Career barriers and professional support: Perceptions of global majority trust leaders

QIAN LIU, GILLIAN KEIGHTLEY, CALUM DAVEY AND KAMAL BODHANKER, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TEACHING, UK Introduction  The lack of ethnic diversity across the teaching workforce in England remains a persistent issue (Sharp and Aston, 2024) and is particularly stark in school leadership. For example, in 2020/21, 86 per cent of schools in England had an all-white senior leadership team (Worth et al., 2022). Recent figures from the School Teacher Workforce (DfE, 2025) report that 91.8 per cent of headteachers are white British. Similarly, global majority leaders (i.e. those who self-identify as non-white or indigenous to the Global South or who have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’) (Campbell-Stephens, 2021) remain underrepresented in multi-academy trusts (MATs). A recent survey found that only 2.3 per cent of MAT chief executive officers (CEOs) with 15 or more academies came from the global majority (Dyson, 2024). Given increasing ethnic diversity among students (DfE, 2024), a m