Trusts have been told to set “diversity targets” as efforts to close the gap in leadership among the country’s biggest academy trusts falter.
The latest Schools Week diversity audit of trusts with 15 or more schools has revealed women now occupy 35 per cent of the top jobs.
The findings are an improvement on last year – when progress stalled for the first time since 2018 – boosting numbers to slightly above 2021. But the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) leaders remains static.
Meanwhile, among the 50 largest trusts, 25 per cent have a female chief executive, and only one leader is non-white.
‘Hard to defend’
Sam Henson, of the National Governance Association (NGA), said the “stark” findings showed “a lack of genuine progress in achieving diversity in leadership, which is frankly hard to defend”.
Our audit of the 171 trusts with 15 or more schools found 59 (34.5 per cent) were run by women, 8.1 percentage points up on six years ago, but only slightly above 2021 numbers.
Of the trusts included in our survey, 30 changed chief executive in the past 12 months. Despite this, only 10 newly installed MAT chiefs were women and just one was non-white.
David Watson, who became chief executive of Sherborne Area Schools’ Trust in February, said in his “experience as a black educator” he had noticed “additional challenges around racism and bias – subconscious and not”.
“We must understand what bias is, accept that bias is real, and be prepared to be proactive in addressing this matter. If we fail to address this imbalance, we will lose talent in the education system and all be poorer for it.”
Targets ‘must apply to all layers of staffing’
In all, we recorded four (2.3 per cent) non-white CEOs, all of them men. The figure is similar to last year.
Henson added: “The setting of diversity targets in the workforce must apply to every layer of staffing and leadership, and so it is vital boards [which hire leaders] are looking to establish measurable goals for improving board and leadership diversity, with regular progress reviews.”
But an NGA survey found “a stark lack of ethnic diversity persists” at board level too, with “95 per cent of respondents identifying as white”.
Latest figures show female teachers make up 76 per cent of the workforce, dropping to 69 per cent in leadership roles. This falls to 43 per cent in secondaries.
A report written by think tanks The New Britain Project and the MTPT Project said “an additional 2,639” women heads were needed to address the imbalance.
By committing to the “bold” target and “openly acknowledging this issue”, the study argued, the DfE “will spark the crucial conversations needed to begin to address and rectify” this.
ESFA data gap
In its 2023 school workforce census, the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) admitted to a “data gap on centrally employed MAT staff”.
It conducted scoping research over how to collect the information, but this week refused to comment on the outcome.
The government also last year told governing boards to publish diversity figures, but in March Schools Week found that few had done so.
Ann Palmer, the chief executive of the leadership support organisation Fig Tree International, argued “a more targeted… approach is needed to ensure that the percentages that we currently have move in the right direction”.
Representation issues are prevalent in other sectors too. About 20 per cent of the NHS workforce is black or Asian, but account for 9 per cent of senior managers.
Departmental gender gap back to 2021 levels
Across the Department for Education, Ofsted and Ofqual, 43 per cent of those listed as ministers or in “our management” sections of their websites are female.
This represents a rise on last year, but the gender gap returns to 2021 levels across government departments.
Two people – ministers Janet Daby and Seema Malhotra – are non-white.
Ofqual said it would “continue to work with our staff networks to ensure that we are an inclusive employer”.
An Ofsted spokesperson said its senior management team was not “as representative as we would want it to be, particularly in terms of race and ethnicity”.
The regulator hopes to boost representation through its “future leaders” project in which ethnic minority staff are invited “to meet senior leaders and shadow inspection as part of their development”.
“We hope that, over time, our scheme, as well as other professional development programmes, will enable us to recruit from a more diverse range of candidates.”
The DfE refused to comment.
