"I Am Not Enough": What HeadteacherChat Tells Us About Headship Right Now
If you want to know what headship really feels like in 2025, you do not need a policy paper. You need to read what heads say to each other when no one from the DfE, Ofsted or the local paper is in the room.
Over the last month, I have been analysing a large set of posts from the HeadteacherChat community. The conversations range from the practical (IDSR, funeral leave, NPQs) to the raw and personal (“I am NOT enough… I feel so utterly trapped”).
Taken together, they offer a remarkably clear picture of the current state of school leadership in England.
This blog pulls out the main themes, not as a list of complaints, but as data. Data about workload, culture, inclusion, parental behaviour, and system design. And then, more importantly, what might actually help.
1. Headship at the Edge of Sustainability
The single most striking pattern is the emotional tone.
Headteachers are not mildly tired. They describe:
- Spending most of the holidays ill and still returning to school exhausted.
- Waking at 4 a.m. worrying about money, behaviour, and high-needs pupils in the wrong provision.
- Feeling physically sick before work or experiencing panic before term starts.
- Working 7:00–18:00 on site, with evenings and weekends used for “the actual thinking.”
On top of that sits a particular kind of self-criticism: “I am NOT enough. I am simply not enough for this job.”
What is important here is that these are not failing leaders. Many were outstanding teachers, often with a track record of strong classroom outcomes and pastoral work. The perception of “not enough” is not a reflection of capability; it is a reflection of the scale of the job.
The Hidden Job Description
When governors ask “what do you actually do all day?”, heads in the group respond with lists that read more like six jobs compressed into one:
- Safeguarding: DSL triage, MARFs, social care meetings, supervision.
- Pupil Management: Behaviour incidents, de-escalation, parental complaints, attendance meetings, and legal processes.
- HR: Investigations, grievances, recruitment, and cover.
- Premises: Health and safety issues (sometimes literally opening, closing, gritting, and fixing).
- Accountability: Data analysis, SEF, SIP, governor reports, Ofsted preparation.
Strategic work – curriculum design, pedagogy, culture building – is frequently done after 17:00 or at weekends, because the rest of the day is taken by urgent operational demand.
The system is relying on extraordinary goodwill and personal sacrifice to function. That is not a sustainable design.
2. Behaviour, SEND, and Safety at the Limits of Mainstream
Another concentration of posts sits around serious behaviour and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
One typical scenario involves:
- A Year 3 pupil with ASD/ADHD and a long history of violence.
- Multiple attacks on staff and pupils, culminating in the head being punched in the face, lip split, and possible broken hand.
- Extensive in-school support already provided (nurture, adjustments).
- No immediate specialist place available; limited external support; trust culture discouraging exclusion as the child is “vulnerable.”
Professional Consensus: Safety is Not Optional
Heads converge on a shared position:
- Safety of staff and other pupils is non-negotiable.
- Suspension and, if necessary, permanent exclusion are legitimate tools when all reasonable adjustments have been exhausted.
But they also acknowledge the harsh reality: in many areas, permanent exclusion is effectively the only lever that unlocks a special school place or intensive alternative provision. Exclusions are then no longer purely educational sanctions; they are also rationing and placement tools.
Heads are being asked to square three things simultaneously: A legal commitment to inclusion, a duty of care to keep staff and pupils safe, and a system that cannot provide an appropriate place for every child who needs one.
3. Parents, Complaints, and AI-Powered Hostility
A third cluster of posts highlights changing parent dynamics.
Complaint Culture
Common elements include:
- Subject Access Requests (SARs) triggered by referrals to social care or disagreements.
- AI-generated complaint letters, often long, legalistic, and adversarial in tone.
- WhatsApp and Facebook groups where heads and staff are discussed in unmoderated, sometimes abusive terms.
The dominant feeling is that the volume and tone of complaints are out of balance with the issues at stake, and that heads carry a disproportionate share of this load.
Use of AI on Both Sides
Interestingly, AI appears on both sides:
- Some parents are clearly using AI tools to draft formal complaints and SAR responses.
- In turn, heads are starting to use AI to: summarise complex data (IDSR), draft clear, calm responses to letters, and build coherent arguments for governors.
We are seeing the early stages of AI becoming part of the conversational “arms race” between schools and families.
4. Staff Culture, Wellbeing, and Contested Fairness
The group also spends a lot of time in the grey zones of HR and culture:
- Funeral leave for extended family or close friends.
- TAs asking for term-time holidays.
- Teachers off long-term sick attending the staff Christmas meal.
- UPS progression in tiny schools with minimal budget headroom.
These involve policy interpretation, judgements about fairness, and ethics around compassion versus consistency. Two instincts repeatedly collide:
Principle-Led ConsistencyPragmatic Retention and Humanity"Term-time is term-time."TAs are low-paid; occasional unpaid leave can be a lifeline."We cannot pay people twice for the same hours."In a recruitment crisis, rigidly enforcing every line of policy can be self-defeating.
The cognitive and emotional effort involved in navigating these tensions is significant, and it sits squarely on the headteacher.
5. Governance, Data, and the “What Do You Do All Day?” Problem
Several posts focus on governance relationships:
- Governors questioning head workload and asking for detailed breakdowns of daily activity.
- Governors taking operational stances on interventions.
- New heads struggling to interpret and explain IDSR, especially with recent format changes.
The Facebook group provides two key things here:
- Language to respond with: Strategic vs operational distinctions, and data narratives honest about context.
- Boundary setting: Heads are encouraged to push back on governors who move into micromanagement, while still welcoming strategic challenge.
6. What Might Actually Help? (A Design Brief)
It is more useful to treat the HeadteacherChat threads as a design brief: “If this is the lived experience, what would a better support structure look like?”
6.1 Make Sustainable Headship Explicit, Not Optional
We could build explicit working-pattern agreements between heads and governing bodies, covering:
- Typical on-site hours.
- Expected out-of-hours commitments.
- Boundaries around email and holiday work.
- Headteacher appraisal should include protected strategic time (e.g., one day per half-term off-site) and access to coaching or supervision.
6.2 Provide a Clear Behaviour / SEND / Safety Framework
Heads are repeatedly re-deriving the same complex reasoning. A concise, practical framework is needed that covers:
- How to interpret “reasonable adjustments” in the context of repeated violence.
- What a defensible graduated response looks like.
- Example wording for exclusion letters that link explicitly to legal tests.
6.3 Normalise Robust Boundaries with Parents
Instead of every head reinventing complaint responses, a shared, reusable library could contain:
- Template letters for proportionate responses to unusual incidents.
- Example parent and community charters clarifying acceptable channels and expectations of respectful communication.
6.4 Tackle Misinformation and Polarisation Around ADHD and SEND
A useful response would include:
- Short, accessible explainer content on how ADHD and other neurodevelopmental conditions are actually assessed.
- Moderated discussions where the focus is on what schools can control (adjustments, boundaries), not on speculation.
6.5 Turn Informal Wisdom into Deliberate Infrastructure
The quality of collective problem-solving is the most encouraging insight. The opportunity is to capture the tacit knowledge before it scrolls off the bottom of the feed:
- Curate Toolkits (behaviour, complaints, HR grey areas).
- “Start-here” packs for IDSR, Ofsted, and SEND escalation.
Final Thought
Heads are constantly arbitraging between competing goods: inclusion and safety, compassion and fairness, policy and pragmatism, work and life. They are doing this under intense scrutiny, and then blaming themselves when the sums do not work.
The conversations in HeadteacherChat show that the profession already has the insight and ingenuity to design better ways of working. The next step is to treat this peer-generated wisdom as a serious resource, to organise it, and to use it to argue – calmly and firmly – for a version of headship that is demanding, but not destructive.
Would you like me to draft a social media post to promote this blog, focusing on a specific section like the use of AI in complaints?