Feature Article

Age of the super-head

New approaches to education

They command six-figure salaries and have a role more akin to the chief executive of a corporation than a school. They are the new breed of head teachers emerging from the Catholic sector to share their expertise by taking charge of less successful schools in their areas

You could call Catherine Myers a mutation in evolutionary terms. When in 2001 Bishop Challoner Collegiate School in east London was appointed the country’s first federated school, she became the first of a new species of executive head teacher. Slowly but surely this new breed is taking over our schools, taking on some of the toughest challenges in education and earning six-figure salaries in the process.

Increasingly, today’s head teachers are adopting the style and methods of the business world. The most successful tend to be thrusting entrepreneurs with the deal-making skills of a chief executive. This evolutionary process began in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher gave heads of state schools in England power to run their own budgets, and has gathered pace under New Labour. Over the last decade new models of school organisation and leadership have developed as the present Government has sought to inject fresh dynamism into the system to address concerns about poor standards of education.
Schools have grouped together in loose partnerships, often leading to more formal federations with a joint governing body and an executive head or CEO at the helm. The idea is that schools working in collaboration – especially when underperforming schools are matched with highly successful ones – can bring about a significant rise in standards, even in the most challenging circumstances.

As the country’s first executive head, Catherine Myers has been hugely influential in the development of this new thinking. After being appointed head of Bishop Challoner in 1992, then a struggling girls’ school where less than a fifth of pupils achieved five good GCSE grades, she set about turning it into one of the highest performing comprehensives in the country.

In 2001, the school took over a nearby failing boys’ school and Mrs Myers took on the role of executive head, creating a federated structure with separate 11-16 girls’ and boys’ schools feeding into a mixed sixth-form college. Since then, Bishop Challoner’s pioneering three-schools-in-one structure has gone from strength to strength, and recently pupils and staff completed the move to an impressive £47-million Learning Village campus.

As the leader of a federated school with more than 1,700 pupils and 354 staff, she likens her role to that of the head of a medium-sized public limited company. But although she thinks grouping schools into federations makes sense, much depends on local circumstances. “For us, as a Catholic school, it’s a good model. We sit next to the church and on the other side of the church is the primary school. There are definite advantages financially, and it enables us to put more money into teaching and the classroom. But federations only work if there is a local need.”

Following Bishop Challoner’s lead, hundreds of schools across England are now involved in federations or similar partnerships, ranging from two or three small primaries to chains of comprehensives. That figure is expected to rise as new legislation introduced last year now requires schools that fail to meet minimum standards to form partnerships with successful schools.

An alternative development is the growth of academies, which are becoming increasingly common in England’s inner cities. They offer a more radical approach to tackling poor educational standards by bringing in sponsors from the business and voluntary sectors who run their schools as “not for profit” franchises. There are currently 203 academies in operation, many of them run by single sponsors who have developed their own distinctive ethos and approach to running schools.
Largest of these is the United Learning Trust, founded in 2002, which currently operates 17 state-funded academies in England. What is interesting about this franchise, however, is that it is run by the Church of England and based on a much older trust founded as the Church Schools Company in 1883. Nor is the Church of England alone in jumping on board the academy train. There are now 53 academies designated as faith schools, many of them jointly sponsored by two or more religious groups. These include 10 run by Catholic trusts in collaboration with the Church of England.

There are currently two academies designated specifically as Catholic schools. The first to open was St Paul’s Academy, Greenwich, in 2005. This was followed in 2007 by St Matthew Academy in Lewisham, which has the distinction of being the first academy in the country to be run as an “all through” school, with pupils ranging from three to 16. Sponsored by the Archdiocese of Southwark, St Matthew replaced a primary and an 11-16 secondary that had been blighted by a mixture of academic under-performance, changes in leadership and falling rolls.

Michael Barry, the vice principal of St Matthew, says the decision to become an academy was the only answer for local Catholic families. Academic standards had risen sharply and the most recent Ofsted rated the academy’s progress and capacity for further improvement as “good”. Mr Barry, 38, typifies the new breed of school leader. Currently he is halfway through a pilot programme developed by the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services that has put him on a fast track to academy headship. As such he is an advocate of the more entrepreneurial approach that academies provide.

“Becoming an academy has enabled us not only to make some quick wins in terms of raising achievement but also to make the sustainable changes that this community desperately needs. What academies do is offer local solutions to meet local needs,” he says.

Initially, many Catholic educationalists and trustees were sceptical about academies, fearing they would lead to asset-stripping and undermine the Church’s traditional role in state education. Increasingly, however, the Church is embracing academy projects. One example is the Coloma Trust, sponsor of the new Quest Academy that is due to replace Selsdon High School in Croydon, south London, this summer. The school’s closure was prompted by poor GCSE results – just 28 per cent of pupils achieved five good grades including English and maths in 2009.

Coloma was chosen because of its record of running the nearby high-achieving Coloma Convent Girls’ School, one of the highest achieving schools in the borough. Maureen Martin, who has been head of Coloma for 15 years, has been appointed principal of the new academy and will serve as executive head of both schools. Uniquely, for a school run solely by a Catholic trust, the academy will be open to children regardless of their religion.

“We believe we are the first Catholic state school to sponsor a community academy which will be ecumenical and multi-faith, open to the wider community,” says Mrs Martin. “There are many more who would like to share the standard of education and family spirit we offer at Coloma but who regrettably we can’t fit in because we’re heavily oversubscribed by Catholic girls. This is an opportunity to support many more parents in the area and provide a good education, based on traditional values, for their children. It is part of our mission to reach out in this way”

Another example is the All Saints Academy due to open in Cheltenham in September, jointly sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Clifton and the Anglican Diocese of Gloucester. The academy will have an explicitly Christian ethos, with a third of its pupils drawn from Catholic families, a third Church of England and the rest from other faiths.

Ian McNiff, director for schools and colleges for the Clifton Diocese, said the process of co-sponsoring an academy with another faith partner had gone smoothly, adding: “The critical thing is to be absolutely clear about your vision for education, and that vision needs to be underpinned by clear structures and governance. You have to be sure not to dodge the issues of difference.”

With all three of the main political parties supporting the growth of the academies programme and school federations the future looks rosy for ambitious, business-minded heads. Academy principals can expect to earn salaries of between £100,000 and £120,000 while chief executives responsible for a chain of academies earn considerably more.

For the Catholic sector there is a further consideration likely to lead to increased numbers of academies and school partnerships with other faiths. According to new figures produced by Professor John Howson of Education Data Services, almost half of the vacant posts for headships of Catholic schools in 2008-09 had to be re-advertised because of a lack of good candidates. Mrs Myers is retiring as head of Bishop Challoner and last week Westminster Archdiocese re-advertised for her replacement, offering £130,000 for the appropriate “visionary”.

In parts of inner London and other major cities the problem of recruiting qualified heads with a commitment to Catholic education is particularly dire. For them the pragmatic solution is to offer super salaries to attract an executive head with the right credentials. The day of the super-head has arrived.