Phil Holden is currently Senior Adviser for Leadership Development for Sandwell Local Authority with responsibility for succession planning. Phil is also a leading member of the group that is developing and implementing a succession planning strategy across the Black Country.
Phil has a track record of supporting leadership development at national, regional and local authority level: he was one of the original team that devised and delivered NPQH and has led on trainer training and programme delivery for a number of national programmes. He is a Lead Facilitator for NCSL's Leadership Pathways.
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Diagnosing the need
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Hello I'm Phil Holden. I'm Senior Adviser for Leadership Development for Sandwell Local Authority and I'm here today to talk about the data we've been using as part of the National College's pilot project on succession planning. We've been working across the Black Country for the last 12 to 18 months looking at the issue of succession planning and as part of the National College's programme we've been able to get involved in working with data.
What I've realised through involvement in the project is that, at its heart succession planning is actually about supply and demand. It's about who's leaving our schools and who's going to replace them, and there are two types of data, therefore, that one can collect. On the one hand you have demand data and the other is supply data. Demand data is actually predictive, in that it's a bit like a long-range weather forecast - you know that it's likely to rain but you actually don't know when, so although unlike local data where you can literally look outside your window and you can see whether it's going to rain and you know whether to take your brolly or not. So, one of the things that we've been looking at is what is the difference in demand data between the long-range predictive stuff and the short-range stuff that we might have available in our authority?
At the moment there's been a current focus across the country on headteachers leaving the profession. This is because of the demographics around the baby boomers. What it has shown is nationally the age profile of headteachers currently in the profession mean that in the years 2009 and 2010, there's likely to be a very large number leaving. However, when we started to look more locally and certainly when I started to look within my own authority, what we came to realise was that, actually, not all headteachers were staying until they were 60. In fact many of them were going when they were 58 or 59. That means that rather than have that bulge peak in two years' time, it seems to be peaking now and over the next 18 months. That's meant that we can't just look at headteacher data, and we can't just look at the supply of headteachers, because what's going to happen is we're going to need senior members of staff at all levels. Therefore we've had to look much more closely at the age groups in our schools of both assistant heads and deputy heads, and possibly into the future we'll start to look at the age groups of people lower down.
We've got many deputies in our authority for instance who are over 55 -getting on for 30% of them - and we've got nearly 20% of assistant headteachers who are over 55 too. So what we've done by looking at the local data in our authority is actually identified all the people that might well choose to retire over the next five or six years, and from that we've been able to break down where those people are.
Another piece of research that the College had commissioned as part of the pilot project was from Hay, and they came to the conclusion that a school was far too small a unit, even the larger secondary school, to actually plan its own succession planning strategy, and what they recommended was that schools work in clusters. Now it's fortunate in Sandwell, because Sandwell is based around six towns. Many of you might not have heard of Sandwell, but you will have heard of West Brom, which is one of our largest towns, and there are five other towns in our borough as well. And the local council strategy for the development of the area is to work across the six towns, and the education department has followed that by creating six clusters of schools across the authority. So I was fortunate in being able to work our data down to the level of the individual cluster.
The other issue for us was that in fact data was available on the demand side in terms of ages, but we didn't really have the supply-side data. Now part of the supply-side data is knowing which potential senior leaders, which potential headteachers, have been through the national programmes such as the college-run NPQH, Leadership Pathways, Leading from the Middle, and up to about a few months ago it was impossible to get that data out of the College because of all sorts of legal reasons. Well fortunately, the College has now taken away that and managed to get past that block and has actually released the data on NPQH and that has been extremely helpful, because now we are able, for the first time, to actually see in our schools who is actually engaged in NPQH and who's actually got the qualification, and we've been able to match that against the local data that we've now produced at the cluster level. So we can look at a particular town, we can look at a particular group of schools or indeed an individual school and see who has got the qualification that can lead them to headship and who might be likely to move on.
And it's that local data, it's the ability to get down to that very local level that's actually making us being able to create an effective strategy and so using the local data at the local level, has enabled us to work with local stakeholders - headteachers, governors, representatives from diocesan boards and other local authority officers to ensure that we can create a strategy that will mean that Sandwell schools get the very best leaders to lead them over the next few years. Thank you very much indeed.
Name:Phil Holden