Where are all the headteachers?

A goodly portion have taken themselves off to the tranquil golden beaches of early retirement. Others resign in search of a job that won't require so much in the way of daily battles with kids, parents and the government for such basic requirements as respect, support and adequate funding.

But the real concern, as laid out in the report published today by the Association of School and College Leaders, is that many potential heads are taking themselves out of the running long before they can be put in charge of a school. The statistics show a looming leadership crisis - headteacher applications have been falling for years and now one in three jobs have to be readvertised because schools fail to fill the posts, one in five schools is without a permanent head and one in eight secondary schools has to advertise for a new head each year.

Why the unpopularity of a post that can carry remuneration of more than £80,000 a year? "Where do I start?" says John Dunford of the ASCL, with a laugh that is not so much wry as mirthless. "The two main problems [with the job] are over-accountability and bureaucracy, which have both mushroomed in recent years. If you think about the number of different agencies a headteacher has to answer to - the government, Ofsted, the local authority, the Learning Skills Council and so on - it's not just a simple line of accounting to your governing body any more."

Allied to that, of course, is the amount of paperwork, which seems to be increasing at an exponential rate. "They are having to spend far too much time on form-filling, bidding for different pots of money, responding to centrally-driven target-setting regimes instead of being given enough freedom and flexibility to be able to move their own school in the direction it needs to go," says Dunford.

Headteachers are being lost in thickets of frustration, buried under paper avalanches and diving into caves to avoid professional death by a thousand cuts. It's everything you may have hoped for as a 14-year-old seething with resentment at being landed with detention, but as with so many childish dreams, it looks a lot less satisfactory when it actually comes to pass.