This article reports on some of the findings of a wider, life history study of the factors affecting the career decisions of 40 female secondary school teachers, including 10 female headteachers. As a part of this, insights were sought into why women continue to be proportionally under-represented in secondary headship posts in UK secondary schools. Interview evidence indicated that the majority of female teachers in the study harboured a set of negative perceptions of school leadership and rejected headship as a career option. In this article, I contrast these negative perceptions with the positive picture of headship painted by the female headteachers. The headteachers in this study were driven by a strong sense of values relating to pupil achievement, and saw themselves as agents of change who needed to occupy positions of power in order to enact their principles to maximum effect. Drawing on the narratives of the 10 headteachers, I discuss their positive, agentic perspectives on school leadership, underpinned by essentially child-centred values. I argue that a more proactive approach to promoting this positive view of school leadership may be key to encouraging women (and presumably some men) who have previously rejected headship as a career, to reconsider.

No abstract

This article reports on some of the findings of a wider, life history study on the factors affecting the career decisions of 40 female secondary school teachers in England. By using life history interviews, it was possible to gain rich and nuanced insights into the complexity of factors influencing women's career decisions. While acknowledging the reality of constraints on women's lives and options, this article focuses on the women's perceptions of their own agency in their approach to career. A typology of career approaches is presented. I argue that women's awareness of their own potential for agency, and how they choose to exert it, are key considerations in understanding female teachers' career trajectories. I conclude that there is a need to move beyond an analysis in which the existence of barriers to progression is taken as a given and assumed to be a major career-shaping force, to an analysis that affords scope for taking into account the multifarious ways in which women exert their agency in the career context, making conscious and positive choices which may be at odds with traditional, hierarchical notions of career.

Drawing on a study about women secondary school teachers' perceptions of the factors affecting their career decisions, I consider in this article some of the issues I faced as a researcher in using life history interviews, as well as the strengths afforded by this approach for research with a social justice agenda. I argue that researcher involvement and bias are inevitable aspects of life history research, and that these need to be managed to the benefit rather than the detriment of the study. I describe some of the strategies I used to code, organize and interpret the data. Life history offers a number of strengths: it offers scope for exploring subjective realities; it allows narrators to reflect as they speak, which for some can be a transformative experience; and it affords rich insights into the reasons behind the decisions people make that would not be possible via more structured approaches.

The paper reports on a small-scale, exploratory study investigating the professional aspirations of a cohort of student teachers at a UK university. Questionnaires and interviews sought insights into the students' perceptions of leadership, future aspirations and selfperceptions as potential leaders. Whilst there was commonality in male and female students' interest in subject-leadership and teaching-and learning-oriented roles such as Advanced Skills Teacher, gendered trends emerged in patterns of aspiration towards certain other posts. Women were more likely than men to aspire to the post of Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator, and men were more likely than women to aspire to the most senior posts, especially headship. Whilst men and women showed awareness of the negative and more challenging aspects of senior school leadership, there were indications that male students were more likely than their female colleagues to perceive the affordances offered by headship and to envisage themselves as potential headteachers. There were indications of difference also in the ways in which men and women constructed teaching and leadership, and a stronger tendency for men to transfer agentic self-perceptions as teachers to a view of their future selves as leaders.