Exodus: battle-weary heads have had enough of the DfE

The government’s mishandling of schools during the pandemic has led many headteachers to quit their jobs. Sean Smith finds the education system is on the brink of a crisis

DfE’s ‘dreadful communications’ left schools and parents ‘bewildered and floundering’ (Getty)

Even after a heart attack in October 2019, Robert Campbell had no intention of leaving the job he loved as leader of a Cambridgeshire academy trust. He was back in his role just five weeks later. But it wasn’t long before he was knocked off his feet once again, this time by a Covid-19 infection the following March.

When Campbell returned to work for a second time in April 2020, he saw immediately that school autonomy would be among the first casualties of the pandemic. In attempting to control the crisis remotely from Whitehall, the Department for Education had adopted a frenetic micromanagement style that would have a detrimental effect on the health and wellbeing of thousands of school leaders across the country.

In the first three months of the crisis alone, the DfE issued 148 pieces of guidance to schools. Many of the dense documents containing updated instructions were emailed at bizarre times – often arriving after 5pm on a Friday – negating planning that schools had already undertaken, and leaving heads scrambling to react over fraught weekends.