Education: Headteachers shun most difficult posts

Government policies on league tables and target-setting are causing heads to shun difficult schools, a survey has revealed. Judith Judd, Education Editor, explains why there is a crisis in headteacher recruitment.

For the first time in a decade, an annual survey of headteacher recruitment shows that some small schools are receiving not a single applicant for headship vacancies.

Among secondary schools, many that have low league table scores are struggling to find good heads, according to John Howson, an educational analyst, who carried out the study with the support of the Secondary Heads Association and the National Association of Head Teachers. Ministers, he suggests, will have to pay some heads more if they want to achieve their aim of raising standards in poor schools.

The Government's 25 education action zones, where heads may be paid as much as pounds 100,000, will cover only a tiny proportion of struggling schools, Mr Howson says. At best, around 75 of 4,500 secondary schools will be included. But, in the last three years, nearly one-fifth have seen a decline in both the proportion of pupils getting five good GCSE grades and the proportion getting no GCSEs.

The survey, which measures recruitment problems by monitoring the number of readvertised posts, analysed the exam results of 40 schools that readvertised headship vacancies. At more than half of these the percentage of pupils with five GCSE passes at grades A-C was less than 30 per cent. At one- third, it was under 25 per cent.

Mr Howson comments: "All schools need high-quality leadership and schools with low percentages of higher GCSE scores must not lose out. In a market- based economy, the amount a school can pay to attract a new head may be of significance."

On education actions zones he adds: "The experiment will still leave too many schools dependent upon market forces and with budgets that do not allow them to offer financial incentives to new heads."

Schools that fail to attract any applicants are usually small village schools in unattractive areas where unemployment is high.

Overall, the problem of recruiting a head appears to have been no worse last year than in previous years, but Mr Howson suspects this is because an unusually high proportion of schools now have acting heads.

In inner London, more than 50 per cent of posts were advertised. In outer London and the South-east the figure was 30 per cent and nationally it was 14 per cent for secondary and 24 per cent for primary schools.

John Sutton, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said that some heads did look at league tables before making applications. "The real message is one about security. It is not that people don't want to take on challenging schools. If you take on that sort of place and you don't deliver, maybe through no fault of your own, your job is at risk."