Of every decision an owner makes about a school, the appointment of the head carries the longest consequences and receives the least scrutiny afterwards. More than any other post, it decides what the school becomes. Excellent teachers will not perform under a poor head, and a competent staff will do good work under a strong one.
GSE is tougher on leadership appointments than owners usually expect, and the reason is the cost of getting them wrong. A weak head damages a school more than a weak appointment anywhere else, and the damage stays hidden longer and costs more to undo.
A CV shows qualifications and not outcomes
An impressive CV establishes that somebody holds the qualifications and has occupied the positions. It says very little about what that person actually delivered in any of those posts.
Ask instead what changed at each school during this person’s time, what state the school was in when they arrived, what state it was in when they left, and which of those changes can reasonably be attributed to them. A head who inherited a strong school and left it strong may have done a great deal or almost nothing, and that distinction rarely appears on a CV while being the whole of what an owner is buying.
A great interview is a performance
Interviewing is a skill, and senior candidates have practised it. The people who interview best are frequently the people who have interviewed most often, which should give an owner pause.
A well-designed process gets closer to the truth by asking candidates to work on a real problem the school currently has, putting them in front of teachers and students to see what they do when nobody is scoring them, and pressing for the detail behind a claim until the answers either hold or run out. Anyone can describe a turnaround, and only the person who did it can explain the second and third year of it.
No single technique is reliable enough to lean on alone, and each improves the odds without removing the risk altogether.
Reference checks stop at the first layer
Candidates nominate referees who will tell a story matching their own, which is not dishonest and is what anybody would do. Everything of value in reference checking lies past that first layer of nominated names.
Speak to the people the candidate did not name, meaning somebody who worked under them, a board member from the school before last, or the colleague who stayed on after they left. Those conversations take longer to arrange and they produce the information the nominated referees were selected to leave out.
Two questions get closer than most others, which are what this person found difficult and how the people who worked for them would describe them. A referee who cannot answer the first has not worked closely with the candidate.
A start-up head and an established-school head are different roles
Owners frequently appoint for the school they will eventually have instead of the school they have now, and the two need different people.
Opening a school means working without systems, deciding fifty things a week that nobody has decided before, recruiting a staff from nothing, selling the school to families who cannot visit it, and doing all of this while the roll is too small to support a full leadership team. It requires someone who will roll their sleeves up and take on work below their grade for two years.
Running an established school calls for a different discipline, which is sustaining standards, developing a team already in place, managing a community with settled expectations, and improving something that already works rather than building it from nothing. Excellence in one of these carries no guarantee of competence in the other, and turnaround is a third distinct job again.
Ask a candidate which of these they have actually done, and ask the owner which of them the school needs for the next five years.
Character carries further than credentials
Beyond the record, GSE looks for character, values and authenticity. That sounds soft next to a list of qualifications, and in practice it predicts more.
Heads with good values behave consistently whether or not the owner is in the building, tell the board things it does not want to hear, and are straight with staff about decisions they will dislike. Those without them manage upwards, present well to owners and are experienced very differently by the people who work for them. When a head is described very differently from above and from below, an owner has the earliest warning available that the appointment was wrong.
Watch the candidate’s interest in status, because somebody drawn to the title, the package and the reporting line more than to the students and the staff is telling an owner a great deal about the next three years.
A poor head is protected by the position
Underperformance in any other role becomes visible quickly, and a weak head of mathematics is known to the department within a term.
Headship is different, since the person in the post controls most of what a board ever sees. Reports are written by the head or by people the head manages. The board’s contact with staff is arranged by the head, and parents who complain are handled by the head. Somebody struggling in the role can present a coherent account of a school for a long time, and a board with no independent information will believe it.
GSE sees the same pattern across the schools it is asked to look at. A weak head receives more patience and a longer run than any other senior appointment, partly because replacing one is disruptive and partly because the owner who appointed them has an interest in the decision looking sound. Two or three years then pass, and by the time the position is admitted, the best teachers have left, enrolment has slipped and the school’s reputation has taken damage that will cost several more years to repair.
Boards defend against this with independent information, which means one that speaks to staff without the head arranging it, indicators it receives directly, and a set of numbers that does not pass through the head’s office on its way to the table. Nothing in that implies suspicion of the head, and a good one will welcome it.
What an owner should conclude from this
Take longer over the appointment than feels comfortable, and design a process that tests the claim instead of the presentation. Check references past the first layer, appoint for the stage the school is at now, and weigh character alongside the record. Once the head is in post, make sure the board can see the school through more than one pair of eyes.
Nothing guarantees a good appointment, and all of this improves the odds considerably enough to justify the effort, given what the role decides.
Read next
- Governance Structures That Attract Education Investors. What a board is for, and where its oversight should stop.
- The School Dashboard: What an Owner Should See Every Month. The independent information a board needs.
- Give Teachers Back Their Schools. What a head does with the authority once they have it.
- Which Data Tells You Anything. Separating the information that develops people from the information that judges them.
Part of GSE’s What We Believe collection.
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