Courageous leaders: Supporting and Celebrating LGBT School Leaders

It is estimated that there are 50,000 LGBT teachers in UK schools, yet very few openly LGBT teachers achieve school leadership roles (Lee, 2019a). This article draws on the work of Courageous Leaders, the UK’s only LGBT school leadership programme, and posits that the skills that LGBT teachers need to navigate the complexities of their hetero- and cis-normative school workplaces equip them with a distinct set of attributes that ideally place them to become excellent school leaders. Despite advances in equalities legislation, many LGBT teachers do not yet feel adequately protected in their school workplaces (Lee, 2019b). Schools are entrenched in the predetermined categorisations of male and female. In pupils, this manifests in the toys in the Reception class home corner, right through to the expectations of school leavers at their prom (Robinson, 2002). In school staff, the rigid binaries of male or female are evident in the expectation for pupils to address them as Mr, Mrs or Miss, and the way in which pupils are grouped for activities according to gender.