Viewpoint: capturing the leadership premium

We’re on our way to capturing the leadership premium, but there’s still some way to go, says Sir Michael Barber.

We all have our stereotypical images of a headteacher. Even Winston Churchill: “Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers and Presidents have never yet been invested”. Whether our memories are positive or negative, we can all probably agree that headteachers had a great influence on us during our formative years.

But there have been few serious attempts to analyse what makes a good headteacher. Over the past few months, with the help of the National College, McKinsey & Company has conducted a review of school leadership across eight high-performing education systems: in England, New York, Alberta and Ontario (Canada), the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and Victoria, (Australia). We conducted almost 70 interviews with experts, policymakers and leaders of school systems and surveyed over 1,800 headteachers and middle-tier administrators.

What did we learn?

Apart from classroom teaching, nothing has a greater influence on pupils than headteachers. In England, for every 100 schools with good headteachers, 93 will have good standards of student achievement; for every 100 that do not have good headteachers, only one will have good standards of achievement.

There is a consensus about the importance of school leadership. The high degree of change and innovation in this area reflects this growing awareness of the importance of good headteachers.

Good headteachers have a lot in common wherever they are in the world. So there is an emerging consensus about how to improve leadership.

"There is a consensus about the importance of school leadership.”

Good headteachers spend more time away from their desks, coaching and developing their teachers, and interacting with students and pupils. They see teacher development as the greatest challenge. Seventy-five per cent of them work on teacher development at least once a week, as against 63 per cent of a randomly selected group of headteachers. But this does not have to mean working longer hours. High-performing headteachers work very similar hours to, or in fact fewer than, a randomly selected group (59 hours per week against 61 hours).

Headteachers learn best on the job and from peers. In the best systems, they support each other and exchange best practice, and higher performing headteachers provide support to weaker schools. Our research suggests that high-quality formal training is effective. In Singapore, one of the best performing education systems, two-thirds of head teachers received more than 400 hours of training. But there is also emerging evidence, mirroring experience in the business sector, that “lateral learning” (such as learning from peers and using networks and clusters) is one of the most effective ways of strengthening leadership. Eighty-eight per cent of randomly selected headteachers and 94 per cent of high performers visit other schools to learn at least once a year.

Using good headteachers to support struggling schools is also effective. In England, schools supported by National Leaders of Education (who are heads elsewhere) improve faster than other schools. The recently announced expansion of this programme is a consequence of its success.

Good education systems find headteachers for today, whereas the best systems grow them for tomorrow. The best systems identify potential leaders at an early stage and proactively guide and support their careers through different jobs. For example, the education authorities in the York region (Ontario) have identified 800 potential headteachers across 200 schools.

Selecting headteachers is one of the most important decisions an education system has to make. So, selection committees need to have the right skills and capabilities. The selection and development of leaders have to be seen as integral to the work of schools and education systems, not as separate processes. And there is some evidence that the requirement to hold a leadership-related qualification helps improve the quality of school leadership. For example, in England 43 per cent of schools led by a National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) graduate raised their standards, compared with 33 per cent of schools not led by an NPQH graduate.

However, despite this emerging consensus, some areas of further work still remain, such as: developing performance management and incentive structures (an area still underdeveloped when compared with the business sector); and developing the collective capacity of leadership teams rather than focusing on individual headteachers.

There is much to learn from these examples of best practice. We still have a long way to go to capture the full leadership premium but our evidence suggests that some of the best systems around the world are now beginning to strengthen leadership in a sustained way – often learning from the National College.

Sir Michael Barber is head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice. Prior to joining McKinsey he was Chief Adviser on Delivery to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Between 1997 and 2001, he was Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on school standards. His advice on public policy, especially education, has been sought by governments in over 30 countries.