Demand for care work intensified and extended during the pandemic and continues to the current day.' Care work’ refers to everything that schools do to support children’s emotional, social and physical well-being. Care-full leadership also covers support for staff in safe and professionally generative and rewarding workplaces. We understand care-full leadership, following Tronto (1998, 2015), to be work which combines (1) attentiveness, becoming aware of need; (2) responsibility, being willing to respond and take care of need; (3) competence, having the skills and knowledge to provide effective care; and (4) responsiveness, considering how others see their position and recognising the potential for the responsibilities of caring to be violated (1993). Our paper draws on a three-phase research project on school leaders’ work during and after lockdown (Greany et al., 2021, 2022, 2023). Our data includes two surveys (n=1491 and n=6057), leader interviews (n=101), stakeholder roundtables (n=9), and analysis of job advertisements. This research shows that during the pandemic there were considerable affective costs on school staff, with care leadership roles (pastoral, welfare and safeguarding) extended and disproportionately experienced by female members of staff. The situation is now critical. Escalating poverty has meant that care demands on schools serving poor communities have further increased, while a youth mental health crisis coupled with rising numbers of children with special needs places unprecedented demands on all schools. Our current four UK nations study of the sustainability of school leadership (https://sustainableschoolleadership.uk) suggests that the English performative and marketised education policy agenda is “care-less” rather than care-full (see Grummell et al., 2009, Lynch, 2010). Leaders must focus on teaching/learning and support students to excel in tests/exams and their school to excel in inspections. Escalating leader vacancies suggest that the predictions made in pandemic research – up to one in three of serving leaders in our studies – are now reality. Leaders argue that government needs to trust them and provide support and resources so that they can continue exercising care-full leadership of students, staff and themselves. This would promote well-being and encourage them to stay. We argue this means policymakers adopting Tronto’s four interlinked care practices. Provocatively, we suggest that the system could well learn about care-full leadership from its school leaders.

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