One of the most revealing themes to emerge from our recent conversations with independent school Heads as part of our ongoing research into the changing nature of Headship ‘20% More – The Art of Headship 2026’, was not about strategy, finance or governance. It was about loneliness.
Heads are surrounded by people throughout the school day, yet many describe a role where the most complex challenges, decisions and anxieties travel upwards and often stay there.
As Head of UK Appointments, Richard Backhouse explores, this is not simply a matter of workload or resilience. It is a structural feature of leadership. The ability to lead sustainably depends not only on capability, but on the quality of the support, relationships and professional networks around the Head.
An important reflection for Heads, senior leaders and governors alike.
“It’s incredibly lonely.” “It can be a very lonely place…” “You go home and you think, well, is this normal? And then you realise—actually, it’s not.”
One of the quieter findings from our interviews with independent school heads is also one of the most important: headship is lonely, though not always in the way people imagine. Heads are surrounded by people all day — at the gates, assemblies, fixtures, concerts, receptions and governors’ meetings — yet many still describe a role in which the hardest things travel upwards. As one put it, “the moaning goes up, not down”; another simply said, “Other heads are gold.”
Our research suggests that loneliness isn’t mainly a personality problem, nor a failure of resilience; it’s structural. Heads are asked to hold institutional anxiety while appearing calm, absorb worries from parents, staff and governors, protect confidentiality, and often make decisions which can’t be fully shared with those affected by them. A head may be at the centre of everything and still have very few people with whom they can speak freely.
In the interview material, the loneliest accounts often sit alongside other pressures: complaints, legal or HR issues, financial anxiety, governance intensity, difficult staffing decisions and the burden of being the visible point of institutional reassurance. One head wondered whether what they were carrying was normal; another, in a financially pressured context, spoke less about workload than about keeping the school safe and viable.
There is a paradox here, and a form of emotional asymmetry: heads need to be emotionally available to their communities, but they can’t expect those communities to be their main source of professional containment. They occupy an hourglass position: they oversee a team, and are overseen by a team, but don’t really have a peer team of their own inside the school.
Federations and groups can soften this, but only when they create genuine peer relationships rather than another accountability layer; the loneliness isn’t solved by structure alone, but eased by people who really understand the work. That is why the support around the head matters so much: strong senior teams, trusted chairs, coaching, WhatsApp groups, peer heads, advisers and the occasional person who can say, with credibility, “yes, that really is difficult”.
For governors, this isn’t soft stuff; it’s part of the infrastructure of sustainable leadership. A head with no safe professional space may carry too much alone, or use the wrong audience for the wrong conversation; neither is healthy for the individual or the school.
So the question isn’t simply whether the head is coping; it is whether the school has deliberately built the relationships, structures and habits which make wise, calm and sustainable headship more likely. Connection isn’t a luxury at the edge of the role: done properly, it is professional infrastructure.