Lately, I’ve been thinking about how easily the focus can shift away from what really matters. This latest suggestion that schools could find savings by reducing the number of Assistant Headteachers feels like one of those moments, a convenient distraction, a misdirected focus.
It plays on a familiar divide, the one that too often opens between senior leadership and everyone else. I sat in a meeting recently where frustration, anger, and exhaustion were all directed towards leadership teams. And while I understood that tension, I also knew the truth of what those teams carry.
They are not overstaffed; they are overstretched.
Behind every leadership title is a human being trying to hold a system together that was never designed to hold this much.
Senior leaders are the ones delivering the messages no one wants to hear. They don’t want to deliver them any more than we want to hear them. Human to human, I see friends who bear the weight of those conversations so heavily that it impacts their world, often as much as it does the other person’s. I don’t know many senior leaders who get their kicks out of being cruel. They carry the emotional cost of every decision, every conversation, every compromise that keeps the wheels turning.
They are the ones safeguarding everyone, staff and students alike. The ones absorbing complaints, anticipating crises, responding to new expectations faster than they can be understood.
Someone in that meeting gently reminded us that the stress we feel throughout the system filters down because senior leaders feel it first. They hold the heat before anyone else does.
And yet, when ministers imply that the rise in Assistant Head numbers is evidence of inefficiency, it reduces a complex reality to a soundbite. It dismisses the truth that schools today are doing more than ever before, not because they want to, but because they must.
In the last decade, schools have absorbed the weight of services that vanished: mental health support, social care, family outreach, early intervention. Every role that’s been cut elsewhere has found its way, quietly and inevitably, to the school gates.
The responsibilities of an Assistant Head in 2025 (and any other school leader, for that matter) are unrecognisable from those of a decade ago. They are curriculum leads, safeguarding partners, public health advocates, crisis managers, wellbeing champions. They are the people keeping the system human.
This isn’t inefficiency; it’s survival.
Every one of us in this profession is trying to make things better. We don’t clock in and out of caring. We don’t switch off at the end of the day and stop worrying about the children or colleagues we carry in our thoughts. For us, this isn’t a political cycle. It’s a life’s work.
If ministers spent more time listening, really listening, to the people inside the system, and less time searching for someone to blame, I believe education would be in a far better place. Support heals. Division harms.
The truth is, the government has rarely, if ever, prioritised the education system or the people working tirelessly to make it a better, more inclusive place, one where everyone belongs. Perhaps they should own that, with integrity, like the senior leaders we see modelling this in schools across the country. Because that’s what real, wholehearted leadership looks like. It looks like honesty, transparency, delivering the tough messages even when they break our hearts, and not shifting blame but sitting with it, even when it hurts and is uncomfortable, because there is no other choice.
Every year, the demands grow. Every year, the expectations rise. And still, leaders show up, tired, stretched, but determined, because they believe in what this work stands for: the children, the communities, and the possibility of something better.
So, no, the solution isn’t fewer Assistant Heads. The solution is a government that understands that leadership isn’t a cost to be cut; it’s a lifeline to be protected.
Because the people holding this system together don’t need judgment. They need support. They need trust. They need to be seen for what they are: the heart of a system that keeps showing up, even when it hurts.
If we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that real change never begins in Whitehall press releases. It begins in classrooms, corridors, and staffrooms, in the quiet, steadfast humanity of those who keep showing up.
The ones who lead not with hierarchy, but with heart. The ones who carry the weight, and still choose hope.
So here’s to them, the Assistant Heads, the Deputies, the Heads, the people who stand at the intersection of policy and people, holding the system together one decision, one conversation, one act of care at a time.
They are not the problem to be solved. They are the proof that, even in an exhausted system, humanity endures.
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