The weight and the worth: Leadership growth in communities of deep disadvantage

DAN WHIELDON, PRINCIPAL, LEEDS WEST ACADEMY, UK Education, like civilisation itself, is a slow construction project. Cathedrals and classrooms alike are built stone by patient stone, not by ministerial press release. Yet the national conversation about school staffing still treats teaching like a gig economy – a headline about recruitment one month, a panic about retention the next. We trumpet how many are persuaded to ‘train to teach’, but whisper about how many quietly slip away. The silence is telling. It suggests that the hard work of keeping great people is somehow less glamorous than the drama of hiring them. The figures speak with quiet drama of their own. In England, almost nine in ten teachers remain after their first year, but only two-thirds are still teaching after five years (DfE, 2023). The attrition is sharper in the very places where education matters most: schools serving the most disadvantaged communities face turnover rates of around 22 per cent, compared