Aspirations to and Perceptions of Secondary Headship: Contrasting Female Teachers’ and Headteachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

This article reports on some of the findings of a wider, life history study of the factors affecting the career decisions of 40 female secondary school teachers, including 10 female headteachers. As a part of this, insights were sought into why women continue to be proportionally under-represented in secondary headship posts in UK secondary schools. Interview evidence indicated that the majority of female teachers in the study harboured a set of negative perceptions of school leadership and rejected headship as a career option. In this article, I contrast these negative perceptions with the positive picture of headship painted by the female headteachers. The headteachers in this study were driven by a strong sense of values relating to pupil achievement, and saw themselves as agents of change who needed to occupy positions of power in order to enact their principles to maximum effect. Drawing on the narratives of the 10 headteachers, I discuss their positive, agentic perspectives on school leadership, underpinned by essentially child-centred values. I argue that a more proactive approach to promoting this positive view of school leadership may be key to encouraging women (and presumably some men) who have previously rejected headship as a career, to reconsider.