As the role of Head continues to grow in breadth and complexity, how can school leaders create the capacity they need to lead effectively and sustainably?
In this latest reflection from our 20% More: The Art of Headship 2026 research, Richard Backhouse considers the importance of delegation and why genuinely sharing leadership requires more than simply handing over tasks.
“It feels less like I’m the head and this is the team underneath me, and more like a group of people going, ‘oh, …, how do we sort this out?'”
One of the strongest signals in our interviews with independent school heads is that good delegation is no longer simply a useful leadership habit; it is becoming part of the basic infrastructure of sustainable headship.
That may sound obvious: every head knows they should delegate. But the research suggests something more specific, and more interesting: the heads who seem most able to sustain the role are not just working harder at passing tasks down the line, but thinking carefully about the design of the organisation around them — who holds which decisions; where expertise sits; how quickly issues escalate; and whether the senior team has enough authority, confidence and capacity to carry real responsibility.
This is partly because the nature of headship has changed. Across the interviews, complaints, finance, compliance, safeguarding, staffing, marketing, admissions and governance all now press more directly on the head’s desk. If every complex or sensitive matter still travels to the top, the result is not better leadership; it is a bottleneck – and often a weary one. One head described being dragged back into the weeds by people “grabbing” at their ankles. Another spoke of the role feeling less like a single leader with a team underneath, and more like a group of people looking at one another and asking how they sort it out.
There is a hopeful reading of that second image: it suggests that some schools are moving from delegated tasks to shared leadership; from the head as universal problem-solver to the head as shaper of judgement, culture and direction. That doesn’t diminish the head; if anything, it protects the things only the head can really do — hold the school’s purpose, make the highest-stakes judgements, nurture key relationships, and create the conditions in which others can lead well.
For chairs and governors, the question may therefore be less “is the head good at delegating?” and more “have we built a structure and culture in our school in which delegation can genuinely work?” That means looking at the senior team, but also at middle leadership, professional services, governance, reporting habits, and the culture of escalation: does the school really trust people below the head to make decisions, or do problems quietly travel upwards? Is there a culture of empowerment and decentralisation so that delegation becomes the norm? Who is teaching middle leaders to handle this delegation with care?
Delegation, in this sense, isn’t abdication, nor is it a neat efficiency technique: it is how schools protect the head’s strategic capacity, develop future leaders and make headship more possible for the long term. For boards and recruiters, the lesson may be: don’t ask only whether the candidate can delegate; ask whether the school has been designed so that delegated leadership can do the job.