After a 10 year career in the physics/electronic engineering world I decided to finally take the plunge and do what I’d always fancied doing but never had the guts to; teach.  And have been now for 3 years.

I really feel I have found my niche when it comes to education and love the environment.

I have had experience working in, being managed well and not so well, and managing people in big multinational companies across England and Europe.

However I have never seen such a wide range of poor leadership skills from first level line managers to Heads of whole school. Hours of CPD in my old life involved management and leadership training as well as motivational and communication seminars. So now I feel that I could really make a difference in schools I work in such positions.

BUT!!

There seems to be a culture in education that says that the only “time on job experience” that matters is that as a teacher. I am being told by “senior” people that I have to wait my turn to have a go at management positions. In the mean time I have to watch as numpties with little or no leadership qualities “lead” me.

I took such a plunge in the way of pay cut and risk to move from my old career to teach should I now feel bad that I want to move out of the other side to Leadership ASAP

And

What is it with not being taken seriously for leadership roles until I have had 3-5 years IN CLASSROOM experience? When I could be doing the personnel leadership thing so much better than some of my seniors!?

Kind regards

Groovy 

Karvol:

 If you wanted to come into teaching for the leadership side of things

That’s not what I'm saying. I am loving being a teacher for the most part, the challenging students included. I am however often finding myself utterly demoralised by weak leadership.

I see where people have come out of university and initial teacher training as a bright eyed early 20 something and after the due time served move in to leadership roles without significant leadership skills or training. So they hash along the best they think they can following examples set by equally inept predecessors, never making any effort to open a leadership book, attend a seminar or study how leadership can be used to empower people beneath them.

I see far too many people scared of bright sparks coming in to the ranks behind them (I don’t just include myself in that) because of latent insecurities they then proceed to do their best to shoot down any proactivity or positivity in protection of their own back. Resulting in departments in turmoil and staff just doing the minimum to keep their noses out of harm’s way

A good leader should be encouraging any positive proactive enthusiastic member of their department to make the department or school shine on the whole rather than worry about being out shone.

It’s the idea of synergy where a paradigm of interdependence is cultivated. Or in simpler terms, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts due to strong management / leadership

Perhaps you need to experience working in more schools, because I don't recognise the situation you're describing. I've seen "time-served" managers who struggle to lead because they're known to be poor classroom teachers. I've also seen new-to-teaching colleagues (both straight from uni or otherwise) being promoted to leadership positions and being very successful too.

 There is very little credibility in education towards people who cannot lead by example. A good head of department, deputy headteacher and headteacher is someone who has excellent discipline, is in touch with what students and staff think and know the reality of marking piles of books at the end of your day, writing reports when you've finished marking the books, and after that planning your lessons for the next day, during which inevitably you will need to cope with the technology not working, the queue for the photocopier, the detentions, the phone-calls home, the bottom sets, the tutor group, etc. 

I have yet to work somewhere where there isn't a head or deputy head who has so little or non-existent teaching duties that they have completely and utterly forgotten the reality of a teaching-load, and who thinks asking someone to "get back to them by the end of the day" or "read this email in the next 4 hours" is perfectly feasable. In an ideal world all managers would go back to the bottom of the food chain for six months every five years to keep their feet on the ground, but that is not possible. 

 I don't agree you should wait forever, but I also disagree that previous experience can bypass experience in the teaching environment - as others have said it is a different ballgame. Three years is about right to go into middle management, then perhaps another five for senior management.

leviosa:

 Depends where you are - I had a head of department role as an NQT - in a high performing school - 2 terms in as they saw that I could clearly cope - I had a mentor and it was initially on a 12 month contract - to be reviewed -9 years on I am in same position with a thriving department and outstanding results.