"The Headteacher's Handbook" by Rae Snape is a manual for current and aspiring headteachers on leading a primary school. It covers curriculum, analysing data, managing budgets and working with key stakeholders, and it is about thriving with authenticity and integrity, not just firefighting.
Its approach is practical. It asks you to pause, reflect and look honestly at your own practice. Topics range from setting vision and culture to day-to-day management, and it includes practical lessons from other school leaders.
It helps you develop dispositions such as empathy, inventiveness, persistence, humility and generosity, while recognising that every school's character and context needs its own approach.
It does not expect you to be an all-knowing leader. It treats headship as collaborative and promotes six qualities: creativity, courage, communication, confidence, consideration and calmness.
Recommended for heads and aspiring heads who want to lead well and keep some balance in their lives.
Who it is for
New, current and aspiring primary headteachers. The bookseller's description lists topics a new head meets early on: developing a school vision, building a staff team, an Ofsted inspection, inclusion and equality, curriculum and assessment design, and day-to-day management such as finances, health and safety and behaviour. It also includes contributions from other school leaders, among them Mary Myatt, Paul Dix and Dr Kulvarn Atwal, and features Sir David Carter's First 100 Days in Headship framework. The book was published in 2021, before Ofsted's renewed framework and report cards from November 2025, so read its inspection material against Ofsted's current school inspection toolkit.
About the book
- Author: Rae Snape, a primary headteacher, National Leader of Education and co-founder of a festival of education, as SEN Magazine describes her.
- Full title: The Headteacher's Handbook: The essential guide to leading a primary school.
- Foreword: Professor Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive of the Chartered College of Teaching.
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Education. Paperback published 5 August 2021, ISBN 9781472975423. The book is divided into eight parts.
Source: the publisher's own page could not be fetched, so these details come from the bookseller listing at Madeleine Lindley and a review in SEN Magazine, checked 13 October 2026.