Super-heads are a super-huge mistake

Another month, so it seems, another super-head rolls. Not that many would have noticed the latest. Greg Wallace’s resignation as executive head teacher of five schools in the east London borough of Hackney was drowned out by the hubbub surrounding the Revd Paul Flowers. Yet the departure of Wallace — much lamented by pupils and their parents, according to tributes in the local newspaper — deserves a closer look.

For Wallace was not just any top teacher. As one of the Education Secretary’s so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, he was a living, breathing advertisement for super-headship — the idea that particularly dynamic and gifted members of the teaching profession can be airlifted out of their particular success stories and parachuted in to work their magic in failing schools.

Being a super-head brings big rewards — in honours as well as cash. But they have not been without controversy. The concept was introduced by the last Labour government, then played down after a spate of difficulties and resignations in the early 2000s, only to be revived by Michael Gove. And in October, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, proposed creating a new super-league of super-teachers, ready to answer the call.

This makes Wallace’s resignation, in the closing stages of an investigation into claims about IT contracts awarded to a company run by his boyfriend, especially inopportune. But it is not the only bad augury. A few weeks ago, the long and sorry saga of Sir Alan Davies, the erstwhile super-head of Copland School in north-west London, reached its conclusion at Southwark Crown Court. Conspiracy-to-defraud charges were dropped, but Sir Alan — who was knighted for services to education — pleaded guilty to six counts of false accounting and received a 12-month prison sentence, suspended by the judge in the light of his otherwise illustrious achievements. Local moves are afoot to have him stripped of his honour.