Session Information
26 SES 12 A, System Leadership and School Self-improvement
Symposium
Contribution
The paper is based on research conducted between 2009–2016 to gain insights into the characteristics and the impact of evolving models of system leadership. At the start of the study, this policy was seen as a solution to the challenge of reforming education and was also welcomed by headteachers as acknowledgement of their expertise and evidence of a move towards professional self-regulation (Jopling et al., 2006; Dunford, 2007; Hill and Matthews, 2008, 2010). The aim of the study was to track the development of system leadership through investigation of specific ‘cases’, to answer five research questions. Firstly, the study characterised the governance environment(s) which provides the context for such roles. Secondly, it examined what happens when policy becomes practice. Thirdly, the study captured what each party learnt through the interactions. Fourthly, the research explored how the roles are enacted. Finally, the analysis addressed issues raised about the contested nature of the governance environment in England since 1997. This study offers a theoretical means of assessing how far the reality of the use of headteachers to lead system reform has matched the rhetoric that this heralded a new era in governance – an era which was to be defined by the devolvement of power and decision-making to professionals. Insights came from three data sources: interviews with system leaders, headteachers they support and those ‘managing’ this activity at a mediating or policy level; analyses of policy documents; performance data of the schools led by the respondents. Phase One consisted of interviews with five system leaders and five policy makers/implementers; Phase Two interviews with headteachers the system leaders worked with; Phase Three a further interview with each system leader who formed the centre of the cases; Phase Four update telephone interviews with the system leaders and headteachers. Other primary data included policy documents and published performance data of the schools involved. To address the research questions, the study brought together literatures on governance, leadership and school improvement, to form a heuristic adapted from Newman (2001). Interview data were used to situate the perceptions of each respondent along the two axes of the heuristic to illustrate how far the respondents perceived the system leadership roles as centrally directed or professionally autonomous (the vertical axis) and whether they felt system leaders worked in a directive style or distributed leadership (the horizontal axis).
References
Dunford, J. (2007). School leadership: The challenges being faced by English secondary schools, Centre for Strategic Education Seminar Series 168, Centre for Strategic Education. Hill, R. and Matthews, P. (2008). Schools leading schools: The power and potential of National Leaders of Education. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership. Hill, R. and Matthews, P. (2010). Schools leading schools II: The growing impact of National Leaders of Education. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership. Hopkins, D. (2009). The emergence of system leadership. Nottingham: National College for School Leadership. Jopling, M., Ballantyne, P., Jackson, D., Temperley J. and Lieberman, A. (2006). System leadership in action: Leading networks, leading the system, Nottingham: National College for School Leadership Newman, J. (2001). Modernising governance: New Labour, policy and society, London: SAGE.
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