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Mr Nigel Pressnell The Arnewood School England, United Kingdom
The purpose of this paper is to explore, from a personal perspective, the role of the contemporary school leader and put forward a case for what the role might become in the future.
In this paper I shall argue for what I believe are the needs of future leaders and discuss how we should prepare them. I shall explore what I believe are the challenges facing future school leaders and how key stakeholders can make the role of senior leader more attractive. I shall consider how we can develop leadership capacity in schools and the motivation for doing so. Finally, I shall make the case for distributed leadership, as I see it from my own position as Technology College Director in a UK specialist school.
My intention is to make connections or illustrate contrasts where I can, from my experience of teaching, both in the UK and Australia, over a number of years. Educationally, the two countries have many similarities (see, for example, their relative PISA rankings), whilst equally, there are some tangible differences that are worthy of exploration, albeit from an anecdotal perspective.
Let us consider what the current role of a school leader is and what the current trends lead us to believe the role might evolve into.
We expect much of headteachers, and sometimes too much. It strikes me as perfectly reasonable that headteachers should be judged as lead professionals and be held accountable for spending the public purse in maintaining and raising academic performance. However, I must admit I find it bizarre that UK headteachers could, in theory, find themselves arrested for ' aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring ' , which is an offence under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, should they do nothing to prevent children kissing in the playground or at the school disco (letter to the Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2004).
For much of the time I have been in teaching, conventional wisdom has suggested that it is the headteacher who is the single most significant factor in determining a school ' s success. Whilst no doubt helping to raise those headteachers in successful schools to a status worthy nowadays of a mention in the Queen ' s Honours List, it has been a hard cross to bear for headteachers in those schools judged as failures. Some headteachers with a poor report from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) have paid with their careers.
Yet the value of the Ofsted inspection process has been questionable in terms of its effectiveness in promoting school improvement. It will be interesting to see what outcomes the new inspection framework will produce. The new emphasis placed on verifying a school ' s judgements of its own performance certainly seems more likely to stimulate greater self-evaluation, whilst the shorter inspection notice period of a few days will reduce pre-inspection anxiety for many colleagues and arguably give a more accurate snapshot of a school ' s strengths and weaknesses.
The current role of headteacher is evolving from a traditional one, where a single individual is considered to be the prime factor in determining a school ' s success, as judged by external agencies, to one where the headteacher is thought of as being key amongst a wider professional leadership cadre.
It is the headteacher who, through distributed leadership, is responsible for ensuring that the needs of the learners ' community are being served. There are those who would say that, pragmatically, this has to be the logical move in a scenario where headship is not the popular career path it once seemed. In the UK, as elsewhere, we cannot sustain a situation where the number of applicants applying for the most important positions within our education framework can frequently be counted on the fingers of one hand. Given that this is an untenable situation and one that shows little likelihood of immediate change, we must clearly determine new, and presumably more effective, models of school leadership.
Let us then think what the needs of future leaders are and how these might be met. In some respects, the first part of this question is easier to determine than the second. It could be argued that the prime motivator for the transformational leader is school improvement. Educational research continues to provide clear guidance on good practice, which illustrates the conditions that need to be sustained to allow for whole school improvement. We know, for example, that successful systemic school improvement programmes:
( School Improvement: What ' s in it for schools?, Alma Harris, Routledge Falmer)
School leaders need to be equipped with the skill sets to deliver the conditions for successful improvement, whether these are instigated at a systemic or at a local level. The National Professional Qualification for Headship has gained significant currency as the entry benchmark qualification by which those eligible by prior experience can become a headteacher in the UK.
The programme, which even in its fast-track form can take several months, covers varied competency domains that include strategic direction and development of the school; teaching and learning; leading and managing staff; and efficient and effective deployment of staff and resources.
However, this by itself will not be sufficient, even if the funding of this programme is sustained by future governments. Certainly, within the UK, increasing numbers of headteachers are reaching retirement age and the next generation of headteachers seems worryingly absent, at a time when a clear redefinition of the limits of responsibility for headteachers, within the wider community context, is needed.
Too often we hear that ' the school ' (and by implication, the school ' s leadership) is ' to blame ' for all of society ' s ills. It is slim comfort that other social institutions, from the police to the Church, are also unfairly blamed for these social problems. My personal experience of Australian society is that it still maintains a healthy degree of tolerance and, on occasions, deference to authority that arguably ought to be cherished.
Developing leadership capacity requires a common purpose to secure an ethos in which the culture of a school expects that each person takes responsibility for their own actions and those of their peers. This is readily achievable in an environment where the vision is a shared one but securing support for this principle takes courage and belief that the outcomes are going to improve the school ' s performance. Like any change, it requires its champions and, in this context, the champions can be found at all levels of the school ' s organisation.
At our school we have a group identified as ' emergent leaders ' . These staff are coached by the headteacher and other colleagues in the characteristics they need to develop, in order to maximise their leadership potential either within our own school or in a future appointment. It is little surprise that, amongst this group of young men and women, are colleagues who have already received regional recognition with ' Teaching Awards ' (a national awards programme to celebrate outstanding teaching achievements) or featured in Department for Education and Science (DfES) case study DVDs that are distributed to other schools as exemplar material.
Within too many schools I would argue that the concept of distributed leadership still remains a rigorous challenge. Certainly within some schools, there are those who are happiest with what they see as a ' them and us ' between school management and classroom teachers. This notwithstanding, there are numerous examples of school leaders who, by adopting the mantle of ' lead learner ' , improve the quality of provision in a school, through encouraging action-based research into teaching and learning. In networking with Australian colleagues, I know, too, that there is some variability in leadership style between individual schools and systems. However, my limited experience of Australian schools is that there is a generally strong professional collegiality, for example, demonstrated in peer mentoring, the quality of professional dialogue and the sharing of professional practice through professional development that is not yet universally evident in UK schools.
In this paper I have presented a very personal view of educational leadership and some of the challenges and opportunities faced by schools. I make no attempt to suggest that what is offered has any great intellectual or academic merit; however it is offered to stimulate debate and discussion. Educational leadership, for all its challenges, is still a tremendous privilege and much of what makes it so interesting is its evolving nature and complexity.
Whilst society in this country and abroad expects much of headteachers, we have become more sophisticated in the support that we offer them through professional development. The new agenda for school leaders has to be the way in which schools can increase their effectiveness and maintain the support of their stakeholder communities. Distributed leadership is not the abdication of a headteacher ' s responsibility but the next step in extending leadership beyond the scope of a minority, for the benefit of all.
Mr Nigel Pressnell is Technology College Director at The Arnewood School, in southern England, in the UK. The Arnewood School is one of the still relatively few UK schools with an established laptop program and, as a Microsoft Education Partner, is unusual in delivering both mainstream and vendor qualifications to its pupils. The Arnewood School is one of six UK schools and three Australian schools in the Effective eTeaching and eLearning Networked Learning Community, which is funded by the National College for School Leadership.
Prior to his current appointment, Nigel Pressnell worked at John Paul College, in Brisbane, Australia, supporting the school ' s innovative use of notebook computers with over 1,800 students and teachers. It was here that he became aware of the potential for ICT to transform education, from the point of view of the teacher and learner, and especially to personalise learning.
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