Ministers must stop dumping new policies on schools or face a national shortage of headteachers, a report has warned.
The study found widespread hostility to the idea of replacing headteachers with "chief executives" who have business expertise.
Commissioned by the NUT, the University of Buckingham report said the overall message from heads to the Government was: "Get out of our faces." Primary teachers were reluctant to apply for jobs as heads because the pay was not high enough.
And secondary school teachers were put off by the increased workload and threat of being sacked after an Ofsted inspection.
NUT general secretary Steve Sinnott said a constant stream of Government initiatives gave heads an "unending" task. "Recruiting from outside the profession is not the answer," he said.
"Moves to divorce the leadership of schools from teaching and learning and replacing heads with chief executives will make things worse. If we are to avoid a severe crisis in recruiting new heads, the Government must recognise its responsibility for creating the headteacher recruitment crisis.
"The Government must also look at ensuring proper salary levels for primary heads and improving the work-life balance of all, rather than just paying lip service to the idea."
The report, written by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson of Buckingham's Centre for Education and Employment Research, said any recruitment crisis was "Government-made".
It found that independent schools did not seem to be suffering the same difficulties with recruiting new heads as those in the state sector. This was attributed to the "relative freedom from Government interference" which private schools enjoy.
One independent school head said: "An awful lot of people I know in the maintained sector seem to exist in a state of barely controlled paranoia about where the next raft of legislative punishment is coming from and what they might have forgotten that is going to get them into trouble."
The academics conducted in-depth interviews with staff at 36 state secondary schools, 19 state primaries, and 12 top independent schools in England and Wales.
Nearly all the heads thought that to do the job successfully you had to recruit from among those with classroom experience.
Unions and Government bodies have all warned of impending problems in recruiting new headteachers, with many current school leaders set to retire and a dwindling supply of future candidates. The report said there was evidence to support concerns of growing recruitment problems.
A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills defended the Government's record and insisted that vacancies for headships remained "low and stable".
He said: "Less than 1% of schools at any time will have a head vacancy and even then there will always be an acting or temporary head in place. No school should ever be without a head.
"We recognise that leading a school is both a rewarding and challenging role and that is why we are paying heads in inner London up to a six-figure salary."
He said ministers had "slashed" the red tape which schools face and given heads control over budgets over several years.
