Senior leadership recruitment

  • 2016
Challenge

Collaboration across schools boosts teaching quality, but recruiting school leaders into system leader roles (e.g. National Leader of Education) is challenging.

Insight

People give different weight to information depending on who communicates it to them. If a message comes from a trusted and respected authority figure, we tend to heed it more than if the message comes from someone non-descript or unknown. This is known as the messenger effect which we deployed in this trial.

Approach

We deployed the messenger effect by sending head teachers a letter from another head teacher encouraging them to apply to system leader roles.

Result & Impact

Head teacher applications to National Leader of Education roles doubled.

Design and development by Soapbox.