Schools in the north west are the most likely to be “isolated” and shut out from attracting the best headteachers, a new report claims.
An Education Policy Institute report found current and future headteachers tended to work only in connected “communities” – groups of schools often within the same region – and were unlikely to move for work outside of those areas.
EPI said this creates “isolated” schools which are left without access to the best headteachers.
The north west had the largest proportion of isolated primary schools (20 per cent), while isolated secondary schools are concentrated in the West Midlands, east of England, and south east (all around 15 per cent).
Meanwhile, London attracts more than half of the most effective primary heads, although fewer than half develop their leadership skills there.
The north east is also revealed as “disproportionately successful in developing and attracting highly effective headteachers despite having a smaller share of the overall teacher workforce”.
It attracts the highest proportion of the most effective secondary heads (around 23 per cent) and also trains a fifth of them.
The EPI ranked headteachers as effective based on whether they improved their schools’ test and exam results.
It then checked how schools with leaders at different points in that ranking fared in terms of metrics like pupil progress, teacher retention and absenteeism.
Dr Joana Cardim Dias, school workforce senior researcher at EPI, said “many schools across the country are often isolated and do not benefit from experience from the most talented leaders and headteachers”.
“The government needs to encourage more localised movement across communities of schools and multi academy trusts should consider how they grow and deploy their own leaders in order to spread best practice.”
Other policy recommendations include helping promoting “grow your own” schemes to support local teachers to become leaders and incentivising ways to get the most effective heads in the toughest schools.
EPI also said recruitment and retention strategies should be tailored to the “specific needs of local communities.
“Government should prioritise their support to local areas empowering them to address the challenges of their regions.”
Dias added: “Improving our understanding of how to grow talented teachers and leaders, as well as incentivising them to work in the most disadvantaged schools could be a powerful tool in helping to tackle geographic inequalities and close the disadvantage gap.”
A previous EPI study found that effective headteachers can improve pupils’ attainment by up to two GCSE grades.
But the new report found a secondary school head is 20 times more likely to move to a school within the same community than to a school in another community. Primary school heads are nine times more likely to remain within the same community.
The research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, followed the movement of all teachers who became heads between 2010 and 2019 to reveal the community clusters.
