Sustainable school leadership across the UK
The research by Professors Toby Greany and Pat Thomson, and Dr Mike Collins
The research
The Sustainable School Leadership project (2022-2026) explored the training, supply, retention, and wider sustainability of senior school leadership across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland, seeking to offer a vision for where and how these approaches could be enhanced.
The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and undertaken in partnership with Dr Tom Perry, University of Warwick.
We examine two aspects of sustainable leadership.
First, the sustainability of leadership itself, by which we mean the extent to which leaders and their teams feel ready, willing and able to lead successful schools. This includes consideration of diversity, equity, quality and fitness for future as well as the supply of leaders.
Second, leadership for sustainability: this is about meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, including through consideration of sustainable organisations and social, economic and environmental sustainability.
We position leadership for sustainability and the sustainability of leadership as separate but interconnected: with important ramifications for educational equity and outcomes in a rapidly changing world.
The mixed methods comparative study included:
- a review of international literature and practice on senior school leadership development
- interviews with policy makers and leadership development experts from the UK and internationally
- research in each nation comprising:
- documentary analysis
- secondary analysis of workforce datasets
- place-based case studies
- UK-wide survey of school leaders
- comparative analysis which allowed us to refine our theoretical framework and address the research questions
- development of an original conceptual framework addressing four areas:
- leadership
- identity
- place
- an ethic of education and care.
The research builds on Nottingham’s long-standing research centre, Centre for Research in Educational Leadership and Management, and expertise in the area of school leadership, but moves it into new areas with potential for wider collaborative work and impact.
The research is both deeply applied and practical (helping to highlight and address the very real tensions and pressures faced by thousands of school leaders every day) and conceptually and methodologically rich. I have particularly enjoyed the comparative aspect – seeing how leaders in each nation are facing similar challenges, but within different frameworks and cultures which means they play out differently, offering rich scope for policy and practice learning.
Professor Toby Greany
The challenges and responses
Senior school leaders play an essential role in shaping educational experiences and outcomes for children, particularly in the most challenging communities.
Policymakers around the world broadly agree on the features of successful school leadership. This is seen to combine transformational (vision and values), instructional (teaching and learning) and distributed (collective efficacy) approaches. This global consensus shapes how leaders are trained, recruited and held accountable.
Our research asked whether this consensus holds true at a time when the needs of children, families and wider societies are changing rapidly. We live in an era of global polycrisis. In the UK, this encompasses the long-term impacts of COVID-19, prolonged austerity, growing inequality, increased social tensions and a rise in populist politics. These forces impact on schools directly and in ways that are cumulative and indirect, manifesting in issues ranging from rising mental health and special needs to persistent absence and school dropout.
The pressures on school leaders create clear risks around supply and sustainability. Our previous research indicated that between 30-40% of headteachers were planning to leave the profession early, due to the intensity of the challenges they were experiencing at that time (2021-2022).
The final report sets out six themes from across the UK as well as recommendations for policy and practice in each nation:
- The nature of school leadership is widely seen to have changed in recent years – COVID as a hinge point
- Schools and leaders are often working beyond their ‘education’ remit – limited time for instructional leadership - an ethic of education and care
- It’s not a pipeline crisis (yet) – it’s a sustainability crisis
- Diversity – a problem that no-one really owns
- Preparing for headship – the importance of developmental experience
- One-size-fits-all policy does not fit all – place and the need for local solutions
We argue that not all school leaders are in crisis – indeed, several interviewees described headship as “the best job in the world”. Throughout the research we highlight what sustains leaders: spending time with pupils and seeing them develop, strong teams and relationships with colleagues, making a difference, and the moral purpose of educational leadership. Wider factors are also important – opportunities to learn and grow, feeling trusted and receiving positive feedback for a job well done, helping others to develop, an active and supportive home life, good salaries and extended holidays. These sustaining themes serve to keep leaders going, even when times are tough.
In fact, for most leaders, the fact that the job is tough is what makes it so rewarding. This creates a paradox: it seems that leaders can be thriving and sinking at the same time, or, perhaps more accurately, thriving one day or one week, but sinking the next. Such work can be exhausting, but also richly varied and even addictive. The issue is that a particularly difficult crisis or emotional event, a change in personal circumstances, a negative inspection outcome, or simply the overall weight of leadership can become too much – the sinking outweighs the thriving. We heard numerous stories of leaders who had become “burnt out and … left the profession.”
Understanding why, when and how leadership becomes too much and what can be done to enhance sustainability at a time of constrained resources is challenging.
Challenging the global consensus – namely acknowledging that leadership in an era of polycrisis includes, but is not limited to, instructional improvement – seems an important place to start. The leadership of care cannot be seen as a ‘touchy feely’ sideshow, it is part and parcel of contemporary school leadership. But such work is often emotionally and physically demanding, requiring skills and qualities that are insufficiently recognised in most development programmes. A key skill appears to be knowing where to draw the line, working with parents and other agencies to agree what schools can do – and what others must pick up.
The research also demonstrates that place matters profoundly and that generic policies and standardised approaches frequently fail to account for the radically different contexts in which leaders work. It highlights that formal leadership development programmes, while valuable, cannot alone prepare leaders for the complexities they face; developmental experiences, peer support, and ongoing coaching are equally if not more important.
Ultimately, addressing the sustainability crisis requires urgent, coordinated action at national and local levels across all three nations, with particular attention to enhancing diversity and supporting new and struggling leaders. Without such action, the sustainability crisis seems highly likely to become a pipeline crisis, threatening the supply of expert, authentic leaders that every school and every child deserves.
But this is not about new one-size-fits-all policies. Instead, what is needed is a ‘local solutions’ mindset which seeks to reflect and capitalise on the particularities of place. This requires an active but facilitative approach from the centre, geared towards defining core principles and then helping to stimulate networks and support local dialogue, learning and action, while accepting that different schools and localities might have legitimately different priorities and ways of working.
Head teacher Ruth Perry died by suicide shortly after the project began – and Ofsted has been going through the various stages of acknowledgement and reform ever since. I often say that I was expecting England to feel the least sustainable for leaders at the outset, because of the nature of its high-stakes accountability framework (Scotland does have inspections, but less high stakes, while inspections in Northern Ireland had been largely paused for around eight years when we started the research, due to a long-running industrial dispute there). In the event, while we do acknowledge accountability as an issue, the findings are more nuanced than I had anticipated.
Conducting research in Northern Ireland has been particularly fascinating. The nature of the post-conflict society infuses everything. We state in the report that leaders there are strongly pastoral and community-anchored in ways that are clearly distinct from both England and Scotland.
Professor Toby Greany
Conceptual framework
Our conceptual framework positions sustainable school leadership at the centre of four overlapping ‘petals’ of a flower:
- Leadership is understood as a process of influence geared towards the achievement of shared goals. Such leadership is culturally situated and context specific, distributed and collective and draws on accumulated knowledges, expertise and repertoires of practice. Leadership development is viewed as career-long individual growth involving shifts in knowledge, abilities, beliefs, values, and/or identity.
- Identity encompasses both the substantial self, an inner core of self-defining beliefs, values and attitudes, and our situated identity, which is socially constructed through interaction and professional socialisation. These personal identities are embodied and intersectional, encompassing aspects such as class, race, gender, sexuality and neuroptypicality. Our individual and collective narratives underpin how we make sense of leadership and can influence career choices and sustainability.
- Place includes but goes beyond geography. Leaders work within specific geographic, economic, historical, and social contexts which shape what leadership is required, who becomes a leader, how leadership is practiced and whether leadership can be sustained. Places are both context-derived and context-generative, meaning they respond to globalising influences and national policies in distinctive ways, making each locality unique.
- An ethic of education and care: feminist care theories assert that humans are fundamentally interdependent beings who develop within relationships of care. This places the human and relational at the heart of processes of learning, challenging the separation of academic learning from a broader understanding of students' lives. Schools have always had a duty of care, but placing an ethic of education and care at the core of sustainable leadership raises foundational questions around the purpose and process of schooling.
This conceptual framework offers one way to approach change, illustrating what needs to be in place for leadership to be sustainable, individually and collectively, and signalling areas that policymakers and leadership development providers might need to address.
As we indicate above, challenging the global consensus – specifically acknowledging that leadership in an era of polycrisis includes, but is not limited to, instructional improvement, and must encompass an ethic of education and care – seems an important place to start.
Innovation
The Sustainable School Leadership project is the first ever empirical study of school leadership and leadership development across three UK nations: England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The innovative design is presented visually below.
Two aspects are particularly innovative:
- Place and place-based case studies
Place (and space) are well-established theoretical frameworks across multiple disciplines but have rarely been applied in education before now. In addition to integrating place into our conceptual framework and analysis, we conducted seven locality case studies - three in England, and two each in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The localities were selected based on an analysis of national data and informed by discussions with the three national advisory groups. Our aim was to visit a reasonably representative spread of contexts. In each locality we interviewed a small number of local leaders (for example in a Local Authority (LA) or Multi-Academy Trust (MAT)), employers (for example Chair of Governors) and a locally representative spread of primary and secondary schools, where we interviewed potential or serving heads. Each interview lasted 1.5 hours, following a semi-structured schedule. Across the seven localities we conducted 111 interviews with 132 participants - usually individually but sometimes in small groups. We also reviewed publicly available documents and websites, for example describing local partnership arrangements.
- Data dashboards
In the final report we include three national and seven local dashboards (examples below). These dashboards bring together existing data and project findings to provide a visual overview of the three systems and localities. Each locality dashboard includes quotes mapped onto our conceptual framework.
The link to all reports with dashboards can be found at the bottom of this page.
Impact
The final report (plus three national technical reports) and a series of four podcasts discussing the findings were published in February 2026.
We worked with key stakeholders throughout the study, including through three national expert advisory groups. Each group met nine times during the course of the project and included senior policymakers (for example from the Department for Education (England), Department of Education, Education Authority and Education and Training Inspectorate (Northern Ireland) and Scottish Government and Education Scotland).
In each nation we shared emerging findings as the research progressed through a range of workshops and events. This included 15 keynote speeches and workshops across the UK and internationally attended by well over 1,500 school leaders and key stakeholders. In addition, we gave presentations and keynotes at 10 academic conferences.
By February 2026 we had published two academic journal articles from the study, with further articles, a special issue of a journal and a book in train. We are working with the Chartered College of Teaching to develop a themed issue of the Impact journal and with school leader associations in each nation on further workshops and impact projects. We have also informed a spin-off project in South Australia that is exploring parallel sustainability issues there.
We see the main scope for potential impact in the areas of:
- Policy and practice in the UK and more widely:
- Influencing school leadership standards
- Influencing the content and/or design of national and local school leadership training programmes
- Influencing approaches to succession planning and support for leaders
- Academic / contribution to knowledge impact:
- The empirical case for reassessing the global consensus on successful school leadership
- The conceptual framework as a way of reconceptualising sustainability issues
Resources and publications