I have never intended my work as a freelance journalist or author to become particularly political. There are plenty of economists, policymakers and far more seasoned Westminster watchers who can provide a more informed analysis of political personalities, trends and electoral arithmetic than I can.
However, I also accept that it is impossible to write regularly about poverty and inequality without entering political territory, because the conditions in which poverty grows or recedes are shaped by political decisions about income, housing, welfare childcare and many other public services. So, amidst the considerable white noise created by Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister this week, I find myself thinking less about who might be next and more about what happens next to the issues that matter to the children, families and communities many of us serve.
To be transparent about my own political position here, I remain open-minded about whether a change of Prime Minister was necessary and can understand arguments both for and against the legacy Starmer will leave behind. Yet, despite being a relatively optimistic chap, I find myself questioning how much practical difference another change in national leadership might make to the much bigger issue of ‘poverty’ sitting in and beyond the rooms in Downing Street.
I’m less preoccupied with whether the next person is the right man or woman for the job than I am with whether the policies, resources, structures and systems are in place to understand and dismantle child poverty. I am interested in whether the commitments already made will survive a transition of leadership, whether they will be implemented with haste and whether child poverty will remain a central national priority rather than becoming a Post-it note in a handover folder marked ‘FAO of the new PM’. For the children and families experiencing poverty now, ‘later’ carries a cost.
Leadership matters, but how much?
Of course, leadership matters! There is a vast body of evidence showing that leadership can influence organisational culture, staff development, decision-making and outcomes across education, health, charities, business and public services. However, there is also a substantial body of evidence warning us that leadership is not a generic collection of behaviours that can be transferred seamlessly from one context to another.
Effective and impactful leadership requires expertise in the work being led, alongside sufficiently developed mental models of the problems being navigated. It requires judgement, relationships, contextual understanding and an ability to recognise the complex interactions within an organisation or system. This is why some generic leadership exercises and professional development programmes will often be unimpactful or just risk annoying people. The idea that we can train somebody to be a ‘good leader’ in almost any context through a sequential set of modules on vision, communication, resilience and difficult conversations is increasingly difficult to defend.
For transparency, much of my own leadership experience has been within education, charity and place-based roles in areas of high need, and so this inevitably shapes both the evidence I have been exposed to, chosen to read and how I interpret it. Nevertheless, I think research across different sectors points towards several reasonably consistent characteristics of effective leadership in areas facing significant challenge. This is, at best, a summary of some of what I’ve found helpful….
- Effective leaders tend to diagnose before they act, rather than importing generic solutions or assuming that every organisational difficulty requires a new initiative. They seek to understand the problem, its causes, the local context and the interaction between different parts of the system before deciding what action is appropriate (Hawkins and James, 2018; Leithwood, Harris and Hopkins, 2019).
- Knowledge and expertise matter but effective leaders do not apply either mechanically. They understand the core work of their office or organisation, recognise the principles underlying effective practice and use adaptive judgement to decide when an established approach should be applied, altered or abandoned altogether (Sternberg, 2005; Goodall and Bäker, 2015).
- Effective leaders seek clarity and protect a specific (and limited) number of priorities. In pressured environments, leadership is partly an exercise in helping others to make sense of complexity, while protecting teams from an endless stream of competing demands and short-lived priorities. If everything is a priority then nothing really is (Leithwood et al., 2010; Leithwood, Sun and Pollock, 2017).
- Perhaps most importantly, effective leadership builds collective capacity rather than dependence on a heroic individual. Responsibility is distributed to where the relevant knowledge, capability and relationships sit, while leaders work across professional and organisational boundaries to leave people more capable of responding to the next challenge themselves. Put bluntly, there is no scope for superhero or ego drives of leadership (Day et al 2014; West et al 2014).
But all of this requires a culture in which people can raise concerns, question assumptions and acknowledge uncertainty without humiliation or blame. Sometimes this is referred to as belonging, but I think it is more nuanced and complex than this term is sometimes used. At its best, it makes purposeful challenge, honest feedback and shared accountability more possible, because people are less likely to conceal emerging problems or pretend that everything is fine (Edmondson, 1999; O’Donovan and McAuliffe, 2020). Also worth stressing that good or effective leadership also treats implementation as a process of learning, feedback and adaptation rather than a launch event (or incoming PM speech!). Leaders pay attention to how work is being experienced by staff, communities and service users, and they judge progress through changing behaviour, practice and outcomes rather than through attendance figures, positive feedback forms or the slickness of the original announcement (Arthur et al., 2003; Sharples, Albers and Fraser, 2018).
My point is that we should be cautious about assuming that a new leader will automatically bring new impact, especially when we have not properly considered the expertise, knowledge and approach that the role requires. Leadership has to always be bigger than the personality or portfolio of one person, however senior or visible that individual may be.
Is being dull really a leadership diagnosis?
During a recent Radio 5 Live interview, I recoiled as listeners called Nicky Campbell to explain why they believed Keir Starmer needed to leave as PM and why the country needed a different leader. What followed was a succession of personal observations about the outgoing Prime Minister lacking animation, charisma and excitement. I do not expect members of the public phoning a radio programme to arrive with a carefully researched framework for UK leadership, but I do wonder whether our public and private conversations might ask more meaningful questions than whether a leader appears sufficiently dynamic.
Character and communication undoubtedly matter, and I think they long have in leadership discussions. Integrity, judgement and the ability to bring people with you are all part of leadership. However, personality is not policy, and charisma is certainly not an implementation plan in my experience of educational or charity leadership. The rapid turnover of PMs in recent years makes it difficult to believe that our difficulties can be explained only by repeatedly selecting the wrong individual. To put that into perspective for a moment…
- Past five years: The UK will have had 5 Prime Ministers (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and the incoming one…
- Past decade: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak Keir Starmer and the incoming one….
- Since the conventional beginning of the office in 1721: 58 individuals, from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer. Walpole is generally treated as the first Prime Minister, although the role evolved gradually and the title was not formally recognised until 1905.
Perhaps the last decade instability tells us something about the wider political system, the expectations attached to national leadership and our tendency to place structural problems on the shoulders of one person or office before expressing surprise when that person cannot resolve them. Rather than asking only whether we have finally found the right leader, we might need to ask what kind of knowledge, capability and character the role now demands, what conditions are necessary for that person to lead effectively and what we actually expect them to accomplish. I’d like to think that we have a stronger blueprint for that since the 1700s….
For me, a sustained commitment to and reduction in child poverty should sit close to the top of that list of things needed. I’m not the only one surely.
What is our collective hymn?
Many readers of a certain age may remember the primary school hall banger One More Step, I still recall singing alongside my school pals “And it’s from the old I travel to the new, keep me travelling along with you.”
There is something understandably attractive about the new. A new leader arrives untainted by previous decisions, carrying fresh energy, fresh language and the possibility of a reset. Even those of us who are naturally cautious about change can appreciate the appeal of beginning again, especially when the present feels difficult or disappointing. I have witnessed similar patterns in education. Poor outcomes and weakened organisational performance can quickly become attached to the legacy of a previous or existing Headteacher, while the appointment of a new leader is presented as the moment a school will begin travelling towards improvement. The uniform might be changed, the behaviour policy rewritten and laminated, the vision statement revised, and a new dawn announced with enthusiasm. The past is criticised partly to make the present appear more hopeful, while visible changes provide reassurance that something different is happening.
Some of these changes may be sensible, and there are undoubtedly circumstances in which new leadership is both necessary and beneficial. However, schools and communities are more complicated than the assumption that replacing the person at the top will automatically alter the conditions beneath them. I have previously written about the cautionary tale of the Super Head. A study by the Centre for High Performance followed 160 academies over five years and found that, while high-profile turnaround leaders could sometimes produce short-term improvements in examination outcomes, their departure could also leave schools facing falling performance and significant financial difficulties.
Much like an incoming leader speech or new manifesto launch, these interventions sometimes created an impressive initial spectacle while failing to build the capacity required for sustained improvement. The hero head myth suggests that school improvement depends largely on will, personality and the successful transplantation of strategies used elsewhere. A sufficiently dynamic person can supposedly arrive, bypass complexity and fix the school or community. From my own experience of leading and working in complex contexts, I have come to see this as a fundamental misunderstanding of leadership and of place. It also explains why leaders can rarely lift a model from one school or community and expect it to work seamlessly in another.
School improvement and community transformation seldom follow a predictable, linear route. Sir David Carter and Laura McInerney explore this particularly well in Leading Academy Trusts: ‘Why Some Fail, but Most Don’t,’ showing how organisational improvement is shaped by history, context, people, capacity and the quality of implementation. If there were a simple and ready-to-use blueprint for turning around a struggling school or community, every organisation would be applying it and government departments would be able to make improvement look remarkably straightforward. That is not the reality most of us recognise.
As Hawkins and James argue, schools and other settings are complex systems rather than machines in which a faulty component can be replaced to produce a predictable outcome. In these environments or offices, one decision can have several intended and unintended consequences, while the effect of an action depends on relationships, history, capacity and local conditions. You do not entirely control a school, a community or a country; you navigate it. That navigation requires deep knowledge, humility and a willingness to learn when the original diagnosis proves incomplete. A new leader is not going to travel from the old to the new without it.
Have we forgotten anything?
In my experience, a change of leadership can create institutional and organisational amnesia. Incoming leaders understandably want to establish their own authority, bring in trusted colleagues and articulate a clear set of priorities. However, this can mean that existing work is paused, repackaged or moved towards the periphery while everybody waits to understand what the new person wants.
But these delays are not experienced equally. Families with savings, secure housing, reliable transport and strong support networks may be able to absorb a period of political uncertainty in communities right. Yet families already making daily choices between food, heating, travel and hidden school costs have far less room to manoeuvre. Across the communities I serve, poverty is neither abstract nor marginal. It can mean a child sleeping without a suitable bed, a parent or carer missing a meal so that their children can eat, a family unable to afford the transport costs attached to an opportunity, or a young person quietly excluding themselves from an activity because they know money is tight at home.
It is also important to remember that many children growing up in poverty live in working households. In the communities I directly serve in the Tees Valley, around 65% of children in poverty are from working families. This is not a simple story about parental ambition, effort or responsibility. It reflects a combination of low income, insecure employment, housing costs, childcare, limited transport, uneven access to services and the geography of opportunity. As I wrote in a piece with the Sutton Trust, these nuances are not about talent either. They are about uneven investment, economic opportunity, transport, access to apprenticeships, early years provision and social infrastructure. The index research from Sutton Trust validates what our children experience daily, opportunity is not equally distributed.
The outgoing government has made significant commitments around child poverty, and those commitments should not be casually discarded simply because the person at the top has changed. Whatever one thinks of Starmer’s political record or legacy, the next PM will inherit responsibility not merely for the language of tackling poverty but for the implementation of policies intended to reduce it. Publication is not implementation, and an announcement does not become impact simply because it is accompanied by a press release and a photograph. A strategy improves children’s lives only when responsibilities are clear, resources reach the right places, different parts of the system work together and progress is examined honestly over time.
Critics might reasonably argue that a government cannot spend a year analysing every problem before taking action, I get this. They may also suggest that I am slightly bonkers for wanting as much attention given to an implementation plan, and accountability framework for child poverty as will inevitably be given to the presentation of the next PM and their successful appointment tour. However, families and children experiencing poverty do not have the luxury of waiting while a new leader creates a personal brand, reorganises government and considers which existing commitments they want to retain. Every day in which poverty is treated as peripheral has consequences for people already struggling.
I suspect the working families experiencing poverty in the communities I know are less concerned about whether the next PM appears more charismatic than the previous one and more concerned about whether wages will cover their costs, whether rent and childcare are affordable, whether public services are accessible and whether their children will have opportunities that currently feel beyond reach.
Can we be a bit more human?
My final reflection is simply a reminder that leadership remains a human response. Watching Starmer’s resignation speech left me feeling a bit sad. Whatever people think about his political decisions or record in office, we were watching a person express pride in having served while acknowledging that his time as Prime Minister had come to an end. He thanked his wife and spoke about wanting to commit more time to being a husband and father. I can relate to those responsibilities, despite never having had to carry the weight of the UK on my shoulders.
Education is also no stranger to high pressure and, at times, unpleasant forms of accountability. Leaders are expected to raise standards, improve outcomes, support staff, manage limited resources and safeguard children against a vast number of social and systemic inequalities. They are often asked to carry responsibility for problems they did not create and do not possess the power to solve alone. No human being is sufficiently expert, invulnerable or perfect to deliver everything expected from leadership. In the rush to talk about strength, charisma, animation and political instinct, it is worth remembering that history has provided plenty of leaders who possessed some of those characteristics but lacked integrity and humanity.
I appreciate that humanity cannot substitute for effective policy, although policy without humanity can quickly lose sight of the people it is intended to serve. By all means, take me to our new leader. Just do not ask me to believe that a new face behind the lectern is, by itself, a child poverty strategy. Our next Prime Minister will matter, but what matters more is whether the government they lead have and can use the knowledge, commitment and collective capacity to turn promises into changes that children and families can actually see and feel. Otherwise, we may be here again quicker than we realise.
Further reading and references:
· Arthur et al (2003) ‘Effectiveness of training in organizations: a meta-analysis of design and evaluation features’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(2)
· Carter and McInerney (2020) Leading Academy Trusts: Why Some Fail, but Most Don’t. Woodbridge: John Catt.
· Day et al (2014) ‘Advances in leader and leadership development: a review of 25 years of research and theory’, The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1)
· Edmondson (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2)
· EEF (2026) Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation. London: Education Endowment Foundation.
· Goodall and Bäker (2015) ‘A theory exploring how expert leaders influence performance in knowledge-intensive organizations’ (in Welpe et al Incentives and Performance: Governance of Research Organizations. Cham: Springer International Publishing)
· GOV UK (2026) Past Prime Ministers: Available here.
· Harris (2025) ‘What if opportunity never knocks?’, The Sutton Trust
· Hawkins and James (2018) ‘Developing a perspective on schools as complex, evolving, loosely linking systems’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 46(5)
· Hill et al (2016) ‘How to turn around a failing school’, Harvard Business Review
· Sutton Trust (2026) The Opportunity Index: The Geography of Opportunity and Social Mobility in England. London
· Leithwood et al (2008) ‘Seven strong claims about successful school leadership’, School Leadership & Management, 28(1)
· Leithwood et al (2020) ‘Seven strong claims about successful school leadership revisited’, School Leadership & Management, 40(1)
· O’Donovan and McAuliffe (2020) ‘A systematic review of factors that enable psychological safety in healthcare teams’, International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 32(4)
· Sternberg, R.J. (2005) ‘A model of educational leadership: wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized’, International Journal of Leadership in Education
· West et al (2014) Developing Collective Leadership for Health Care. London: The King’s Fund.
