Heads you win, or Heads you loose?

Disturbing report from the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers, as reported by The Beeb : -

At the opening press conference, when the union leadership was publicising a survey revealing the problem of head teacher recruitment, the man from The Times asked why so few people wanted to become heads.

It opened the floodgates. There were about a dozen head teachers sitting amongst the journalists in the audience. They almost fell over one another in their eagerness to answer the question. As the union leadership looked on, the press conference was very effectively hijacked by grass-roots head teachers.

It was almost therapy. Each poured out a story of woe. The ingredients were the same: excessive workload, stress, pressure, risks of failure, money worries, the threat of Ofsted, demands from government, difficulties with parents. Interestingly, none of them complained about the pupils. Indeed, despite the horrors they listed, all insisted they loved the job.

This set the tone for the conference. Ofsted's new short, sharp inspection regime was berated for failing to give a full picture of the problems schools had to overcome. League tables were condemned for their negative effect on teaching