Who Looks After The School Leader? Responsibility, wellbeing and reflective space in leadership

There is an asymmetry built into leadership of many kinds, perhaps especially senior leadership in schools, in that colleagues in this sector of education hold significant, indeed statutory, responsibility for the wellbeing of others.

For example, school leaders are expected to create healthy cultures, notice when colleagues or children are struggling, manage others’ workload, deal with safeguarding issues and respond appropriately to personal difficulty. The buck stops with them when it comes to creating the conditions in which staff and pupils can flourish. Oddly, it is rather less obvious who is expected to perform an equivalent function for them.

I was prompted to think about this recently by reading on LinkedIn about a small-scale research into primary headteacher wellbeing being carried out by Andrea Bean. One of the questions foregrounded in the study was this: who is responsible for creating the conditions in which school leaders themselves can flourish? It is not an insignificant one.

Leadership is psychologically paradoxical work. A school leader may be surrounded by people throughout the working day while having relatively few places in which it is possible to speak entirely freely. There are anxieties that cannot appropriately be shared with staff, decisions that cannot yet be discussed, frustrations that need to be contained and uncertainties that have to be held while continuing to provide sufficient confidence and direction for others.

The Department for Education’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders research provides substantial evidence about workload, wellbeing and retention among teachers and leaders in England (DfE, 2026). Recent research at UCL has similarly examined the relationship between workload, wellbeing and the retention of school leaders (Gu et al., 2025). Dr Cat Place’s work turns to the networked and interdependent ways school leaders’ and school teams’ wellbeing interact (Place, 2025).

Support is not, of course, entirely absent. School leaders have colleagues, governors or trustees, professional networks and, in some cases, access to occupational health, counselling, mentoring or coaching. Recent DfE research suggests that access to wellbeing support is now widespread, although support for mentoring or coaching is less consistently available (DfE, 2026a). Yet much of this still depends upon the individual recognising that something is wrong and deciding to seek help.

By then, the difficulty may already be well established.

Whose Responsibility Is Wellbeing?

There is a wider problem here with the way we have come to talk about wellbeing at work.

We rightly encourage people to take some responsibility for their own wellbeing. There are choices about boundaries, workload, relationships and the use of time over which individuals exercise at least some control. Leadership involves learning how to live sustainably with responsibility rather than simply accumulating more of it.

Yet the language of self-care can easily slide into something rather different. If an organisation places people in circumstances characterised by excessive workload, chronic uncertainty, inadequate resources or unreasonable expectations, it cannot discharge its own responsibility by encouraging them to become better at looking after themselves. This is a problem I have written about previously in relation to resilience. There is something deeply unsatisfactory about locating the solution to structurally generated difficulty principally within the individual experiencing it. Research into the working lives of teachers and leaders repeatedly identifies workload and organisational conditions as significant factors in wellbeing (DfE, 2025; DfE, 2026). Sometimes the appropriate response to an intolerable situation is not greater resilience, it is to change the situation.

The same must surely apply to school leadership. Governing bodies, trusts and the wider system cannot require leaders to create flourishing organisations while remaining indifferent to the conditions under which those leaders themselves are working.

There is, however, another side to this. An organisation’s responsibility for the conditions of work does not remove the individual’s responsibility for how they respond to them. Nor can responsibility for our wellbeing simply be transferred to somebody else.

Responsibility And Support

An idea I have encountered through Transactional Analysis (TA) is relevant here. Psychological support, at its best, does not seek to make the person permanently dependent upon the person providing it. Part of its purpose is to strengthen our capacity to recognise and respond to what is happening within our own lives. This resonates with the TA emphasis on autonomy and responsibility, and with later work on self-reparenting (James and Goulding, 1998).

I think something similar applies to coaching, without suggesting that coaching and psychotherapy are the same thing. Support should increase our capacity to exercise responsibility for ourselves rather than provide somewhere to transfer that responsibility.

This matters because there are two forms of abdication to avoid. An organisation should not create damaging working conditions and then franchise responsibility for wellbeing to the individual. Equally, a leader cannot hand over responsibility for their own wellbeing to a coach, therapist, colleague or employer and expect it to be carried on their behalf.

Other people may notice that we are exhausted before we do. They may challenge us, support us and help us understand what is happening. Yet they cannot finally establish our boundaries for us, decide what we are prepared to tolerate, determine how much of ourselves we will give to work, or make the difficult choices that sometimes follow from recognising that the way we are working is no longer sustainable.

The question of responsibility for wellbeing therefore resists an easy answer. Organisations have responsibilities for the conditions they create. Leaders retain responsibility for how they inhabit those conditions. Neither responsibility cancels the other.

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider what school leaders themselves believe good leadership requires of them.

What Does A Good School Leader Do?

The LinkedIn post which prompted these reflections suggested differences in how headteachers understood the role itself. Some associated good headship with being highly visible and hands-on, with strategic and administrative work consequently spilling into evenings and weekends. Others appeared more comfortable delegating and protecting time for the strategic aspects of their work. These different understandings seemed to have consequences for boundaries and wellbeing.

This suggests that workload alone may not tell us everything we need to know. Two people can occupy similar roles and experience them differently because they carry different assumptions about what those roles require. One leader may believe that being conscientious means being permanently available. Another may feel guilty delegating work they could conceivably do themselves. Someone else may experience saying no as evidence that they are letting colleagues down.

Such assumptions can be powerful because they rarely present themselves to us as assumptions. They feel instead like descriptions of reality: this is simply what a good leader does.

The difficulty is that an understanding of good leadership may therefore contribute to the very conditions that make leadership unsustainable.

Where Coaching Might Help

This is where I believe coaching becomes relevant. A coach cannot make an underfunded school adequately funded. Coaching cannot remove unreasonable accountability requirements, reduce an impossible workload or repair a dysfunctional organisation. Nor should it become a means by which people are helped to accommodate themselves more successfully to circumstances that ought to change.

What coaching can provide is somewhere in which the assumptions through which a leader inhabits the role become available for examination.

• What ideas of leadership do I hold, espouse and model?

• Why do I believe I need to do this myself?

• What do I imagine would happen if I were less available?

• What would delegating this mean about me as a leader?

• Whose expectations am I trying to satisfy?

• What am I taking responsibility for that properly belongs to somebody else?

• What am I expecting somebody else to take responsibility for that properly belongs to me?

These are rather different questions from simply asking someone whether they are looking after their wellbeing. They invite examination of the relationship between the person and the role.

There is some empirical support for this conception of coaching. Research into coaching for school leaders has identified its potential contribution to reflection and self-awareness, as well as to leaders’ experiences of isolation, uncertainty and wellbeing. The DfE’s evaluation of its School Leader Mental Health and Wellbeing Service also found leaders using professional supervision to think about workload, boundaries, delegation and their ways of working (DfE, 2023). Seen in this way, coaching is not principally about looking after the leader. Its value may lie partly in creating the conditions in which leaders become better able to notice what is happening to them and decide what they need to do about it.

Reflective Space As Part Of Leadership

Perhaps, then, we should think differently about the place of coaching and other forms of reflective support in school leadership. There is an understandable tendency to associate additional support with difficulty. Coaching may be introduced because somebody is approaching exhaustion, experiencing conflict, struggling with a transition or contemplating leaving. This can inadvertently make reflective support appear to be something required when normal leadership has gone wrong.

Yet people exercising considerable responsibility need places in which they can think about how they are exercising it. A regular coaching relationship can provide a space in which the leader does not, for a while, have to perform leadership for anybody else. There is no team to reassure, governor to persuade or institutional position to represent. There is simply an opportunity to pay sustained attention to what is happening, what it means and what response may be required.

Crucially, the coach does not thereby become responsible for keeping the leader well. If coaching is doing its job, it should help the leader become more capable of recognising what is happening, distinguishing what can and cannot be controlled, examining assumptions, establishing boundaries and making choices for which they remain responsible.

This is why I wonder whether access to reflective space should be regarded less as an intervention for leaders who are struggling and more as part of the ordinary infrastructure of leadership. We would find it strange to suggest that leaders need access to financial or legal expertise only once a crisis has developed. Perhaps opportunities for serious reflection should be thought about in a similar way.

So, Who Does Look After The School Leader?

Perhaps the question with which I began contains a misleading assumption. There may be no single person whose responsibility it is to look after the school leader. The organisation has responsibilities. Governors and trustees have responsibilities. Colleagues and professional communities can provide important forms of support. Coaches and supervisors can provide relationships in which things can be thought about that are difficult to think about elsewhere.

The leader also retains responsibility for themselves.

The more useful question may therefore be whether we are creating the conditions in which that responsibility can be exercised self-consciously and well. If we expect school leaders to create environments in which other people can flourish, we should surely be concerned with the environments in which they themselves are asked to lead.

Perhaps part of sustainable leadership is having somewhere to examine, from time to time, not simply how well we are doing the job, but what we bring to the job, what the role itself brings out in us and does to us.

REFERENCES

Bean, A. (2026), LinkedIn post, available at: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7501687269867569152/ (accessed 15 September 2026).

Department for Education (2023), Evaluation of the School Leader Mental Health and Wellbeing Service. London: Department for Education.

Department for Education (2025), Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Wave 3 – Qualitative Insight into Teacher and Leader Workload. London: Department for Education.

Department for Education (2026), Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders: Wave 4. London: Department for Education.

Department for Education (2026a), School and College Voice: October 2025. London: Department for Education.

Gu, Q., Seymour, K., Shao, X., Eleftheriadou, S. and Leithwood, K. (2025), Workload, Wellbeing, and Retention: Do NPQs Make a Difference? London: UCL Centre for Educational Leadership.

James, M. and Goulding, M. (1998), ‘Self-Reparenting and Redecision’, Transactional Analysis Journal, 28(1), 16–19.

Place, C. (2025) ‘Creating the conditions to thrive: exploring the inter-relationship between organisational culture, collaboration and teacher wellbeing, through narrative inquiry’. Unpublished EdD, University of Wales Trinity St David.