Flourishing of School Leaders in England: Headteachers’ Experiences of Flow, Thriving, Resilience, Grit, and Wellbeing

Abstract

Given the intensification of school leadership roles, often resulting in heightened levels of stress, increasing workload, and ever-expanding challenges, it is important to understand how school leaders attend to and grow their own wellbeing as well as that of those they lead and work with. Our exploratory study examined the sense of flourishing within the professional lives of school headteachers from England’s “Growing the Top” outstanding schools, a program led by Challenge Partners. This article details participants’ perceptions of overall flourishing through its constituent constructs: flow, thriving, resilience, grit, and wellbeing. Our findings indicated that flourishing for England’s outstanding school leaders was a complex phenomenon, not helped by the current backdrop of challenges that school leaders in England are experiencing, with positive correlations in varying degrees among the constituent constructs of flow, thriving, resilience, grit, and wellbeing.