Primary Drivers

Sheffield City Council

The background: Raising achievement is an urgent priority for primary schools in Sheffield. In part that has meant ensuring that the city has the right leaders in the right place to bring about change. In Sheffield, this objective has been made more difficult by the succession squeeze in primary headship in particular, which has resulted in the city losing a significant number of primary heads in 07/08 through natural turnover, with further retirements in 08/09.

The challenge: To meet the challenge of school improvement, the local authority team in Sheffield developed a vision for creating a more flexible style of school leadership within the City – one which attracted experienced leaders to come to the city and which enable the LA to deploy skilled practitioners quickly to where they could make most difference. The team turned to Navigate to develop of way of realising these ambitions.

The solution: Working in partnership with the Head of the School Improvement, Navigate developed the concept of special “Lead Headteachers”. These are highly experienced heads (with at least one headship under their belt). Such individuals are employed directly by the City, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice to a school without substantive leadership in order to bring stability, and to act as talent spotters and mentors to newly appointed heads.

When not on placement in schools, Lead Headteachers support the improvement strategy within the Authority. The scheme was designed, developed and implemented against an extremely short timetable. From conceiving the programme to making the first appointments of Lead Heads was just five weeks. This included developing the specification and standards for the role, setting contractual arrangements and frameworks, advertising the roles and searching for candidates, running “open events” for interested heads, interviewing and making offers.

The Navigate team achieved this by: establishing a constructive partnership at each level of the client organisation; sharing responsibility for achieving the final outcome (not just delivering agreed levels of specific services); taking an active approach to problem solving; quickly scaling up the (human) resource so that some parts of the project could “blitzed” very rapidly; establishing clear roles for members of our team; applying very tight project management, with progress updates every 2-3 days.

The result: Four Lead Headteachers have been appointed, with a number already on deployment to support school improvement across the city.