve also been an example to others who are now following in their footsteps. I think there is a perception that it takes a long time to become a head. Is this more than a perception and does it, if it isn t more than a perception, does it affect women more than men? I think it is a reality that it takes longer to become a head, and that s one of the things that the National College for School Leadership are trying hard to correct because we should be focusing, and do try to focus, on people as they come into teaching now; and say look, you re a future leader and we will give you opportunities and we will nourish and nurture you because you re a future head. But at the other end of the spectrum, I think sometimes governors see heads who are very mature in their years they ve given excellent service. But when that person moves on, you won t Page 2 of 10
be replacing like with like. People grow into headships and I think there s a notion we should remember of being a good enough head, a good head, rather than starting as a perfect, finallyformed head. Do I detect that you re hinting that some governors are a bit conservative when it comes to choosing a new head? Well if you think about it, you don t have to choose a new head very often and therefore they re not always very well practised at it. It s one of the things that I m pleased that in the Catholic sector we ve just been successful in getting a bid from the NCSL to do in-service support and guidance materials for governors to get them thinking about what it is they re looking for in a head. I go further and say that every governing body should consider that they ve got a responsibility to provide heads for other schools as well. And I mentioned women. A lot of women would wish to take time out to have a family. Do they perceive that perhaps this will be disadvantageous to them when it might not? Well, I think women bring back in superb managerial skills and all sorts of other skills after time out. And maybe that s one of the things that people like me need to work on, ensuring the governors understand the benefits of that and also that those women do put themselves forward. I think there is a sort of a block sometimes with very, very good women deputy heads and senior women in other roles who just step back from that step of applying to be heads. Let me bring Jeffrey Leader in at this point. Do you recognise any of the problems within your community the Jewish community that Oona has been describing? I do, and in fact right until the last comment, I would agree with everything that Oona said. In terms of the question of women we find, I should tell everyone that we have 36 voluntary-aided schools in England and the vast majority are headed by women. So I don t think that s an issue for our community. I think there s a strong direction, a commitment to education and to headship. But where we are affected in terms of gender, is that if you have some of the more orthodox schools, then you have very talented women who are coming into leadership roles but then leave early to have their families and then, from an orthodox Jewish perspective, devote most of their time to bringing up very large families. Because the orthodox community tends to have larger families? Page 3 of 10
That s right. So, by the time that they want to come back in, many, many years have passed. But normally, we don t find the gender issue a problem there are very, very few men and I think that reflects the national intake of teachers across the country. What about the role of school governors? In which respect? In your community, because I think there was hint from Oona that some of them don t really think outside the box when it comes to choosing a new head. I think we re a very traditional and conservative community. We re a community that seems to be results-driven. However, I detect that coming into the system are a new breed of governors and I think that if they re looking for someone who will deliver what they feel should be delivered in terms of academic results around education then they re very open to new models of headship. Would you welcome help from outside your community, from NCSL for instance, in training governors to think differently maybe what they re looking for? Yes, the Agency for Jewish Education actually runs governor training. But it s interesting that you mention that because we run governor training in terms of what it is to be a governor, but from this perspective, we don t and I think that would be a very interesting thing to do. In the system the whole system, not just the faith school system a lot of schools are changing the way they look for new leaders. There are co-headships, there are executive headships, there are federations and they all seem to work even if they re in early stages in some schools. Where does the Jewish Education Agency stand in this respect, in being a little bit more flexible about the role of the head? Well I think because headship is an issue in our community as it is nationally and I think we re very open to different models. So, for example, of the 36 voluntary-aided schools in our community, seven of those schools have non-jewish headteachers. And the issue for us is how to protect the Jewish educational development within the school, in other words the spiritual growth of the children. So how can you do that with a non-jewish head? Well, there are various models that we have. For example, I m thinking of one secondary school that has an executive headteacher who runs the national curriculum side of the school and the Head of Jewish Studies runs the Page 4 of 10
But the executive headteacher might not be Jewish? Might not be, and in this case is not Jewish. And the Jewish Studies Programme is headed and directed by the Head of Jewish Studies. And the governors, in the school that I m thinking of, have a big input in terms of the religious nature of that school. So the religious nature is guarded, and it leaves that headteacher free to develop the school in the way that he wants to. Let me turn to you now Nick McKemey, representing the Church of England. You ve heard from two other faiths here, do you recognise the same problems within your own community? Broadly speaking, yes. We know that in terms of hard-to-fill headships, our issues lie somewhere between the Roman Catholic position and the community schools position, or the rest of the maintained sector. So we do have issues around leadership. I think that we see it in two ways: one is to provide, as it were, a sufficient quantity of leaders and the other thing that we re very interested in is the quality of leadership. And we see that there are challenges in both those terms. We have a community which is very big; nearly 40 per cent of all the children that attend a Church of England school are in a rural school and most of them are in very small schools. At the other end, we have a very rapidly expanding Academy programme of up to a hundred new secondary schools and we ve got just And they would be in an urban environment on the whole? Most of those are in an urban environment not all but most, yes. And what are the specific problems within those two different kinds of schools? There are clearly issues around leadership in very small communities and that s where we often find the greatest reluctance amongst other staff or senior leadership to take that on. To give you an example, we have a headteacher from a rural primary school who attends one of our central boards, who said to me the other day, I find this whole issue of headship now becoming almost unbearable with all the bureaucracy and so on that I have to do, and I m telling my senior staff not to touch the post with a bargepole. Now that is a really key example of one of the major blockages in terms of us maintaining a supply of highly effective leaders. Page 5 of 10
That s nothing to do with faith in a sense; that s to do with bureaucracy. That is a general perception shared and what we re saying is that we have that issue, as do all other sectors. Oona you nodded there, audibly. Yes there must be support. There must also be the development of the team leadership model, which is there in schools already, but it needs to go further in terms of posts and how they re structured. But the paradox which I admit challenges me is also that some of our dioceses, particularly up in the north-east of the country, have been focusing on how they retain heads. I think it is very important to ask yourself what example do we set to future heads in terms of how we treat existing heads? They have done excellent work with sabbaticals, opportunities to become a group that supports one another, does action research and indeed also has time away on retreats together. But one of the things that s also come out with that model and those people is that sometimes a new challenge, an addition of work, is refreshing them and they re saying we re going to stay because we ve now got the opportunity to run a children s centre at our school. So this notion of service and wanting to give more is still there. Nick, the Church of England faith schools presumably would be the most numerous within England because there are more followers of the C of E, nominally anyway, than any other faith; up till now anyway. Oona mentioned support because heads have more and more responsibility or are expected to take up more and more issues. Do you think you ve got the worst problem in terms of what you need? Well, we have just under 5,000 schools in the system, the bulk of which are primary schools, but a growing secondary sector. I think that we also have around 40 dioceses who are actively engaged with those schools, so there is a support network. One of the reasons that we have joined with the National College enthusiastically in this new partnership is that we recognise that both from the point of view of the Church of England providing the right quality of leadership, because we also expect our schools to be distinctively Christian and therefore we are looking for leadership which will underpin that. Now that does not necessarily mean that the head has to be the focus of Christian leadership in the school, that can come from chaplaincy or other directions, but, and very often it is located somewhere else in the school. Jeffrey, may I turn to you to put before you something that actually was published in a report on schools of a religious character by the government, the report called Faith in the System, with Page 6 of 10
which you will be familiar. It was a recent publication. It acknowledges that the number of faith schools is going to increase in the future and it says, and I quote the report, it will accordingly continue to support the establishment [that is, the government] will continue to support the establishment of new schools including faith schools in the maintained sector where the local decision-making process shows that that is what parents and the local community want and where the school is willing and able to comply with the requirements of all maintained schools. Do you think Jeffrey, that governors and parents and local communities indeed surrounding a school, are open to new models of headship, if there is a difficulty in recruiting from the traditional pool? Yes, 36 schools that we have, and seven of those are headed by non-jewish headteachers, and governors and parents are very happy with those schools and the results The sky hasn t fallen in as a result? Not at all, not at all. So I think they re very open as long as all of them can be convinced that the head will lead the school in a way that raises standards, which will hopefully develop the faith, then I think they re very open to whatever model. I mean also for us as a faith community, the government trying to push towards Extended Schools and different kinds of schools and calling schools the new hub of the community might have an effect. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear what my colleagues here have to say on the future of a faith school. Will it replace, for example, the place of worship, if that is to be the hub of the community? If the school does become the hub, I can see something very vigorous, very exciting, in terms of the development within our community. Would that make the headship of a school more or less attractive, do you think, because it might mean more bureaucracy even for the head? I think it s a two-edged sword. On the one hand it s interesting I spoke to a number of headteachers and asked their views about how you can attract people in. Someone actually said to me conceal the truth in other words that once you got the person into headship, they would understand what the job was all about. But most heads said that they would like insurance and freedom to develop within a system where they could create and that s an attraction in itself. So I think on the one hand, yes, a great attraction in terms of power, influence and development; on the other hand, as you say Sue, more bureaucracy and even more work to do. Oona, is he right there? Well in the Catholic Church, we ve always had a very strong tradition that continues today of a partnership between home, school and parish. So a school doesn t stand on its own: it s built on the Page 7 of 10
other two and that synergy continues. The notion of a school replacing a parish is not one that would happen for us. But you are willing to learn from the experience of other faith schools do you think if it seems that suddenly there is less difficulty in recruiting heads as a result? I think we re always open to looking at what everybody else is doing and learning from those experiences. We have executive heads, we have federations of schools. You know, we re exploring all the opportunities we can identify. One of the challenges I suppose for the future for all three of you is sharing best practice without diluting your own particular faiths. Jeffrey? I mean in terms of developing a strategy, one would look for the commonalities. When we started the discussion a lot of things resonated with me in our community, and I m a strong believer in partnership and learning from others. Some things are like a supermarket: some things you might take, others you might leave behind. We are a community that believes in working with others and we do quite successfully and we would be looking for different strategies to attract more people to the job. I mean I just must make a comment that is rather worrying. We run a number of leadership programmes, we talent-spot within schools as quickly as possible. On a year-long programme within the community for 15 deputy heads, they were all asked how many wanted headship and none said that they would, even though they were willing to go on this programme. That is a major issue. Someone at that meeting said, I can guarantee by this time next year, five of you will be in headship, and that was exactly right. I m thinking of someone who came on to the programme who was identified as having future leadership potential, that had to be persuaded to come on to that programme and in her case, it just opened her eyes to the kind of things that she could be doing in a school. And this was someone that you would have thought yes, she will enjoy the programme, academically gain from it, but perhaps stay in a minor leadership role. But she went on to headship and developed the most wonderful school from these kinds of programmes. So, they ve been quite successful, but I do return to the fact that on one of these most successful programmes last year, the 15 deputy heads all initially said that they were not interested in headship. So we need to think of ways, because they ve seen it on the ground, to make it far more attractive. That chimes in with something you were saying earlier, Oona, about a sort of reluctance with some people who potentially would be good heads, don t believe in themselves, if you like? We don t have any shortage of people well-qualified to be headteachers and that s across all kinds of schools community through to schools with a religious character. What we have is a shortage of people wanting to put themselves forward. But I think all of us in our different communities are working closely with our dioceses or our other structures and we have all sorts of programmes in place that are, as it were, early talent-spotting, coaching, tutoring, giving experiences of acting up, secondments. Page 8 of 10
There is nothing like an experience of doing the work to bring people into headship. The number of people who say: I always said I didn t want to go from deputy to head, but since I ve done this acting up or I ve had this day a week doing it I can do it. That s what I want to be. Nick, it is important to talk about the pleasures, the joys and the plus sides of being a head, although it s jolly hard work, isn t it? Well, we recently got ten of what we called our most outstanding heads together; these were people who d got outstanding Ofsted reports and outstanding Denominational Inspection Reports, so we could say they were excellent church schools and excellent schools. What struck us about that particular day was that every single one of them had been utterly radical and inventive and innovative and thought outside the box about a raft of issues, and some of them had come into schools and confronted very difficult issues. The other thought I have is a head from a rural Midlands school who took over a school very reluctantly; basically because there wasn t anybody else who was prepared to take the job. She came in thinking that she had a great long list of things she wasn t allowed to do, and she worked through this list and she found every single one was eventually crossed off, because she could do it. I think one of the things people perceive leadership to be is a sort of straitjacket of things that they must do and that they re accountable for and so on. Very often, what our ten outstanding heads told us was no, you can break the boundaries, you can do many interesting things and make your schools even better. And these people were happy and they were very fulfilled. Sue, can I just add one final point which I think is very important? Sometimes when we look at future leaders within schools, we look initially at someone who s a superb class teacher, superb practitioner and then you feel, if they have some kind of charisma and character, you want to start promoting them. And I think new models that we should be looking at are developing strengths around the school, so someone for example I was a headteacher but my administration was awful, I was just chosen because I thought I was a fairly good class teacher! But you need to develop strengths. Perhaps we should be looking at models where we develop say administrative strength on the one hand; pastoral strength on the other hand; classroom teaching strength on the other hand. So, look at future leaders not just in terms of an all-encompassing headship that does it all, but perhaps a new model where various people feed into the top. Which could be a sort of job-share, to put it at its most crude? Yes, yes, absolutely, for the benefit of the school and the community. Page 9 of 10
And could I just add that we must not lose sight of the fact that for the schools we re talking about, the leader is the leader of a faith community, a witnessing community, and for all of us, I think at the heart of what we do is also making sure that we give them the support for that role. One theme that underpins the work that we re doing to develop leadership is the notion of it being a vocation in a religious sense. So it s a vocation to teach and a vocation to lead. Nick McKemey, Jeffrey Leader and Oona Stannard, thank you all very much indeed. Just before we say goodbye, I d like to ask what you think listening to us. If you ve been interested in what you ve heard, why not explore NCSL s Tomorrow s Leaders Today web portal and engage with some more of the issues involved in the succession planning debate. Meanwhile, again thank you for listening to Talking Points and thanks to all our guests again. From me, Sue MacGregor, goodbye. Page 10 of 10