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Abstract

The role of middle leaders, that is, those who report to a member of the organisation's senior leadership, in bringing about improvements to schools is well documented. Yet middle leadership is often considered one of the most challenging roles within educational leadership, often under-conceptualised and theorised. Before we can look at the literature on resilience and any potential role it has in mediating against stress within the workplace, we need to know what stressors middle leaders in education experience. This paper outlines some initial findings from a study of 62 middle leaders, in England, exploring the key stressors they experience in their role. All participants were asked to complete a short online survey where they could enter free text when asked to identify the 5 stressors they most commonly experienced. Participants felt that staffing issues, followed by a lack of time and increasing workloads as the most prevalent issues. Commonly cited stressors such as inspections did not score highly, due to the temporary nature of the stress being induced. This is particularly important if staff are to be encouraged into leadership roles and senior leaders are to provide support for those already occupying middle leadership positions.

Keywords

leadership development middle leaders stress resilience

Introduction

Stress is a topic that has gained increased popularity for researchers over the past 25 years (August et al., 2007; Greenwood et al., 1996; Usman et al., 2020). Notions of stress have been conceptualised and studies have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between resilience and stress (Crane et al., 2019; Morales-Rodríguez, 2021) with the former seen as a means of mitigating the latter.

While stress at work is often unavoidable, Marcatto et al. (2022) found that in Europe stress-related absence was second only to musculoskeletal disorders and it is estimated that work-related stress cost European companies 20 billion euros per year and accounted for nearly 60% of lost working days (EU-OSHA, 2014).

In the United Kingdom (UK), 79% of individuals cite work-related issues as a key determinant of an individual's stress levels (Stewart, 2020). The UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE, 2022) says that this equates to 17.9 million days being lost. They go on to state that cases of work-related stress have been on an upward trajectory since 2001/2. However, it is unclear whether this is a result of increased prevalence or a willingness to report stress to employers. At the same time, the Chartered Institute of Personal Development's (CIPD) (2020) report found that heavy workload was a significant contributory factor in work-related stress, resulting in record levels of presenteeism (working when unwell) and leavism (using holiday allowances to work).

While there is a body of literature relating to stress, there is however a paucity of research relating to the impact of stress in education and in particular middle leadership, which is both under-researched and theorised (De Nobile, 2018). Although, recently, Harris et al. (2019) have suggested that since 2003 there has been a marginal increase in the volume of literature focusing on the role of middle leadership. While Forde et al. (2019) found that middle leaders were at risk of becoming task-orientated, a view echoed by Lambert (2022).

Lipscombe et al. (2023) suggest that middle leaders operate in an uncomfortable place between teachers and senior leaders or as they put it, at the interface between influence and change. Whilst scholars are in general agreement that a middle leader is a teacher with formal leadership responsibilities, Edward-Groves et al. (2016), Lipscombe et al. (2023) all state that there is little agreement on the significance of their teaching responsibilities in relation to their leadership ones. For example, are they teachers with leadership responsibilities, or leaders who maintain a teaching commitment? Yet, Li et al.'s. (2018) study of middle leaders in England do not include teaching as an aspect of the role. This opens up the concept of middle leadership being an individual with formal leadership responsibility situated between the school or college principal (or equivalent) and teachers. This approach could therefore include leaders with significant pastoral responsibility. It is this definition of middle leadership (an individual situated between the head of the organisation and the teaching staff), or Grice (2019), Gurr (2019), Li et al. (2018) and Tay et al. (2019) all suggest, based on a person's position within the organisational hierarchy, that is being adopted by this paper.

At the same time, there is limited literature on middle leadership in education and the important role middle leaders play in bringing about change and improvement in schools.

Given the lack of research conceptualising the role of middle leadership and the paucity of research focusing on stress in middle leadership roles, it is pertinent that this paper focuses on the stressors that affect this section of the educational workforce. However, it is important to note that this paper considers work-related stress at a time immediately following the SARS-CoV2 (commonly called COVID-19) pandemic. A time which has tested the stress and resilience of those individuals working in education.

Therefore, this paper identifies through middle leaders in education, that is those that report to a member of the organisation's senior leadership team (SLT) (or equivalent), the factors that cause them significant perceived work-related stress. The paper looks at two conceptual frameworks for stress before looking at the data collected from 62 middle leaders on factors that cause them stress.

Stress

Quick et al. (2013) and Robinson (2018) note that stress is one of the most widely studied topics in psychology, yet is a term that is used ubiquitously. The aphorism ‘the straw that broke the camel's back’ encapsulates the essence of stress. Nonetheless, stress is often widely used as a term relating to how individuals and organisations respond to environmental issues.

For a stress response to be experienced, a stressor must be evoked. This can be either a physical or psychological stimulus that can be related to a particular context, such as a workplace, or an individual's experience of, or perceived experience of a situation. Once a stressor has been experienced, individuals are exposed to a number of possible responses.

Individuals are likely to experience physiological responses through increases in heart rate, respiration, perspiration, disturbed sleep or irregular eating. Or, psychological responses which are less obvious such as increased levels of anxiety. Yet too many individuals ignore the early warning signs of stress, such as intestinal distress, insomnia, fatigue and nail-biting. Instead, allowing stress to build up under the false belief that stress itself makes them more tolerant of stress. However, the way in which individuals experience stress and their response to it varies considerably. Sims and Jerrim (2022) acknowledge that schools are stressful places to work. However senior leaders need to be cognisant that they will also contribute to an individual's exposure to stress. For example, a teacher working to achieve unrealistic management performance targets may be placed in a psychological state of stress. Often leadership demands, such as increasing pupil progress, or evidencing of increased progress, and long working hours all act as stressors. While there may not be one signal factor, stress can be the result of the sum of the parts. The consequence of this leads to schools struggling to retain staff at all levels of the organisation (Sims, 2021).

Nonetheless, Copper et al. (2001) and Robinson (2018) state that stress can be positive, leading to an improvement in an individual's performance. This form of ‘good stress’ is referred to as Eustress, and has been expressed by the Yerkes-Dodson law (Bong et al., 2016). This model shows how an individual's performance increases with increased stress to an optimum point after which performance levels decrease as stress levels continue to rise. The difficulty with this model is that the optimum level is different for each individual.

Methodology

The objective of this paper was to explore the stressors that affect middle leaders in education. The author adopts the position of an outsider researcher, thus reducing the potential power dynamics. The sampling unit for this study was middle leaders with line management responsibility of staff from education providers (primary, secondary, further and higher education) in England. Sixty-two individuals (n = 62) from a range of providers participated in an online survey. The value of 62 participants was calculated to ensure that there was a statistically valid response on which to base the findings. The first part required them to provide some demographic information including the phase of education in which they work. After this, participants were asked to identify the top five factors, by entering free text, that cause them work-related stress. Participants were self-selecting through emails to providers based on a convenience sample (Plowright, 2011) and all were middle leaders. Defined as individuals who report to a member of the provider's SLT.

An important point to note is that the number of respondents is small, 62. This was done deliberately to get a set of data from which to explore whether there are common themes and whether a further larger study with a greater number of participants should be conducted. It is also worth noting that the findings of this study are not generalisable at this stage due to the limitations of the sample size.

Findings

Demographic findings

The sample had a greater proportion of females, 43 (69.4%) than male participants, 19 (30.60%). This echoes the disparity in staffing that the UK's Department for Education identified in their staffing survey (DfE, 2022a, 2022b) which showed that across the primary and secondary phases of education, 36.5% of teachers were male. Within further education, 62% of middle leaders were female in the 2018/19 data; the most recent published dataset. This represents a 2% increase on the 2017/18 data (ETF, 2020). Data relating to higher education shows that for the 2020/21 academic year, 46.68% of staff were female (HESA, 2022). It is only the further education sector that sub-divides the workforce data into the primary occupational roles (teacher, middle leader, senior leader).

The majority of respondents were in the age range of 45 to 54 years old, 35.5% as shown in Table 1. Within schools, however, 27.4% of staff were within the same age bracket. Whereas in the FE sector, the mean age of staff was 47 years old, although the distribution of staff across age brackets was similar at approximately 12% of staff within each of the aforementioned age categories.

Table 1.

Distribution of participants’ ages.

	N	%
18–24	1	1.6%
25–34	9	14.5%
35–44	16	25.8%
45–54	22	35.5%
55–64	13	21%
65 and over	1	1.6%

Figure 1, shows the range of educational settings that participants worked in, with a third of individuals working within higher education, a quarter in primary schools and the remainder split across secondary schools, further education colleges and independent training providers.

Figure 1.

Participant sectors.

It is important to acknowledge that while participants represented a range of different educational settings, the role of the middle leader is fairly consistently represented. All individuals participating in the study were in middle leadership roles with line management responsibilities for staff. This therefore excluded those who were in roles without formal staffing responsibilities for example research professors, and those middle leaders with responsibility for organisational processes, such as those in policy-related roles. Whereas the UK's Department for Education identifies that middle leaders are those individuals who have a defined role such as, for example, head of department, head of year, or special educational needs coordinator (DfE, 2022a). While Fullan and Scott (2009) state that in higher education, a middle leader is a person who holds the role of Head of Department, assuming that the Head of Department reports to a faculty Dean or Provost.

De Nobile (2018) identified through a systematic literature review that middle leaders’ primary focus was on teaching quality. Fleming (2014) stated that improvements in teaching quality are best achieved by influencing a teacher's practice. Whereas, Collie et al. (2015) state that it is teachers’ attitudes, levels of job satisfaction, commitment and levels of stress that all contribute to teaching quality. While there is an assumption that good-quality teaching will lead to good student outcomes the evidence is scant (Day et al., 2016). There is however evidence from Johnson et al. (2012) that job satisfaction and working conditions do impact student outcomes, something that Day et al. (2016) state that middle leaders do have influence over.

Finally, the majority of the participants, 53 (85.50%) reported coming from a white ethnic group or background.

Work-related stressors

Before one can start to look at coping strategies to mitigate stress, it is important to understand the perceived levels of work-related stress. Figure 2 identifies a number of elements that participants, all of whom are middle leaders in education, identified as causing them stress within their role and the frequency of their occurrence within the survey.

Figure 2.

Work-related stressors.

The most prevalent issue raised is related to staffing. Individuals cite a lack of staff as a key factor that causes higher levels of workplace stress. The consequence of this is that middle leaders are often expected to cover classes, where feasible, and undertake administrative tasks which would have ordinarily been delegated to other members of staff. This results in a lack of time and excessive workloads, which can be seen by the second and third-highest scoring factors respectively. The lack of staff is often a result of insufficient funding to appoint the staff, a difficulty in recruiting staff either with the necessary skills or due to the cost of living in specific areas of the country. There could be several reasons for this, but low student numbers are often the biggest contributor to this.

Another issue raised by participants encapsulated under the heading of leadership relates to the lack of clarity, poor communications and indecisiveness from senior leaders which middle leaders all felt were contributory factors to their perceived work-related stress. While this paper focuses specifically on middle leaders, senior leaders need to take heed of the issues identified if they are wanting to support their middle leaders to become more efficient in their roles.

This results in middle leaders working longer hours which subsequently impacts work-life balance. Much has been written about the spillover from the workplace to the family environment (Allen et al., 2000; Ishii-Kuntz, 1994; Roehling et al., 2001). Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) argue that this spill-over, results in work-family conflict (WFC) and this occurs when an individual performs multiple roles, such as employee, spouse and parent, with each placing specific demands on the individual and those around them. This would correlate with findings from Lynch et al. (2012), who state that education is greedy of time, although they do not elaborate on exactly why this is. In addition to this, a lack of clarity surrounding decision-making from senior leaders and subsequent communication from senior to middle leaders. These appear, from the data to be the elements that individuals reported most frequently.

The data suggest that factors that are often portrayed as significant stressors, such as inspections (Brimblecombe et al., 1995; Penninckx and Vanhoof, 2015; Rosenthal, 2004) did not feature highly in participants’ responses. Possibly, due to these events occurring every few years, or increasingly more infrequently than that. While inspections would cause a spike in workload and time management, they are not consistent daily factors that influence an individual's ongoing level of work-related stress. Neither did the levels of responsibility associated with being a middle leader, despite the identification of poor communication and indecisiveness from senior leaders.

What this study does not explore is whether senior staff are aware of the pressures middle leaders are under or are middle leaders sacrificing their own well-being and work-life balance in order to get the job ‘done’. This raises an additional question surrounding the workload that middle leaders experience as a result of the lack of communication and clarity of decision-making that participants report.

Related to the decision-making, of both middle and senior leaders is the notion of social competency and the role it plays in an individual's ability to cope with stress. As a model in its own right (Kunnanatt, 2008), social competency focuses on the interpretation individuals draw from social interactions between individuals (commonly called social attention). Yet evidence from Lambert (2022) suggests that middle leaders typically struggle with the interpretation of emotionally-laden interactions due to the pressures of the middle leadership role. Thus, creating a vicious circle, whereby work-relation pressures limit an individual's ability to recognise emotionally-laden situations and improvements can only come as a result of changes to the job role.

Implications for practice

McKinney et al. (2013) suggested that middle leaders are overloaded with work, undertrained and on the edge of burning out. While Constable and McCormick (1987) suggest that a majority of individuals entering management positions have little in the way of training. Therefore, middle leaders are often entering the role with limited experience and needing to develop their skills on the job.

This has resulted in a strategy for system reform (Fullan, 2015) leading to the idea of ‘Leading from the Middle’ where the middle tier is recognised as being particularly important. In their work, Hargreaves and Ainscow (2015) propose that middle leadership involves working collaboratively and reinforces the centrality of distributed leadership and collaboration within system transformation (Harris, 2014). This is not to say that giving staff additional responsibility and calling it professional development is acceptable. Instead, the development of middle leaders should be done as part of an organisational strategy for talent development and succession planning (Davies and Davies, 2011; Levi, 2006). Senior leaders need to be aware of the role that they play and the support they should provide to middle leaders within a framework of development.

Despite these challenges, Turner and Bolam (1998) point out that middle leaders do have room for manoeuvre and will proactively conceptualise their role and not merely act as a conduit through which the decisions of the SLT will be communicated. At the same time, research by Brown et al. (2000) showed that middle leaders are unsatisfied with having to subordinate their vision in favour of that of senior staff members, and their departmental vision was often undervalued, and their professional judgment insufficiently recognised by senior managers, governors and external bodies.

Conclusion

The findings from this paper suggest that middle leaders are not concerned with sporadic events such as audits or inspections, such as those carried out by Ofsted, but by the myriad of factors that impact their day-to-day work, such as a lack of staff and poor communication between staff.

However, we recognise the limited generalisability of these preliminary findings and the tentative nature of the conclusions at this preliminary stage. However, the data collected does suggest that a further larger study is needed to establish whether there are significant differences between phases of education, and also further validate these findings.

What is important to note is that both middle and senior leadership is crucial in meeting the challenge of bringing about sustained improvements within schools and both middle and senior leaders are axiomatically responsible for such improvements. So, the findings discussed in this article have important implications for developing middle leaders in their current roles.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article

ORCID iD

Steve Lambert

Author biography

Steve Lambert is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Chester. His research focuses on the development of future leaders and the role that behavioural traits play in leadership.

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