Leader: New paths to schools' top jobs must be found

Published on Sunday 17 August 2008 20:18

TODAY, The Scotsman reveals a major crisis facing Scotland's schools: a growing shortage of headteachers. It has been known for some time that almost half of present headteachers will retire within the next decade. But new figures gathered from local authorities by The Scotsman, using the Freedom of Information Act, suggests these early retirements have reached dangerous levels.

What is causing this shortage of headteachers? The major problem concerns the organisation of pay scales. While the so-called McCrone Agreement, of 2000, modernised pay scales for classroom teachers, and radically improved salaries, the same is not true for headteachers and their deputies. As far as headteachers were concerned, the McCrone reforms introduced the notion of "job-sizing" – paying a head or deputy head not by rank but according to the workload in a particular school.

That seems logical and fair, but it produces an obvious side-effect. Deputes can often be paid more for a role in a large school than they would get for headship in smaller schools – so why should they apply for a job that brings a lower wage? The removal of clear differentials between levels of posts has blurred the attraction of seeking a post at a higher level of management when the salary differential may be non-existent or even represent a reduction. This helps explain the shortage of headteacher applicants for smaller schools, primaries and schools in rural areas.

The obvious solution here is to revisit job-sizing with a view to ensuring that salary differentials for headteacher posts, irrespective of the size of the school, are sufficient to attract applications from the whole pool of deputy heads in Scotland. That might be expensive, but it is clear the salaries on offer at present are insufficient to give Scotland's schools the leadership they require.

A second barrier to attracting qualified leadership in Scottish schools lies with the inadequate arrangements for deputies or classroom teachers to acquire the necessary management skills and experience. A formal system of qualifications has been put in place but it is expensive and time consuming for deputies and others to acquire these, given normal work pressures, especially for staff in mid career.

In addition, it is also the case that teachers in the nursery and special sectors have very limited opportunities to gain management experience necessary for applying for higher posts.

The solution here is to examine more flexible, alternative career paths to headship, such as accrediting personal achievements outside the current formal qualifications. The Cabinet Secretary for Education, Fiona Hyslop, has already initiated a study of such flexible career routes. In opposition, before the last Holyrood elections, Ms Hyslop said that the lack of recruitment of headteachers was a "potential ticking time-bomb". It is time to defuse the bomb.