The impact of headteachers on the performance and attitudes of pupils
For primary schools there is no connection between attitude to school and their valueadded measures. This may be because young children are usually enthusiastic and want to please. They may also answer attitude questions in a different way from older children. For example, they may be more influenced by recent events and be less inclined to take a broader perspective. It may also have to do with the different ethos surrounding year 4 and year 10 teaching and the different priorities and culture of primary and secondary schools. Why may the correlation for secondary schools be much stronger than for primary schools? The secondary cohorts are considerably larger than those of the primary schools, and the value-added is calculated at age 16 (Year 11) across a range of GCSE subjects. These subjects will vary between pupils in the schools, but all will contain the national curriculum subjects of English, mathematics and science. The value-added for the primary schools has been calculated for year 4 pupils, age 8 or 9, based on the two areas of mathematics and reading. Thus we would expect greater consistency in the secondary school correlations. Further, secondary schools are generally much larger than primary schools and so the results are much more stable. This has implications for the power of a headteacher to influence a school. A secondary school is a very large organisation with its own culture and subcultures. The correlations show considerable stability from year to year and this suggests that it may be harder for a secondary school headteacher to influence quality across the whole school than a primary school headteacher. On the other hand the results in the primary schools fluctuate mainly because of small numbers. The average Year 4 size was 36 whereas the average Year 11 size was 179. Improving and deteriorating schools One may hypothesise that the variation in
the quality of headteachers could lead to some schools improving continuously and some deteriorating. The next section explores this possibility. Improving and deteriorating secondary schools We define an improving school as a school where in four years out of the five the value-added was at least as great as in the previous year. Similarly we define a deteriorating school as one in which the value-added is less than the previous year for four out of the five years. The table below shows the number of schools in each category, together with the number of changes of headteacher in a particular year. Table 2.8: Improving/deteriorating secondary schools and when the headteachers changed 2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005 no change
total
5 years
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
1
4 years
2
2
2
2
1
1
12
22
5 years
-
-
-
-
1
-
3
4
4 years
3
4
7
8
5
7
40
74
Improving
Deteriorating
We note that there are more deteriorating schools than improving schools, and we now focus on the improving schools and look further at the changes occurring in the value-added scores for the 23 schools that we identified. The table below details the value-added scores of the improving schools and the years when headteachers changed. The table shows little evidence of any pattern. The most improving schools were about as likely to have changed their headteacher as not and the years when the headteacher changed were spread evenly over the six years. www.policyexchange.org.uk
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