Session Information
26 SES 12 A, Reframing Leadership and Leading in Education: Diverse Responses from Scholars Across the Field (Part 1)
Symposium to be continued in 26 SES 13 A
Contribution
This paper considers the ways in which recent English education policy has positioned autonomy as a concomitant of accountability. Over time the research community has explored, at depth, the nature of educational reforms and their impact on schools and teachers. Though rigorous in their approaches, much research tends to stress the negative consequences of reform on teacher morale, an increasing emphasis on the academic to the disadvantage of other humanistic areas of curriculum, and continuing problems of narrowing the achievement gap experienced by students from socio-economically disadvantaged communities. But the key question remains: how do some school leaders manage to successfully mediate the influences of reform and lead their teachers and pupils to survive and thrive over time, whilst others falter? Following a critical examination of the conceptual relations between accountability, autonomy and leadership, the paper investigates how secondary principals lead their schools to achieve sustainable performance despite policy shifts. The research, upon which the paper is based, has used Weick (1995; 2005) and Spillane’s (2004) cognitive sense-making approach to analyse school leaders’ policy enactment process. Such approach enables us to conceptualise policy enactment in schools as an organisational behaviour which is crafted and shaped by school leaders. How these leaders interpret and make sense, rationally and emotionally, of what a particular policy means to their schools and then decide “whether and how to ignore, adapt, or adopt” this policy locally (Spillane et al., 2002, p. 733) influences not only how the policy is interpreted by their teachers and how effectively it is implemented in the school, but importantly, the extent to which the actions of “enactment” are likely to disrupt, constrain, or advance further improvement of the school. Drawing upon longitudinal interview data from case study schools in England, the paper shows how successful secondary schools—in different socioeconomic contexts and led by principals with similar, strongly held moral purposes and principles of social justice, but with different histories and values—incorporate and use externally generated policies to support their own educational agendas, as they assert their right to apply their own educational values in practice for the improvement of teaching and learning and pupil progress and outcomes. Key in this regard is how principals broaden and deepen their organisational, social, and intellectual capacities for the improvement of quality and standards in teaching and learning, despite rather than because of externally generated reforms.
References
Spillane, J.P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Spillane, J., Diamond, J., Burch, P., Hallett, T., Jita, L., & Zoltner, J. (2002). Managing in the middle: school leaders and the enactment of accountability policy. Education Policy, 16 (5), 731–762. Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Weick, K.E. (2005). Organizing and the process of sense-making. Organisation Science, 16 (4), 409–421.
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