School system does not reward the best head teachers

The school system systematically fails to recognise the head teachers who make the biggest impact in improving pupils' chances, research suggests.

Heads who focus on short-term success, even at the expense of the long-term, tend to be rewarded by the system.

The study looked at 160 schools in England and is published in Harvard Business Review.

Leaders who build big, successful schools are less likely to be recognised.

The new research, produced by the Centre for High Performance, shared exclusively with BBC Newsnight and Schools Week, is based on internal administrative data from schools which covers everything from pay to timetables.

Four researchers had access to 160 secondary school academies in England - building a dataset that covered the tenure of 411 head teachers.

The research, by Alex Hill, Liz Mellon, Ben Laker and Jules Goddard, is being published in the Harvard Business Review. Their work found that heads tended to fall into one of five "types":

The graph below shows the average annual change they made when the head was still in post. The vertical axis shows performance change in exam results, measured as a share of the children in the school getting five good GCSEs. Dots that are higher up mean the school has a faster average improvement rate. The horizontal axis is financial balance. Being further to the right means that the school tended to improve its financial position.

The clear finding here is that surgeons appear to make the most dramatic improvement in the short term, averaging around a 10% improvement per annum in exam results with only a slight loss of financial strength. "Philosophers" make marginal improvement on results, but not finance. "Architects", on these measures, make steady progress on both finance and results.

That remarkable performance on GCSEs explains why surgeons are the most sought-after heads. The paper reveals that they are paid, on average, £154,000 a year. Philosophers get £103,000 and architects just £86,000. Soldiers and accountants both get about £100,000 a year. Surgeons are also most likely to get awards. Almost two-thirds have a national honour, like a knighthood.

More on this story on BBC Newsnight at 22:30 on BBC Two

There are, however, profound problems for the system with the strategy pursued by the surgeons. Their strategy is about rapid turnaround, so they invest aggressively in children about to take exams, and exclude tough children up-front. Surgeons dropped into a school would be expected to get rid of an average of 28 per cent of final year students to dramatically boost that year's exam results. The Philosophers would expel 6 per cent of final year students and architects just 1 per cent.

That generates rapid improvement in results. But it is not sustainable. Many of these heads leave within two years - and the surgeons' schools' results decline rapidly in the year after the head moves on.

Their strategy is time-limited - you can only improve results modestly through removing pupils. And if a school has moved resources from younger children to focus on those taking exams imminently, eventually it will have to deal with children whose education was damaged by the strategy at the start of secondary school, when resources were diverted from them into older children.

The surgeon's schools eventually recover, and stabilising back into slow improvement in the third year after the surgeon left. But in the meantime, the architects' slow steady approach has left behind schools that are still continually improving.

An important reason why the architects' schools are improving financially as well as on exam results is that these schools have been improving without expelling. In fact, they have been growing, as parents want to use them.

That has another effect, too - the previous graphs showed the change in the proportion of children who are getting five good GCSEs and the change in the budget. The following two graphs show the raw number of children getting five good GCSEs in each category of heads' schools. This graph suggests that, when architects are in place, their schools get many more children to five good GCSEs than the surgeons.

Looking on, three years after the heads move on, the architects' schools are both still growing - and delivering a good education to a higher proportion of those children. In short, they leave schools that are both growing and improving.

All of this research is novel - elements of it may get refined and improved. We need to look more closely at some of the detail - like why different sorts of schools might recruit different sorts of heads. But it is not the case that, for example, architects just take easier schools. And there is certainly enough here to suggest that some strategies being pursued by heads may be counter-productive, yet those strategies are ones which get the rewards. The work also raises questions about the structure of English education.

First, it implies that the incentive structure for English schools is much too short-termist. We honour heads who get short-term results and pay them more. Architects, who maximise impact for the maximum number of children over the maximum amount of time, are not recognised. If anything, they are penalised. The short time-horizon is the consequence of regulation about school turnaround, the attitude of Ofsted and the way academy chains have to demonstrate rapid progress in order to be allowed to expand. All of these things are easily fixable.

Second, we do not look enough at school size. We have, until now, measured schools by the proportion of children meeting certain fixed benchmarks. This has always created an incentive to exclude children. One unforeseen consequence of these new progress measures now being introduced is that those incentives will disappear. They may, then, reduce the number of children being removed from schools. But explicitly paying more attention to school size might also help identify heads who are quietly excellent.

Third, it implies that the training of heads is insufficient. It is extremely striking that the "philosophers", for example, are mostly English teachers, the surgeons are mostly PE teachers and the architects are mostly history and economics teachers. Schools Week has a lot more detail on that fascinating avenue. That observation brings out how far teachers work in silos surrounded by people who had similar academic and professional training - and how little we do to broaden their experiences as part of the process of turning them into heads.

Finally, it is surely excellent news that a lot of schools can be made to work better with the student bodies and staffrooms within them. While the problems it raises are fascinating, the research is optimistic. And it is exciting - for once, we are able to talk about how good schools work. Not just about types of schools.

Chris Cook is policy editor for BBC Newsnight. More on this story on Newsnight at 22:30 on BBC Two Thursday - or catch up afterwards on iPlayer