This is the third in my series of posts based upon my thoughts on headteacher vacancies that have been posted by state schools in England so far this school year. This post is a bit more speculative than the previous two posts, as it looks at the relationship between re-advertisements of headteacher vacancies and the percentage of children on Free School Meals as recorded on the DfE’s website in the schools that have re-advertised their headship.

I have used data for all the vacancies where free school meals data are available as the baseline. New schools; nursery schools; sixth form colleges and some other schools are excluded as they don’t have free school meals pupils. Thes other schools may be small schools, or just schools that have not recorded the percentage at this point in time.

I have divided the vacancies into groups in an arbitrary manner. At this stage of the year, many schools that have advertised during February and March will not yet have had time to complete the appointment process, and decide whether or not to make an appointment or to re-advertise. As a result, the data presented in the table are in no way definitive of the current recruitment round. It will not be until January 2027, when the autumn term of 2026 re-advertisements have been added that a definitive report can be produced.

However, it is interesting to see that six of the 16 schools with the highest percentages of children with Free School Meals entitlement have already re-advertised the vacancy for their headship.

What I have yet to do is to look at the national total number of schools in each band, to see whether certain bands have a higher turnover overall. However, there are so many different possible intervening variables that such an exercise will need to wait until the end of the school-year, and possibly the autumn to be worth considering.

Nevertheless, as previous posts have made clear, there are some school types that are likely to have a higher rate of re-advertisement than others, and it will be interesting to see by the end of the recruitment round whether or not there is any correlation within groupings such as, for instance, Roman Catholic Schools in the North West of England or small primary schools in coastal areas and the free school meal percentage of schools that re-advertise their headship.

Is this data of any use to policymakers, and if so, what should be the outcome. In the past, during the coalition government there were suggestions for intervention in helping challenging schools recruit new leaders. Nowadays, I assume that is left to multi-academy trusts and diocese, and those local authorities that still take an interest in schooling to intervene. The other interesting question is, do schools with high levels of free school meals pupils retain headteacher for shorter periods of time than other schools?