The 2024-25 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, Leadership in Education: Lead for Learning (October 2024) highlights the challenges facing UK school as they plot their way forward in the current climate.
The report flags up that there have been 10 Secretaries of State for Education in the UK since 2015 – more than one a year – and none of whom had experience teaching at primary or secondary level. The report warns that short tenures make education reform harder to achieve.
It finds that education is dropping as a financial priority. This is based on the percentage of GDP allocated to education in the UK falling from 5.6 per cent to 5 per cent between 2015 and 2023, according to the report.
Calls for better training of school leaders given their central role in delivering successful schools. The report highlights how, in the UK, around one in five “principals” had never been trained in school administration before taking up their role.
Indeed, the importance of an effective Headteacher was judged critical in UK schools as replacing an ineffective headteacher (from the bottom 16% of schools) with an effective one (from the top 15% of schools) led to a two-grade improvement across all subjects or one grade in a single subject in secondary schools.
Elsewhere, the number of teenagers interested in joining the profession in the UK is declining which does not bode well for long-term teacher recruitment.
The report also calls on governments to give heads greater freedoms: “Education systems need to empower school principals with sufficient autonomy to manage financial and human resources and to make decisions related to teaching and learning.”
Matt Allman, Headteacher, said: “The report accurately relates the challenges facing schools and school leaders in terms of DfE leadership, funding, staff shortages and encouraging alternative and creative approaches in schools. At the moment our school continues to flourish in a tough landscape but there can be no complacency or less ambitious expectations else this picture will falter.”
If you would like to read more from the UNESCO Report click here.
