“Polycrisis” may be the most apt neologism of the 2020s – and a concept that could increasingly dominate the headspace of school leaders.
The idea of mounting and proliferating crises is not a new one – as anyone who’s been paying even the most casual attention to the news of late will testify – but school leaders warn that it could have a profound impact on them in the years ahead.
Headteachers have long been telling us how their job has already changed beyond recognition over the past few decades, expanding to take on all manner of new responsibilities and complexities. And never a day seems to go by without a call for schools to take a lead in sorting out the latest moral panic afflicting wider society.
In a piece for Tes, School Leaders Scotland’s David Barnett and Alison Mitchell point out that not only is it a time of “significant reform across curriculum, qualifications and assessment”, but also an era in which the social and political landscape is “turbulent”. (Less measured commentators might choose a more alarmist adjective here.)
The upshot is that the school leaders’ role has “grown significantly in scale, intensity and complexity”.
More and more, schools must “respond to global, intersecting ‘polycrises’ that manifest within their own contexts and communities”. Choose your own example, but the first that came to mind was that TV depictions of toxic masculinity – notably Louis Theroux’s recent documentary and the 2025 drama Adolescence – immediately lead to demands on schools to deal with a welter of related issues.
This all happens, says the SLS piece, at a time of “rising social and emotional needs”, “limited or no external agency support”, and “precarious local budgets and resources”.
Teachers and school leaders have a deep sense of duty to pupils, but the flipside is that they will put up with a lot – often to the detriment of their own health and wellbeing – in the knowledge that so many people are relying on them. And now we are at a point where it appears routine to describe so many aspects of education as being at “breaking point”.
The end of term offers some respite, but as an election approaches we must hope that politicians get to grips with all the polycrises – and not just those in far-off lands.
*The Tes Scotland newsletter is taking a two-week break for the school holidays and will return on Thursday 23 April.
Henry Hepburn
Scotland Editor, Tes
Bluesky: @henryhepburn.bsky.social
Twitter/X: @Henry_Hepburn
