Chapter 2: New Headteachers in Schools in England and their Approaches to Leadership

The chapter presents the lived experience of being a new headteacher (principal) in England at a time when central control over the direction of education and what happens in publicly-funded schools has tightened considerably. Successive legislation over the last 2 decades has increased the micromanagement of activities so that schools, and those working within them, are subject to greater scrutiny and criticism. Simultaneously, the education service has been directed toward a market-based approach, where performance is transparent and standards and outputs are dominant. This provides more than a contextual backdrop for understanding professional practice, but enables the structuring impact of rapid and radical change to be understood through the exercise of agency within leadership as a social practice. We are particularly interested here in what it means for those new to headship (principalship): who they are, what they do, and how they understand their role. This chapter utilizes interviews with nine new headteachers, who at the time were within the first 5 years of headship appointments and working in either a primary or secondary school in different geographical locations in England. The interviews were conducted for the Economic and Social Research Council project, Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) (RES-000-23-1192) (Gunter & Forrester, 2008a). The chapter draws on this empirical research to discuss the leadership approaches taken and head-teachers' perceived origins of their respective approaches.