I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat across from a newly appointed curriculum manager, three months into the job, telling me they feel like they’re drowning and that nobody warned them it would feel like this.
They weren’t lying about the warning. Nobody had one to give, because nobody had thought to ask whether being brilliant in a classroom or workshop had anything to do with being ready to lead the people in it.
It’s one of the most consistent patterns I see across education, and it’s rarely named out loud: we promote our best doers and call it leadership development. Then we’re surprised when the person who could once command a room of children or young people struggles to hold a difficult conversation with a colleague who used to be their peer.
The pattern, stripped bare
It goes like this. A provider has a gap – a head of department leaves, a new area needs a lead. The obvious candidate is the person with the strongest outcomes, the best observation grades, the most respect from students. They get the job. Nobody asks whether they’ve ever managed a budget, held someone accountable for underperformance, or had to say no to a colleague they like.
Six months later, that same person is either burning out trying to be everyone’s friend, or has swung hard the other way and become the manager nobody wants to approach. Either way, the organisation has lost its best practitioner and gained a struggling leader – and often doesn’t know how it happened.
This isn’t a knock on the individuals. I’ve watched genuinely talented people get set up to fail this way, over and over, across schools, colleges, and training providers who all swear they value their people. The failure isn’t in the person. It’s in the system that promoted them without ever checking whether leadership was a skill they had, or one it assumed they’d absorb by osmosis.
Why providers keep doing it anyway
Partly it’s urgency, vacancies need filling and there’s rarely a bench of leadership-ready staff waiting in the wings. Partly it’s a genuine, if misguided, reward instinct: promotion as recognition for good teaching, rather than as a distinct role requiring distinct capability. And partly, if I’m honest, it’s cheaper in the short term. Leadership development costs money and time. Filling a gap with your strongest teacher costs little extra, until it does…six months later, in staff turnover and a department that’s lost its spark. And there we a see the deck of cards start to tumble into audit risks, student grades, inspection results…
This is where two of the 8 Levers collide. Leadership Behaviours and Professional Growth & Development aren’t separate problems – they’re the same problem seen from two angles. You can’t build the leadership behaviours you want if you’ve never invested in developing the person to hold them. And you can’t call something “development” if it consists of a new job title and hoping for the best.
What I’d actually do differently
The providers who get this right don’t wait until the promotion to start developing leadership capability. They build it in before the vacancy exists – shadowing, projects, honest conversations about whether someone actually wants to manage people (a genuinely different job to teaching them), preparation in understanding a role before it becomes available and an induction into the role that assumes nothing.
Just as importantly, they separate the two forms of recognition. A brilliant practitioner can be recognised, paid well, and given status without being handed a team to manage. Not every reward has to be a promotion into leadership. Sometimes the kindest, most strategic thing a provider can do is create a path that celebrates excellence in the classroom as its own destination.
The question worth sitting with
If you’re a leader in education right now, it’s worth asking honestly: the last three people you promoted into management – Did you promote them because they’d shown they could lead, or because they’d shown they were excellent at something else entirely? There’s no shame in the answer. But if it’s the latter more often than not, that’s not a hiring problem. It’s a culture system that’s quietly running on hope instead of design and it’s fixable, starting with the very next vacancy you’re tempted to fill in a hurry.
Written by Amy Fowles — education leader with 15+ years’ experience building and developing teams in challenging circumstances.