Session Information
26 SES 12 A, System Leadership and School Self-improvement
Symposium
Contribution
There has been an accelerating policy shift in England since 2015 towards school-led improvement for state maintained schools, based on the principle of greater autonomy. This government strategy has seen the rapid and further intended growth of academies, funded directly from central government, with no statutory responsible for accountability to local government. This radical policy has fundamentally changed the concepts of school governance and leadership within the country and the concept of system leadership that was prevalent during the time of the Coalition Government of 2010-15.
System leadership, as it was conceived in this previous administration, was based on the development and deployment of national and local leaders of education. National leaders of education (NLEs) were identified as strong school leaders with experience of effectively supporting schools in challenging circumstances and in need of significant improvement as identified by the national and regional authorities (National College for Teaching and Leadership [NCTL], 2014). Local leaders of education (LLEs) additionally provided a range of school-to-school support and coaching and mentoring for head teachers under the direction of the NCTL. More recent developments have seen the emergence of Teaching School Alliances, however, based on strong schools led by strong leaders, that work with others to provide high-quality training, development and support to new and experienced school staff. As a consequence, the NCTL will no longer designate LLEs, and will instead give teaching schools the freedom to recruit and designate school leaders in this role (NCTL, 2017).
Whilst the NCTL thus will continue to designate NLEs in the quest to provide sufficient high quality school-to-school support, the policy direction has shifted toward school-led improvement and has thus redefined the concept of system leadership. Central to this shift are multi-academy trusts which correspond to the general tenets of systems theory, which are based on the principle of self-regulating systems formed of a configuration of parts connected and joined together by a web of relationships. In this model groups of schools are to be joined through the establishment of a trust which oversees the management of their prescribed educational provision through a corporate structure. The nature of the national school system, with its concomitant structures of governance, leadership and management, is thus undergoing fundamental change which means that the direction and control of state maintained schools is now to be enacted by these trusts within a fairly loose accountability structure from central government.
References
NCTL (2014). National leaders of education: A guide. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-leaders-of-education-a-guide-for-potential-applicants#what-an-nle-does, accessed 20 January, 2017. NCTL (2017). Local leaders of education (LLE). Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/local-leaders-of-education-lle, accessed 20 January, 2017.
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