Recruitment to senior staff posts in Anglican and – especially – Catholic faith schools continues to be more problematical than average according to the sixteenth annual report on The State of the Labour Market for Senior Staff in Schools in England and Wales, prepared for the National Association of Head Teachers by John Howson and Almut Sprigade of Education Data Surveys at TSL Education Ltd.
The document analyses the outcomes for 1,499 posts on the Leadership scale (head teachers, deputy head teachers and assistant head teachers) advertised by publicly-funded schools in England and Wales between September 2009 and April 2010. Results are presented for each level of post separately for secondary, primary and special schools, and also by type of control of school (including Church of England and Roman Catholic).
Although the authors note ‘some signs of possible improvement’ in 2009-10, they remain critical of the persistent failure, over the past decade, of some dioceses to give adequate attention to the issue of succession planning for school leadership and imply that these shortcomings have not been exposed to the ‘intense public scrutiny’ to which local authorities would have been subject. The failure is particularly manifest in the high proportion of faith school posts which have to be readvertised.
For detailed figures and commentary, see:
