The publication of the Sustainable School Leadership (SSL) project’s technical report for Scotland last week came at a critical time for our education system, ahead of the parliamentary elections in May.
It highlights what many School Leaders Scotland (SLS) members have articulated: leadership capacity is not infinite, and the cumulative weight of bureaucratic and policy demands, without commensurate resources, is unsustainable.
The report aligns directly with the priorities and commitments of the SLS Manifesto for Education 2026. Published on the same day as the SSL report, the manifesto offers a constructive and practical framework for reform.
It sets out a clear vision for an education system that is equitable, ambitious and effectively resourced, recognising that education is our most powerful lever for social justice, economic growth and democratic participation, as well as social and civic wellbeing.
Together, these insights provide essential context for understanding the importance of sustainable school leadership. The SSL report highlights the intensifying pressures on headteachers.
Escalating socioeconomic challenges within communities - combined with growing bureaucratic, compliance and workload demands - are eroding stability, trust and confidence, and in turn, long-term leadership and system capacity.
Restoring trust and professional respect
SLS speaks directly to these concerns through the calls in our manifesto: to restore trust and professional respect; resolve the funding crisis; and lead education reform with courage and unity across all political parties.
Achieving this will require commitment to national priorities that extend beyond electoral cycles, and authentic engagement with the profession in shaping the future of Scottish education.
Moreover, political parties must recognise the significant risks posed to communities today and to Scotland’s social and economic future by continued disinvestment in both education and the wider public services that safeguard children and young people.
These realities reinforce our manifesto’s insistence that sustainability must be built through systemic support. Consistent with the findings of the SSL report, SLS is clear that continued reliance on individual leaders’ resilience, or on their ethical and moral commitment alone, poses a significant threat to long-term sustainability.
Crucially, we require systemic measures that respond directly to what the SSL report identifies as increasingly demanding and complex professional environments.
Understanding place-based needs
The first core priority of our manifesto - to strengthen, protect and sustain Scotland’s education workforce - seeks a national strategy to address recruitment and retention, ensure manageable workloads and secure competitive pay and conditions, as well as providing statutory wellbeing support for school leaders.
Both the SSL report and our manifesto also recognise that leadership practice and sustainability are profoundly shaped by place. Uniform national policy frameworks, while intended to ensure coherence and equity, can inadvertently constrain leadership agency and compromise schools’ chances of flourishing if they fail to recognise specificities of context.
This is particularly evident in Scotland’s rural and island communities, where the combined pressures of scale, geography, workforce shortages and governance arrangements significantly heighten the risks to the sustainability and wellbeing of secondary school leaders, and also to the schools and communities they serve.
However, these pressures are not limited to rural contexts. Variations in demography, community resourcing, infrastructure and local authority capacity mean that the sustainability challenge is increasingly evident across all of Scotland’s educational settings. The issue is not rurality per se, but the importance of national policy that anticipates, understands and responds attentively to place-based needs.
Acknowledging these risks to sustainability - and noting the recommendation in the SSL executive summary that “Leadership associations [in Scotland] should lead campaigns on the value of leadership and encouraging universal access to mentoring, coaching and supervision” - SLS advocates for the statutory provision of professional supervision for school leaders, recognising this as a vital element of structural support.
National mentoring programme for heads
SLS is also engaging with members and partners to scope the feasibility and design of a national mentoring programme for headteachers.
This work builds on the proven success of the mentoring programme for newly appointed school principals in the Republic of Ireland, as evidenced in a report, and in the growing impact of a headteachers’ mentoring programme in a local authority in central Scotland.
School leadership is a privilege and an immense ethical responsibility, and we welcome the Sustainable Leadership Project’s amplification of the lived experiences and aspirations of leaders in Scotland.
Both the SSL report and the SLS manifesto are optimistic that Scotland’s ambitions for equity and excellence can be realised - but only if they are matched by long-term investment and a coherent national commitment to sustainable leadership, during and beyond the coming parliamentary term.
The SLS manifesto is both an invitation and an expectation to prioritise investment, cross-party coherence, trust in the profession and sustainable leadership - all of which should be cornerstones of Scotland’s educational future.
Kirsty Ayed is president of School Leaders Scotland, David Barnett is SLS general secretary and Alison Mitchell is SLS professional learning and policy officer
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