Do School Leaders Have a Shelf Life? Career Stages and Headteacher Performance

This paper explores several issues about school leaders, career stages and performance. It draws upon various pieces of research, including the longitudinal study of secondary heads which began in the early 1980s at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), to raise some key issues about headteachers’ careers, the various stages of headship, and the relationship between length of tenure and school leader performance. The paper concludes with some thoughts regarding the future of headship and what needs to be done to ensure that the quality of leadership remains as good as it should be. If leadership at the apex of organisations is as crucial as all the research and inspection evidence suggests, then what needs to be done to ensure a longer ‘shelf life’ for school leaders and is the notion of a limited or fixed-term contract worth revisiting

Induction rites and wrongs: the educational vandalism of new teachers' professional development

The central theme of this paper is that teachers’ professional development in England is not being taken as seriously as it needs to be. With reference to the induction of newly-qualified teachers and the early professional development pilot schemes, it draws on data from several related pieces of research, to argue that cases of ‘educational vandalism’ exist. These are identified at three levels – the school, the individual and the current funding policy of the government. It is argued that the short term gain of money and time saved by non existent, inadequate or inappropriate continuing professional development has a number of significant effects; teachers work below their potential, get stale, leave the profession - all of which result in generations of children not learning as well as they might have been. ‘Educational vandalism’ needs to be eliminated; investing in people’s development costs money but the alternative is more expensive

Review of the school leadership landscape: school leaders’ perceptions and response to change [IOE Research Briefing N°7]

This research is a review of school leadership in England – how school leaders are responding to change across the education system, and the challenges (and opportunities) this presents for leadership and leadership development. IOE Research Briefings are short descriptions of significant research findings, based on the wide range of projects carried out by IOE researchers