Effective Leadership: In Search of the Holy Grail | Governors' Agenda

During the last half-century, the concept of leadership and management in schools has morphed from being something fairly ad hoc in the late 1960s to becoming one of the most centralised and controlled features of the educational landscape in the United Kingdom.

During the period following the promulgation of the famous Butler (Education) Act in 1944 to the mid-1980s, the term leadership was interchangeable with administration. The time was one where education was described as a national system locally administered. The key players were local educational authorities and schools who operated in a culture underpinned by the bureaucratic-professional modus operandi.

The values that drove the system ? especially with the creation of the comprehensive school ? were those of equity and social justice.? Local Authority officers were drawn from a cadre of headteachers and senior teachers in schools.? But training was one associated with serendipity rather than planned and fashioned by the needs of the service.? I can recall how, in the early 1980s when I moved from being headteacher of an independent primary school to that of Assistant Education Officer in a local authority, I was out of my depth and, unsure about how and where I could learn ? on and off the job.? I bumbled and bumped along at the bottom of knowledge and understanding of what my function was, what I should do and how to become effective.??

When Kenneth Baker pushed through the Education Reform Act 1988, the expectations on school leaders became more explicit. There was an increasing focus on the identification of standards and competencies. Assessment centres mushroomed.?? In the early 1990s, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the National Development Centre (NDC) were established. The concept of management ? as opposed to administration ? took shape.? Local authorities were given control of funds to provide for the development of management and leadership for teachers.

The Labour Party came into government in 1997, following which it built on the Conservative paradigm of school autonomy and accountability adding the ingredient of ?leadership? to help force speedier improvements in performance and effectiveness in the public sector ? especially in schools.? To accelerate its plans, the government established the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) in 2000.? The NCSL created a development framework for leadership with four programmes ? Leading from the Middle, Leadership Pathways for Senior Leaders, the National Professional Qualifications for Headteachers (NPQH) ? later taken over by the TTA ? and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (NPSH.)

In his seminal article for Educational Management, Administration and Leadership (EMAL) ? Volume 40 No 5 September 2012 ? Tim Simkins, Professor of Educational Management at Sheffield Hallam University, described the three perspectives of leadership that emerged over this period ? the functionalist, constructivist and critical.

Initially, leadership was seen as essentially functional.? Good leadership had objectively determined and agreed targets ? defined competencies, qualities and skills ?that effective performance requires and best practice sought?. Researchers explored ?the causal relationships between practices and outcomes in order that purposes could be better achieved?.? There were problems with this model of leadership because the perspective diverted attention from the important management development processes that included unanticipated outcomes and informal, more covert episodes, and ignored major ethical and moral questions.

These problems resulted in the birth of the constructivist approach, which aimed to resolve the dilemmas.? The new approach conceived blended learning which combined face-to-face and on-line provision, supplemented by in-school activities.? The constructivist model spawned a cadre of coaches and mentors, generally ?expert? and recently-retired (and sometimes redundant ? where schools were closed) headteachers.

Leadership and management developed a second constructivist, development strand.?? Role transition, career development and identity formation became as important as training leaders for school improvement.?? The concept of distributed leadership took shape.?? The successful headteacher was not viewed as a mover and shaker ? a charismatic, miracle-worker ? in the way in which Michael Gove views Michael Wilshaw (HMCI) ? as ?my hero?.?? The interactions between the individual leadership trainee, the programme (generally mounted by the NCSL) and the school became messy as tensions grew.

In an attempt to resolve the complexity, a critical perspective of leadership brought the important issue of values into the frame.? Questions were asked.

(i)???????? What are the purposes of education?

(ii)??????? Where should power be reposed ? the government, the school, the community, Ofsted, the local authority, universities, the profession, private organisation, private individual ? or is there any room for power-sharing?

(iii)?????? What are the levers and mechanism through which control is achieved?

In the current set-up, the piper government controls the funding and calls the tune.?? It promotes an educational market, but places pressures on schools and local authorities to respond to central initiatives and demands ? not least through Ofsted.?? Even the NCSL, which was created by Labour to operate at arm?s length from the Department for Education, has become, from April 2012, an arm of government.

The government?s agenda to create a nation where the overwhelming number of institutions are academies and free schools is an open secret. The overt justification for this is to liberate them from the fetters of local authorities and to promote a ?self-improving school system?, according to Professor David Hargreaves, Associate Director of Development and Research at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. The covert motive, according to critics, is to control schools from the centre creating the mirage of freedom.?? Teaching schools ? which must work with the universities and other schools (of excellence) ? are selected to act as individual agents to develop the new, central model of leaders at all levels. Also, the NCSL has nominated the headteachers of outstanding (in Ofsted parlance) schools for their capacity to act as agents.

The scene is evolving because at this stage we are uncertain about how the tensions between the centralisation of power in the DfE and NCSL will square with the devolution of powers to schools ? in particular, academies and free schools.

Despite the above developments, the functional message of schools dominates.?? Children are regimented to pass tests and examinations so that their schools feature highly in league tables and the nation must do well to dominate the international league tables when it comes to the OECD?s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS).

Denis Mongon and Charlie Leadbeater in High Level Leadership; Improving Outcomes in Educational Settings (2012) described a study they conducted on the headteachers of 10 very good schools in the country.? They discovered that there were five critical ingredients for their successes in increasing the capacity of those who worked in and benefited from their schools.

(i)???????? These headteachers improved the core activity, teaching and learning, measured by educational attainment.

(ii)??????? They drew on and enhanced capacity from within the community.

(iii)?????? They developed the ability of immediate, social networks and families to improve pupil attendance and attitudes towards learning.

(iv)?????? They generated activities which had an indirect impact on educational attainment and a positive impact on other outcomes for the pupils.

(v)??????? They made resources available for community activity building community capacity.

The headteachers made it clear to the researchers that without good teaching and learning ? the first feature ? the other four would be stillborn.

The Ofsted framework for inspection ? which focuses on teaching and learning ? pays little (if any) attention to the other four relevant activities.? Timescales are driven by political imperatives and do not relate to the everyday and long-term experiences of schools, families and communities.

Successful leaders, it seems, run with the grain of government diktat but go much further by embracing other strategies that involve their governors, staff, parents, community, and, of course, the young people whom they serve. Perhaps this is the secret, the Holy Grail, of good school leadership which both, governors and headteachers would do well to nurture.

Source: http://www.governorsagenda.co.uk/?p=743

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