Stress, burnout, initiative overload. Who would be a school principal?

The Irish Primary Principals’ Network (IPPN) is the professional body for primary school leaders and represents over 6,400 principals and deputy principals. Our direct engagement with school leaders has highlighted the increasing levels of challenge, frustration and disillusionment experienced and articulated by school leaders in response to their experience of the practice of leadership. They are not thriving in their roles and their capacity and effectiveness as leaders is being greatly limited and undermined.

The intensity of that sense of frustration and disillusionment has noticeably increased in recent years and has prompted the network to undertake a project on sustainable leadership. In November 2022, IPPN produced a “roadmap to sustainability” and subsequently, last month, a follow-up progress report. The importance of school leadership as an influence on, and key determinant of, pupil learning is clear. The equation is simple: effective school leadership leads to school effectiveness, which in turn leads to better outcomes for children. We believe school leaders should be empowered and supported to deliver that effective leadership in our schools, thereby maintaining their focus on their core purpose: leading teaching and learning.

The current teacher supply and lack of substitution cover has further added to school leaders’ stress

Since 2015 we have become increasingly concerned about the health and wellbeing of our members. It is true to say that the workload of the school leader has changed and greatly increased. No longer is the principal just in charge of teaching and learning; the role has now expanded hugely to managing the organisation, with recruitment of staff, looking after staff leave, school finance, building projects and child protection to name some, but not all, of the demands on primary school principals.

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Let’s look at some of the data from our research, which focused on the occupational health, safety and wellbeing of over 1,000 school leaders in Ireland and was conducted by a team from Deakin University, Melbourne, in 2015, 2022 and 2023.

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The data is stark and irrefutable, revealing that the levels of burnout, stress and depressive symptoms among Irish primary school leaders are more than double those of the healthy working population.

Some 54 per cent of school leaders surveyed are in the high or severe categories of burnout with the top five stressors being: the sheer quantity of work; lack of time focus on teaching and learning; government initiatives; resourcing needs, especially special educational needs; and, of course, teacher shortages.

There is clear evidence that the workload of primary school leaders is expanding year on year with an excessive focus on managing the organisation

Some 54 per cent of school leaders are now in either the severe or high categories for burnout.

In a recent survey in September 2023, to which over 1,500 school leaders responded, principals rated the sustainability of their role at 3.6 out of 10 with teaching principals reporting a rating of just 3.2 out of 10.

I am personally shocked at all the early retirements I see in schools around me, and if school leaders don’t retire early, for the most part, the minute they have their years done, they are gone.

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The current situation is completely untenable if we want to retain our existing school leaders, in terms of continuity and experience, and to attract aspiring leaders to take up these leadership roles into the future.

The impact on children in school when school leaders cannot focus as they would like on teaching and learning is immeasurable and affects the delivery of the curriculum in our schools.

We would like to focus on the children in our schools, on our duty of care to them, on our vision to ensure the continuity and best education provision for them – not on administration, school finance or huge building projects.

Neither teaching nor non-teaching principals have the time and space to lead learning the way we want to, or the way the system expects. This is especially true when we consider that over half of primary principals have full-time teaching duties.

The current teacher supply and lack of substitution cover has further added to school leaders’ stress.

It is clear we need additional administrative capacity in our schools to hand over these huge responsibilities to skilled people so we can lead teaching and learning.

It is little wonder that when asked if they would apply for the principal’s job in their school, 81 per cent of deputy principals said they wouldn’t apply.

Our mission in IPPN is to enhance leadership capacity, effectiveness and sustainability to better ensure effective schools that deliver the best outcomes for children. We need to give our school leader the chance to do the job they signed up to so that they can ensure that every child in every school has the best possible environment in which to learn and thrive.

In our sustainable leadership report, we believe that we have some workable proposals to address the challenges facing school leaders today. They are time and space to lead teaching and learning by delivering a system of proper shared leadership and a fit-for-purpose governance structure.

There is clear evidence that the workload of primary school leaders is expanding year on year with an excessive focus on managing the organisation, diverting them from their core purpose of leading teaching and learning. This is also impacting negatively on the health and wellbeing of school leaders and has implications for aspiring and emerging leadership. But, most importantly, it has implications for school effectiveness and, ultimately, outcomes for children.

Louise Tobin is a primary school principal and president of the Irish Primary Principals’ Network