School leadership: Time to end the hero head myth

In an increasingly autonomous schools landscape, much of the government’s education reform strategy has come to turn on its being able to capitalise a leadership premium.

With a significant proportion of heads approaching retirement, policy-makers have become acutely aware that we lack a strategy for identifying and developing leaders. Despite a massive literature that has built up around the subject, we in fact know very little about what makes for effective leadership, how it interacts with other factors of importance to school improvement.

A key assumption – prevalent in the literature, and implicit in much talk of the importance of leadership in education – is of leadership’s direct impact on academic outcomes. This idea has obvious appeal – we want to believe that whatever challenges a school faces, overcoming them is really just about finding the right person for the job – but of course it is much more complicated than that.