We expect more of our school leaders than ever before. Gone is the view of the headteacher as primus inter pares; they are now supposed to be visionary leaders, curriculum specialists, disciplinarians, senior managers, community representatives and, just occasionally, teachers too. They are expected to transform the worst state schools and maintain performance in the best. But is this emphasis on leadership justified? Can headteachers make a difference?…

Our belief in the power of leadership is based on the existing school effectiveness literature, but it has a fatal flaw: by relying on stakeholders' perceptions of influence rather than objective measures, this qualitative research is able to establish a correlation between good heads and good performance but not a causal link. Policy Exchange therefore commissioned Jeff Searle and Peter Tymms at the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management (CEM) Centre at Durham
University to quantify the impact of headteachers on school performance: the "leadership effect". We believe this is the first time such an analysis has been attempted. It works on the assumption that because it is very unlikely that a new headteacher will be of exactly the same quality as the old head, then his or her ability or inability to influence school performance and pupil attitudes will show up in greater or no greater variation of results compared to schools that have not changed their headteacher….

Searle and Tymms found no difference in performance, on average, between schools that did and schools that did not change their headteacher. This led them to conclude that headteachers have little impact on the quality of learning and on the attitudes of pupils in their school, at least in the first five years of their appointment.

The reason for the lack of headteacher impact on pupil performance and attitudes is, they believe, because schools are "loosely coupled" organizations where the ability to influence performance diminishes rapidly the further one is from the pupil. This means that individual teachers have much more impact on learning than heads, whose influence can generally only be wielded indirectly through the staff.

Probably the most important thing headteachers can do for their pupils is to make sure that there are good teachers in their classrooms. Headteachers are important, they conclude, but not in the way that officialdom has perceived them in England for the last ten years.

James O’Shaughnessy, The Leadership Effect, Policy Exchange, April 17.