Sustainable Leadership

As the professional organisation for primary school leaders, IPPN’s mission is to enhance leadership capacity, leadership effectiveness and leadership sustainability as all the research confirms that effective leaders mean effective schools and effective schools mean better outcomes for children.

If we can ensure the existence of that leadership capacity, effectiveness and sustainability, we can empower existing school leaders to thrive in your roles, while also encouraging greater numbers of potential or aspiring leaders to embrace leadership roles in our schools. However, our direct engagement with you has highlighted that this isn't the case and that is what prompted us to undertake this Sustainable Leadership project.

This time last year, we published the Sustainable Leadership report - Primary School Leadership: The Case for Urgent Action – A Roadmap to Sustainable Leadership.

The first part of that report was an evidence-informed analysis of the current reality of primary school leadership focusing on the extent of the work you have to do, the nature of that work, how it is impacting on the sustainability of your leadership role and how it is impacting on your health & wellbeing.

The second part of the report explored key issues and made specific recommendations in each of its sections - all targeted at enhancing the practice and experience of school leadership. This has been the focus of our advocacy work since the publication of the report.

In order to keep you up to speed with what actions have been undertaken, as part of that advocacy work, we've collated a progress report on the project which can be accessed here.

We are hopeful that the progress report will serve to

• reaffirm the rationale underpinning the project.
• highlight what actions have been undertaken and what progress has been made since the publication of the original report.
• provide an up-to-date evidence base which demonstrates an ongoing need for urgent action.

We are indebted to all of you who took the time to provide us with that evidence, through your participation in our member surveys and the health & wellbeing research.

It is crucial that you are given the opportunity of doing, not only the job you signed up to do, but the job that we should all want you to be doing. This will be a key focus of IPPN’s ongoing advocacy work on Sustainable Leadership.