Abstract
This article reports research that explores headteacher attrition in England through a theological-anthropological lens, and I argue that contemporary educational systems replicate ancient sacrificial logics in their treatment of leaders. Using a case study approach, informed by an interpretivist epistemological orientation and qualitative interview data, focused on a retired headteacher, it reveals how headteachers are positioned as ritual scapegoats, figures whose removal serves to maintain systemic stability while obscuring deeper dysfunctions. Drawing on ritual theory and anthropological accounts of sacrifice in ancient Greek and Mesopotamian societies, the article conceptualises headship as a ‘sacred office’ burdened with symbolic and moral responsibility beyond its practical remit. It contends that the expendability of school leaders is not simply a managerial issue but a cultural phenomenon rooted in long-standing patterns of communal purification through sacrifice. This reframing opens new avenues for leadership scholarship by highlighting the cultural and existential dimensions of leadership attrition, thereby challenging the technocratic narratives that currently dominate the discourse.
Introduction
Headteacher attrition in England has reached a level that now threatens the stability and sustainability of the school system. National data repeatedly show declining aspiration to headship, increasing early exit, and widespread discouragement among serving leaders (National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), 2023; National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), 2023). While these trends are frequently described as a ‘leadership crisis’, dominant explanations remain overwhelmingly technocratic, focusing on workload, inspection pressures, accountability mechanisms and insufficient incentives. Although these factors are significant, they do not adequately explain the persistence of attrition across policy cycles, nor the striking emotional and moral language used by headteachers to describe their experiences of removal, exclusion and withdrawal.
In this article, I argue that headteacher attrition in England cannot be fully understood through managerial or instrumental frameworks alone. Instead, I propose a conceptual reframing that situates leadership attrition within a deeper cultural logic of ritualised sacrifice. Drawing on theological–anthropological accounts of sacrifice and scapegoating (Burkert, 1983; Girard, 1977) and ritual theory (Bell, 1992), I conceptualise headship as a contemporary form of sacred office. Within this framing, headteachers are invested with collective moral responsibility for their schools and communities, yet rendered symbolically expendable when systems falter. Their removal functions not merely as a managerial response to underperformance, but as a ritual act of purification that reassures the wider system that accountability has been enacted, while leaving underlying structural conditions largely intact.
The research reported in this article makes an explicitly conceptual contribution. Research on headteacher careers has long documented stress, disenchantment, early exit and declining aspiration (James, 2007; Ribbins and Marland, 1994; Smithers, 2019; Weindling, 1999). However, these phenomena have not been theorised as ritualised processes embedded within longer historical patterns of blame, purification and symbolic renewal. By mobilising sacrificial anthropology and ritual theory, this article offers a novel interpretive framework that complements existing structural accounts and helps explain why repeated policy interventions have failed to resolve leadership attrition.
This reframing matters for two reasons. First, it helps to explain why policy solutions focused on recruitment pipelines, leadership training or resilience have had limited impact. Such interventions address surface conditions without challenging the deeper cultural logics that normalise leader expendability. Second, it offers insight into why so many teachers refuse promotion to headship, not simply because of workload or risk, but because headship has come to be culturally understood as a role that consumes those who occupy it. Attrition, on this reading, is not merely an outcome of individual failure or poor system design, but the predictable consequence of a leadership culture structured around sacrificial accountability.
This article also attends to the gendered dimensions of this process, particularly in primary education, where leadership is often negotiated within a feminised moral terrain of care, relational labour and emotional containment. This matters because gendered norms can shape who is expected to absorb blame, endure scrutiny and exit quietly when systems falter (Eagly and Karau, 2002; Hall, 1996).
To ground this argument empirically, I draw on an instrumental single-case study of a retired primary headteacher whose career trajectory exemplifies these sacrificial dynamics. Her narrative illustrates how headship is experienced not simply as a job, but as an identity-laden moral vocation, and how removal from that role operates as a profoundly symbolic act. By placing this case within a wider historical and policy context, I argue that headteacher attrition in England reflects not a temporary crisis, but the intensification of a long-standing cultural pattern in which leadership is elevated, burdened and ultimately consumed.
Theological–anthropological lens: Sacrificial anthropology and ritual theory
In this article, I use the phrase ‘theological–anthropological lens’ to signal an interpretive framing in which leadership removal is examined not only as governance or workforce policy, but as a cultural process through which communities manage anxiety, blame and the restoration of order. ‘Sacrificial anthropology’ is used here in a Girardian sense to describe how diffuse pressures and conflicts can be displaced onto a figure who becomes a socially legible bearer of collective failure; the removal of the scapegoat then functions as a mechanism for restoring coherence and reassurance (Girard, 1977). In this framing, scapegoating does not require conscious collusion; it can be normalised through institutional routines and widely accepted narratives of accountability.
Ritual theory supports this interpretation by foregrounding how public judgements, ceremonies of evaluation and scripted institutional actions can operate as ritualised practices. Following Bell (1992), ritualisation is understood as a strategic way of acting that differentiates and privileges certain actions (e.g. inspection judgement, capability procedures, and leadership ‘change’) so that they appear necessary, legitimate and beyond contest. In the context of English schooling, accountability practices may therefore be read as both procedural and symbolic: they measure and classify, but they also reassure stakeholders that action has been taken and that disorder has been purified.
These concepts are not treated as deterministic explanations, but as sensitising concepts guiding interpretation of the participant's narrative. The aim is not to claim that modern headship is ‘the same as’ ancient sacrifice, but to use anthropological and ritual concepts to illuminate how leader expendability can become culturally intelligible and institutionally reproducible, even when it is damaging to leadership sustainability.
Policy and historical context: Leadership, reform and normalised removal
Concerns about the supply and sustainability of school leaders are not new. During the New Labour period, educational reform explicitly positioned leadership as the primary lever for raising standards, improving schools and delivering public accountability. Initiatives such as the School Teachers’ Workload Pathfinder Project and broader workforce remodelling sought to modernise school organisation and redistribute administrative tasks away from teachers and headteachers (Butt and Gunter, 2005; Gunter et al., 2004). These reforms were framed as enabling leadership to focus on teaching and learning, while simultaneously strengthening managerial control over outcomes.
Crucially, this period also marked a shift in how headship was imagined and evaluated. Headteachers increasingly came to be framed as chief executives, system leaders or ‘turnaround’ figures responsible for delivering measurable improvement (Butt and Gunter, 2007). Within the parallel rise of the school effectiveness and school improvement movements, the removal of leaders became an accepted mechanism for signalling decisive action when schools were judged to be underperforming. The metaphor of the failing CEO or football manager became deeply embedded within educational discourse, normalising the idea that leadership change was both necessary and sufficient to restore institutional success.
While subsequent governments altered the language of reform, this underlying logic persisted and intensified. High-stakes inspection regimes, public performance data and intervention thresholds increasingly personalised responsibility for complex, system-level challenges. Headteachers became singular points of accountability for outcomes shaped by funding constraints, workforce shortages, demographic change and widening social inequality. Over time, leader removal ceased to be an exceptional response and became an ordinary feature of improvement culture.
What distinguishes the current moment, however, is the cumulative effect of these reforms under conditions of acute system strain. Headteachers now operate within a context characterised by chronic underfunding, escalating SEND pressures, teacher shortages, intensified inspection frameworks and heightened public scrutiny. Recent NFER (2023) data indicate that fewer than half of middle leaders aspire to headship, while many serving headteachers actively discourage others from pursuing the role. Smithers (2019) similarly identifies reputational risk, loss of professional dignity and public humiliation as key deterrents.
This suggests that the present crisis is not simply cyclical but structural. The removal of leaders, once justified as a temporary corrective, has become a normalised response to systemic failure. Within this context, headship is simultaneously exalted and destabilised: rhetorically celebrated as the solution to educational problems, yet practically exposed as a role that absorbs blame and bears the emotional cost of policy failure. It is this paradox that the sacrificial framework developed in this article seeks to illuminate.
Research design and orientation
This study adopts an interpretivist epistemological orientation and is designed using a qualitative, instrumental single-case study approach. Its purpose is not to generate statistically generalisable claims about all headteachers, but to illuminate how wider cultural and structural forces are lived, interpreted and given meaning by individuals within the system. Case study approaches have a long and established tradition within educational leadership research, particularly in work exploring headteacher identity, career trajectories and professional disenchantment (Ribbins, 2008; Ribbins and Marland, 1994; Weindling, 1999). Such approaches recognise that leadership is not merely enacted through policy compliance or managerial competence, but is deeply shaped by biography, context, and symbolic meaning.
A case study design is appropriate where the aim is to study a phenomenon in context, attend to complexity, and develop a richly interpreted account of meaning and experience (Simons, 2025; Stake, 2008; Yin, 2014). In Stake's terms, this is an instrumental case study: the case is selected not only for its intrinsic interest, but because it provides a powerful lens through which to understand a broader phenomenon, in this instance, the cultural normalisation of leader expendability and ritualised accountability.
An interpretivist orientation was adopted because the focus of the study is meaning-making rather than measurement. Rather than treating leadership attrition as a variable to be quantified, this study seeks to understand how headship is experienced, narrated and ultimately abandoned. In this sense, the concern is not whether the participant's account is ‘representative’ in a statistical sense, but whether it offers insight into cultural processes that may otherwise remain obscured. In line with Bassey's argument, the value of such a case lies less in statistical generalisation and more in relatability and the extent to which readers can recognise resonances with like contexts (Bassey, 1981, 2001).
The study is also theoretically informed by ritual theory and anthropological accounts of sacrifice. These frameworks are not applied mechanically after analysis but serve as sensitising concepts guiding interpretation. The case is therefore treated not simply as an individual career story, but as a cultural text through which broader logics of accountability, blame and expendability can be examined.
Participant and context
The focal participant is a retired primary headteacher with over 40 years’ experience in education. Her career included classroom teaching, multiple headship posts within England, and senior leadership roles in British international schools. She retired from mainstream English headship in 2021. The decision to focus on a single participant was deliberate. As Flyvbjerg (2006) argues, carefully selected critical cases can offer powerful insight into general phenomena, particularly where the case vividly exposes tensions or contradictions within a system.
While preserving anonymity necessarily limits the inclusion of contextual detail, it is important to note that the participant's career spanned significant periods of policy change, including the expansion of performative accountability, the rise of inspection-led improvement and the increasing professionalisation and politicisation of headship. Her reflections therefore offer a longitudinal perspective on how the meaning and experience of headship have shifted over time.
Data collection
Data were generated through a semi-structured interview conducted in late 2021 as part of a wider research project on teacher motivation and leadership careers. The interview lasted approximately 90 minutes and was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Questions explored the participant's professional journey, motivations for leadership, experiences of accountability and inspection, and reflections on her eventual withdrawal from headship. The semi-structured format allowed for flexibility, enabling the participant to elaborate on experiences she considered significant.
Ethical approval was obtained from the relevant institutional review body, and informed consent was secured for the use of anonymised data in future publications.
Data analysis
Analysis followed a thematic approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006), involving iterative reading, coding and interpretation of the transcript. Initial coding focused on recurring motifs such as identity, responsibility, judgement, humiliation and withdrawal. These themes were then examined in relation to the conceptual framework of sacred office, scapegoating and ritualised removal. Importantly, interpretation was reflexive. Rather than assuming sacrificial dynamics in advance, the analysis remained attentive to how the participant herself described her experiences. The parallels with anthropological accounts of sacrifice emerged through repeated references to being ‘expendable’, to bearing responsibility for systemic problems, and to the emotional degradation associated with exclusion. These resonances justified the use of ritual theory as an interpretive lens rather than an imposed explanatory schema.
Findings and analysis
The analysis revealed a coherent pattern in how headship was experienced, narrated and ultimately relinquished. Three interrelated themes are presented here (replacing the previous four-theme structure by integrating ‘degradation/marking’ within the scapegoating theme), each aligned with the conceptual framework developed earlier: (1) headship as sacred office and identity; (2) asymmetrical accountability, degradation and scapegoating; and (3) withdrawal as ritual resolution.
Headship as sacred office and identity
From the outset, the participant framed headship not simply as a role but as an identity. She spoke of being a headteacher rather than doing headship, describing the position as the natural culmination of her professional life. This reflects what Ribbins (2008) identifies as the deeply personal nature of headteacher identity, in which leadership becomes inseparable from the self. Hadn't got a clue what the job was. It was a lovely romantic notion of this person that's not necessarily a hierarchy, but creating institutional change, working with a group of wonderful people who are so committed and vocational, just like me, be idealistic, view that we could make great change for the children … I’ve been a head now for 14 years. I still don't know. I could not articulate the role of a headteacher. Teachers in class are dealing with the teaching and learning, the happy side of education. They get all the reward, the love, you know, and we get a lot of dross … That's what we’re trying to protect them from their role. But as a consequence of protecting them from their role, they see that we only have a negative aspect.
Asymmetrical accountability, degradation and the emergence of the scapegoat
As her career progressed, the participant experienced a growing asymmetry in how responsibility was distributed. Success was framed as collective, while failure was personalised. She observed that when schools struggled, ‘the head is expendable’, capturing a widespread perception within the profession. So teachers immediately have the impression of DfE and Ofsted and the local authority who don't value heads, because if something is wrong, the head's expendable. Let's get rid of the head and have a new head. People think you’re accessible every hour of the day … but they don't realise that you’ve got all these other people doing that. Emotional accountability and responsibility that you end up having are the ones that give you sleepless nights, you know, regularly. Staff see that I’m the person who gets all the grief from the parents. So if someone is going to get verbally abused, it's going to be me … They see it as quite a thankless job … they don't want to be in my position and have all the grief and the stress.
Withdrawal as ritual resolution
The participant's eventual withdrawal from headship did not take the form of outright rejection of leadership. Instead, it was marked by ambivalence. She expressed both relief at leaving a hostile environment and lingering attachment to the ideals of headship. This mirrors what Ribbins (2008) describes as disenchantment rather than disengagement. I stuck at it because I was too embarrassed to say it's really not what I thought it was going to be. I didn't want to be seen as a failure … I also had this imposter syndrome. I kept thinking somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, you can't be the headteacher.
Discussion
This study set out to reconceptualise headteacher attrition not simply as a technical or managerial problem, but as a cultural phenomenon shaped by ritualised accountability and symbolic blame. The findings from the case study strongly support this reframing. The retired headteacher's narrative reveals a pattern that aligns closely with anthropological accounts of sacrificial logic: elevation to a morally charged office, accumulation of collective responsibility, symbolic degradation, and eventual removal or withdrawal.
Situating these findings within existing leadership scholarship helps clarify what is distinctive about this contribution. Research on headteacher careers has long documented stress, disenchantment and early exit (Ribbins, 2008; Ribbins and Marland, 1994; Weindling, 1999). Studies of non-aspiration similarly highlight rational deterrents such as workload, inspection pressure and reputational risk (James, 2007; NFER, 2023; Smithers, 2019). What this study adds is an interpretive explanation for why these deterrents carry such moral and emotional weight, and why the removal of leaders has become so culturally normalised.
The sacrificial framework helps explain how accountability systems function symbolically as well as procedurally. Inspection outcomes, performance data and intervention thresholds operate as modern rituals of judgement. When schools are deemed to be failing, the removal of the headteacher performs an act of purification that reassures stakeholders that responsibility has been located and action taken. As Bell (1992) argues, ritualisation disguises power relations by presenting them as necessary and inevitable. In this context, the removal of leaders appears as common sense rather than as a culturally produced response to systemic strain.
Importantly, the findings also illuminate why headteachers often internalise blame. The participant's gradual acceptance of her own ‘irrelevance’ mirrors Girard's (1977) observation that sacrificial systems are most effective when victims themselves come to believe in the legitimacy of their removal. Attrition, on this reading, is not simply burnout or exit, but the completion of a ritualised process that resolves collective anxiety without addressing its causes.
The discussion also underscores the gendered dimensions of this process. In particular, women in leader roles in feminised educational contexts may be exposed to intensified moral scrutiny and expectations of relational labour, which can shape how blame is absorbed and how exit is narrated (Eagly and Karau, 2002; Hall, 1996). This does not imply that scapegoating is exclusive to women, but that gendered norms can intensify the sacrificial dynamics described above.
Situating sacrificial leadership within attrition and career scholarship
Towards an agenda for leadership scholarship
Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this article proposes an agenda for rethinking leadership sustainability in English education.
First, leadership scholarship would benefit from taking cultural and symbolic dimensions of headship more seriously. While structural analyses of workload, policy and governance remain essential, they are insufficient on their own. Without attention to the rituals through which accountability is enacted and blame displaced, reforms risk reproducing the very dynamics they seek to correct.
Second, policy analysis could more directly interrogate the normalisation of the removal of leaders as an improvement strategy. The assumption that replacing the headteacher is an appropriate response to institutional difficulty has deep roots in New Labour-era effectiveness discourse, yet its cumulative effects on leadership supply have been profoundly damaging. Research is needed to examine how accountability might be reimagined as collective rather than sacrificial.
Third, greater attention could be paid to leadership refusal as a meaningful professional act. The widespread reluctance to pursue headship can be interpreted not simply as deficit or lack of resilience, but as a rational response to observing how leaders are treated. Understanding non-aspiration as resistance rather than apathy opens new lines of inquiry into professional agency.
Finally, leadership research would be strengthened by more explicit engagement with questions of moral injury and existential cost. The emotional degradation described by the participant in this study suggests that attrition is not only a workforce issue, but a human one. Future work could explore how leadership cultures might be reshaped to sustain vocation without consuming those who answer it.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that headteacher attrition in England cannot be fully understood through technocratic or managerial explanations alone. Drawing on a single-case study, interpreted through ritual and sacrificial theory, I have shown how headship operates as a culturally charged office in which leaders are elevated as moral figureheads yet rendered expendable when systems falter. Attrition, on this reading, is not merely a failure of recruitment or resilience, but the predictable outcome of a leadership culture structured around symbolic blame and ritualised removal of leaders.
By reframing headteacher attrition as a form of modern sacrifice, the research reported here contributes a new conceptual lens to educational leadership scholarship. It highlights how accountability systems function not only to measure performance, but to manage collective anxiety through the displacement of responsibility onto individuals. Recognising this dynamic is a necessary step towards building leadership cultures that sustain rather than consume those who lead.
The retired headteacher's narrative serves as both evidence and warning. Her enduring commitment to education, even after withdrawal from headship, illustrates the cost of sustaining a system through ritualised blame. If leadership is to be made sustainable, reform must extend beyond policy adjustment to cultural transformation. Until the sacrificial logic embedded in accountability is confronted, the system will continue to solve its crises by consuming its leaders.
Footnotes
Ethical consideration
The research reported in this article was conducted in accordance with the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS) ethical guidelines. Ethical approval was granted by Anglia Ruskin University.
Consent for publication
Informed consent was obtained from the participant for both participation and the publication of anonymised data.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author biography