Perimenopause for School Principals: Leading Through a Transition Nobody Talks About

Responsible for Everyone. But Who Is Responsible for You?

A school principal's day rarely belongs to them. From the first parent email in the morning to the last safeguarding concern in the afternoon, you are the person everyone comes to. You set the tone, make the calls, hold the accountability, and somehow manage to do all of this while also being warm, visible, and consistent for the children in your care.

Perimenopause can arrive in the middle of all of that and simply refuse to be ignored. Hot flashes during staff briefings. Brain fog at the exact moment a parent meeting requires your sharpest thinking. Mood instability on the day a staff conflict needs calm, skillful leadership. Sleep disruption that leaves you building a school community on four hours and willpower.

The challenge of perimenopause for school leaders is not just the symptoms themselves. It is the cultural expectation that leaders are visibly fine, reliably capable, and personally infallible. That expectation is hard enough on a good day. Navigating it during a significant hormonal transition requires a more honest approach.

The Demands of School Leadership and What They Cost During Perimenopause

School leadership is emotionally and cognitively demanding in a specific way. The work involves sustained professional judgment across an enormous range of situations: personnel management, curriculum oversight, safeguarding, budget responsibility, community relations, and the pastoral care of hundreds of children. It is not one job. It is many jobs at once.

Brain fog is one of the most disruptive perimenopause symptoms for school principals. Working memory, the ability to hold multiple pieces of information in mind while using them, is exactly what school leadership demands. When that starts slipping, the effects are noticeable: forgetting a conversation you had two days ago with a staff member, losing the thread of a complex parental complaint, walking into a room and forgetting what you came for.

Emotional regulation is the other key area. School leadership involves managing other people's strong emotions regularly. Parents who are angry or frightened. Staff who are overwhelmed or resentful. Governors who are questioning your decisions. Perimenopause can lower the threshold for emotional reactivity, making it harder to stay measured in the face of provocation, and harder to recover quickly when a difficult situation has passed.

The stress of school leadership also feeds back into symptom severity. High cortisol from sustained professional stress amplifies hot flashes, worsens sleep, and increases mood variability. The job and the symptoms can intensify each other in a loop that is important to recognise.

Managing Symptoms During the School Day

Hot flashes during staff meetings, parent consultations, or school assemblies are a particular source of anxiety for many school leaders. The visibility of the role means there is less room to quietly manage without anyone noticing.

Practical approaches include keeping a glass of cold water on the table in every meeting, positioning yourself near a window or exit in large gatherings, and wearing easily adjusted layers. A small desk fan in your office is not conspicuous and makes a real difference during the afternoon when symptoms often intensify.

For assemblies and large events, controlled breathing is your most accessible tool. Slow, deliberate exhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system and can reduce the peak intensity of a flash. Practising this response means it is available when you need it.

For the brain fog days, over-preparation is protective. Brief written agendas for even informal meetings, a running note of commitments and follow-ups that you check and update daily, and a structured end-of-day review of what tomorrow requires all provide scaffolding when recall is less reliable than usual.

Leading a Team While Managing Your Own Health

School principals often model professional behaviour for their entire staff. The way you respond to difficulty, ask for help, manage your own health, and talk about wellbeing sets a precedent for the culture of the school.

This creates both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to perimenopause. The challenge is the visibility. The opportunity is that normalising open, honest conversations about health in midlife is something school leaders are particularly well-placed to do.

You do not need to disclose your symptoms to your whole staff. But if the right moment arises, and for many school leaders it does, a matter-of-fact acknowledgment that perimenopause is a real professional and health challenge that affects a significant portion of the female workforce sends a signal that your school takes women's health seriously. That signal matters for your staff, for parents, and for older pupils who are watching how you handle things.

For practical disclosure, a conversation with your deputy or line manager about needing some scheduling flexibility during a difficult phase is a reasonable and proportionate step. Many school leaders describe their deputy as their first and most important support in managing this.

Governors, Accountability, and Professional Identity

Many school principals describe a specific anxiety about perimenopause and professional accountability. The fear that symptoms visible to governors or school improvement officers could be read as a leadership deficit, rather than a health condition affecting a normal life stage.

This fear is understandable, and it is not entirely unfounded given the cultures of some governing bodies. But it is also worth examining carefully. Governors who are worth working with understand that school leaders are human. A frank, brief conversation with the chair of governors about managing a health condition, framed in terms of what support you might need and how you are managing it, is a sign of maturity and self-awareness, not weakness.

In many countries, employment law protections for health conditions mean that employers, including governing bodies, have responsibilities toward you as an employee. Knowing what those protections are in your context is worthwhile. Your local authority HR service, if you work in a maintained school, should be able to advise you. Academies and independent schools have their own HR processes.

Your professional identity has been built over years of real achievement. Perimenopause is a chapter within that career, not a disqualification from it.

Protecting Your Own Health as a Non-Negotiable

School principals are notoriously poor at looking after themselves. The role demands a giving orientation, and the cultural expectation is that the principal solves problems rather than having them. This is the pattern that perimenopause most directly challenges.

Protecting sleep is the most important thing you can do for both symptom management and leadership performance. Cognitive function, emotional regulation, and decision-making all depend on adequate sleep, and perimenopause already disrupts it. Treating sleep as a non-negotiable professional requirement, not a personal indulgence, is justified.

Regular physical activity supports mood stability, sleep quality, and stress resilience. Even thirty minutes of movement most days makes a measurable difference. School leaders who exercise regularly describe it as protective for the emotional demands of the role.

Seeking a clinical assessment from a GP or menopause specialist is important and often delayed too long. Hormone therapy and other treatments have substantial evidence and can significantly reduce the cognitive and physical symptoms that are affecting your work. You deserve access to those options.

Using PeriPlan to track your symptoms, sleep, and energy patterns over several weeks gives you and your provider a clear and accurate picture of your experience. That data is more useful in a medical consultation than a memory-based summary.

You take care of hundreds of people every day. Taking care of yourself is not selfish. It is what makes the rest possible.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider about your specific situation.