The Sustainable School Leadership project studied how England, Scotland and Northern Ireland recruit, train and retain school leaders. In England the research combined an analysis of the School Workforce Census (2010–2023), a survey of 1,001 school leaders, and in-depth interviews with 62 leaders across three contrasting localities — Coast, Shire and City. Twenty-five years of focus on raising standards still shows, but leaders are now also grappling with wider societal shifts that demand care, inclusion and wellbeing.
England's school workforce is large and complex. In 2024/25 there were roughly 75,959 school leaders across state-funded schools — headteachers, deputies and assistant heads — within a total teaching workforce of 513,435. Senior leaders account for about 15% of that workforce; headteachers for about 4.4%.
The three localities studied spanned that range: Coast, a local authority combining a highly deprived coastal town with a more affluent rural hinterland; Shire, a rural area of dispersed villages and market towns; and City, an ethnically diverse urban authority with above-average deprivation.
Blue points are primary schools, terracotta points secondary. Where the two colours
saturate into solid blocks you are looking at London, the West Midlands and the northern conurbations
from Liverpool through Manchester and Leeds to Sheffield.
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point for the school name.
Leaders were asked to select the three to five factors they found most draining, and the three to five they found most sustaining. Financial and resource constraints come top in England, followed by staffing issues and poor work–life balance, with special educational needs and inclusion challenges and the weight of leadership also prominent.
Despite these challenges, leaders were clear about what keeps them going: working with children and young people, their relationships with colleagues, the variety of the role, and the satisfaction that comes from making a difference. Relationships with students and collaboration with colleagues inside school lead the field by a clear margin.
Asked which description best fitted their own experience of the last twelve months, 44.2% of English headteachers said they were sometimes or mostly thriving — a marked improvement on 2022, when just 26% did. The share describing themselves as sometimes or mostly sinking was 21.9%, against 45% in 2022.
England nonetheless sits between its neighbours rather than clear of them. Around a third of leaders in all three nations describe themselves as mostly surviving, and one in five English heads is still on the sinking side of the line.
Between 2010 and 2023 the headteacher age profile shifted towards the 40–54 range. The proportion aged 45–49 rose from 19.0% to a peak of 26.0% in 2020 before easing to 23.7%, while 50–54 edged up to 25.5% to become the largest group by 2023. The share aged 55–59 fell sharply, from 25.1% to 14.6%.
Deputy heads have moved the same way but from a younger base: 40–44 rose from 17.3% to 24.6% and 45–49 from 15.9% to 20.7%, while 55–59 halved from 15.0% to 7.7%. The under-35 group shrank, from 13.3% to 9.5%.
Tracking whether individuals remain in any headship post — so a move between schools counts as retention — around 13% of headteachers leave within the first year, rising to 31% after three years and nearly half by year five. After a decade, roughly three-quarters have gone.
What is striking is how little this has changed. One-year exit rates sit between 11% and 14% for every cohort since 2010, and ten-year rates vary only between 72.9% and 73.4%. Despite a decade of policy change, the rate of leaving headship has stayed broadly flat.
The headteacher role is changing in response to wider societal shifts. Increasing poverty, reduced support from specialist services, and rising SEND and mental health needs combine to mean that schools are playing a wider set of roles, stretching well beyond what would traditionally be seen as education. Schools have always had a duty of care, but it has become more central to leadership today.
Alongside this sits the fragmenting effect of academisation and market dynamics, an accountability regime that shapes the work and mindsets of leaders more sharply than in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and support systems whose scale and effectiveness vary widely. The question is not whether England has capable, committed leaders. It clearly does. The question is whether the system can continue to attract and sustain them.
15.1% of English heads had always wanted the job. 54.3% say the aspiration emerged during their career, and 30.7% describe the route as accidental — "it just happened".
Among leaders not yet in headship, 33.1% say "yes, perhaps" or "yes, definitely" to becoming a head — against 39% in Scotland and 24% in Northern Ireland.
Women are 76.7% of classroom teachers but 67.9% of headteachers, and just 43.2% in secondary. Ethnic minority representation falls from 15.2% of teachers to 7.4% of heads.
The strongest drains — finance, staffing, work–life balance and additional support needs — are system-level levers rather than individual resilience problems.