High-Leverage Leadership

Improving Outcomes in Educational Settings

Denis Mongon, Christopher Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415689526
• eBook ISBN: 9781136583926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Globalisation of world trade, international media, technological innovation and social change are creating opportunities and challenges that today's pupils will inherit and build on. A pupil's academic, technical and social capacity will define their success or failure. Therefore, educational outcomes and well-being for young people across emerging

1	Educational leadership Professional imperative or misguided optimism?

Introduction

It is hard to imagine a world without leaders or leadership. In one form or another there are those who are seen to be leading others by directing, influencing and organising collective effort. In most societies we look to our ‘leaders’ (whether they be religious, political, military, industrial or public servants) for guidance and inspiration. For centuries these leaders have been a cornerstone of society. The best of them are trusted, perceived to hold a strong set of values and beliefs and, perhaps most importantly, to possess unwavering integrity and humility.

During the past two to three decades the context for leadership appears to have changed at a rapid pace. With the accelerating expansion of e-technology and the emergence of 24-hour ‘real time’ media, leadership has become ubiquitously visible. This has presented a new set of challenges for our leaders. Some have gained prominence, even celebrity status. However, this swift rise can be fragile and temporary, ending in mockery and disgrace. For example, Lord Sugar, the former Chairman of both Amstrad and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, is an international industrial leader, but is now better known as a television star. His television programme follows potential apprentices competing for a business partnership or a £100,000-salary job in one of his companies, achievable only if they can avoid being told ‘You're Fired’ by a growling Sugar. Steve Jobs, the CEO of the computer giant Apple, was also an internationally recognised leader. He built the Apple brand and range of i-products, and his personal image was and remains deeply and inextricably linked to the brand and its success. Until his recent death, no Apple product launch would be complete without images of Jobs flooding the e-networks. On the other hand we see leaders whose celebrity status is derived from major mistakes – such as Gerald Ratner, whose careless remark about the quality of his goods was so disastrous for the business, or Sir Fred Goodwin, who seems, in the public mind, to carry so much personal blame for the international banking crisis. Increased visibility and the potential rewards, not least in the international finance sector, have brought leadership into global focus. This phenomenon is not the preserve of industry leaders. While political and religious leaders have always had a relatively high profile, recent decades have also seen military leaders move further into the public spotlight. It has become common to witness military commanders on television explaining the rationale for and outcomes of a military strike, and their memoirs and accounts of conflict fill the shelves of airport bookshops.

Leadership has come into sharp focus in the public sector, especially within education. In England, state-school headteachers are now under a public spotlight previously reserved for a few high-profile headmasters of independent schools. One example is Sir William Atkinson, Headteacher of the Phoenix School in London. In the late 1990s and 2000s he was recognised as the catalyst for ‘turning around’ the fortunes of a very difficult school in a tough area of the city. He was recognised for his efforts, gaining a knighthood and becoming an adviser to the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He could also be heard sharing his views about leadership and change on TV and radio phone-in and panel discussions. He sat on the Question Time panel, the BBC's leading current affairs and political debate show. Initially the BBC1 soap opera Waterloo Road, charting the development of a school ‘rising from the ashes’, was based on his story, with the first head having similar character traits and bearing a notable physical resemblance. The media reporting of his work, along with that of a number of other high-profile headships in England, has reinforced the attention given to school leadership as the key element in making a difference to the outcomes and ultimately the life chances of young people. Some of these heads rose to prominence only to be ‘dethroned’ from their newly-found status. One of the most high-profile falls from grace was that of Dame Jean Else, who has recently had her title revoked. In England the rewards for this generation of leaders have been substantial, but the stakes were high and the pressure colossal.

This book aims to unpack the work of principals and headteachers like Sir William Atkinson, who are successful against the odds, to expose the complexity of their educational leadership and offer accessible insights into their key practices. We use the term ‘high-leverage leadership’ to describe leadership that is associated with higher outcomes than would normally be found in similar contexts. Put simply, the outcomes achieved are disproportionately higher than one might expect. High-leverage leadership reaches out to the holy grail of ‘excellence and equity’, not only achieving outstanding outcomes but promoting fairness (recognition and redistribution) for young people and also, as we explain in Chapter 5, for the adults who work with them. Importantly, high-leverage leadership ensures that the system gets the most ‘bangs for its bucks’. Our argument is that high-leverage leaders engage in three forms of related activity, Navigation, Management and Partnership, to produce high outcomes for the young people.

The purpose of this chapter is to set the context for that argument. First, we provide an overview of the development of educational leadership research. Second, we discuss a number of theories and practices associated with educational leadership, and third, we reflect on the emerging challenges that lead us to conclude that a reconceptualisation of educational leadership is necessary if we are to maximise educational outcomes for all.

Why educational leadership: why the attention?

In the introduction to this chapter we focused on the rise in visibility of leadership in general, and specifically of educational leadership, over the past few decades. In this section we move on to consider whether it is just the visibility that has increased or whether and how other aspects of leadership have developed in their importance, and if there is any evidence to underpin this rise in profile. We are guided by two questions. Are we dealing with a veneer, a fad of our time? And, is there any substance backing up the investment made by governments in developing educational leadership and leaders in the hope of generating improved outcomes?

If there is a leadership fad, it is significant. The sheer volume of academic literature generated over the past two decades demonstrates this. In May 2011 a search on Google Scholar offered over 1,410,000 hits for the term ‘educational leadership’. Leadership development programmes, Master's degrees and other accredited schemes have swollen in numbers.

It is not only academics who have become preoccupied with educational leadership. Related publications and articles can be found in the popular press; news stories about schools often focus on ‘leadership issues’, and there are unprecedented numbers of consultants offering coaching, mentoring and critical friendship to school leaders. Governments and policymakers have also shown their commitment, investing millions of dollars in educational leadership. In England the National College for School Leadership was established in 2000, other national governments and states around the world have followed suit, developing various types of school leadership academies. In schools, principals have higher status than ever before; in England, secondary headteachers can earn more than hospital consultants, lawyers and arguably the Prime Minister. The importance and profile of leadership seems to permeate education systems. We are told that success needs – even demands – ‘strong leadership’. But where is the evidence? How did we ever get by without our obsession with leadership?

Some of us almost did in the 1970s and 1980s. In England, an interest in alternative schooling ran parallel to a laissez faire approach to headship that contributed to the events at Risinghill and William Tyndale Schools, to which we refer in Chapter 3. Gronn (2003) has reflected on the near death of educational leadership as an academic interest in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s. He argues that this can be accounted for by the lack of legitimacy of leadership, rooted in the culture and ideas of the time. This arose from a situation whereby those in the system became reluctant followers and leadership as a concept did not fit the way either academia or society saw themselves. At the same time:

…the wider field of leadership spawned its own peculiar brand of melancholia – a rash of anti-leadership thinking. From the mid 1970s a number of scholars began voicing their disquiet.

(Gronn, 2003, p. 61)

Some American scholars (e.g. Miner, Argyris, Calder, Pfeffer) argued that leadership had become outmoded, had outlived its usefulness and that the field of organisational behaviour and management provided a more optimistic way forward in developing understanding about how and why organisations worked and performed. In contrast to the 1970s, the mid-to-late 1980s saw the emergence of ideas relating to ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ leadership. These developments brought new energy to the field, and by the early 1990s they were quickly adapted to form the bedrock of contemporary educational research (e.g. Gronn, 1996).

These advances coincided with, and were at times related to, the emergence of international research on effective schools, confirming the relationship between leadership and effective schooling. The seminal paper by Ronald Edmonds (1979) in the United States reported findings linking effective schools for the urban poor to institutional leadership, expectations and atmosphere. In the same year, Rutter and colleagues (1979) also highlighted the relationship between school leadership and effective schooling. Since these early studies, this relationship has been confirmed by numerous studies and reviews (Leithwood, 2002; Hallinger and Heck, 1996; Sammons et al., 1995; Leithwood et al., 1999; Hallinger and Heck, 2010). As the knowledge base has expanded, the detail and complexity of the relationships have became the focus of interest (see Davies and West-Burnham, 2003). This has included the nature of leadership in schools at different phases of development (Chapman, 2004), in different socioeconomic contexts (Chapman and Harris, 2005) and at different levels within the organisation, focusing on departmental (Harris et al., 1995; Sammons et al., 1997) and teacher leadership (Leiberman and Miller, 2004; Harris and Muijs, 2004).

Day and colleagues (2010, pp. 3–17) have undertaken some of the most recent work exploring the relationship between leadership and student outcomes. Their three-year study identifying 10 strong claims for the importance of educational leadership draws together a range of evidence to offer a contemporary summary of the field. The claims are:

1	Headteachers are the main source of leadership. Staff perceive heads as the main source of leadership in schools. Headteachers’ values, reflective strategies, and leadership practices are key to improving student outcomes.
2	There are eight key dimensions of successful leadership. Successful leaders define their values and vision to raise expectations; set direction and build trust; reshape the conditions for teaching and learning; restructure parts of the organisation and redesign leadership roles and responsibilities; enrich the curriculum, enhance teacher quality; enhance the quality of teaching and learning; build collaboration internally and build strong relationships outside the school community.
3	Headteachers’ values are key components in their success. Successful leaders hold a set of common characteristics and core values. These include a strong sense of moral responsibility and a belief in equal opportunities, respect for others and a commitment to and passion for learning, achievement and the school community.
4	Successful heads use the same basic leadership practices, but there is no single model for achieving success. Successful heads draw on elements of transformational and instructional leadership, working intuitively from experience to mix and match approaches and strategies to their specific context.
5	Differences in context affect the nature, direction and pace of leadership actions. Schools at different phases of development require different forms of leadership.
6	Heads contribute to student learning and achievement through a combination and accumulation of strategies and actions. Successful heads focus on narrowing within-school variations by looking for strategies to develop approaches to foster collaborative teacher cultures, assessment for learning, monitoring pupil and school performance, the coherence of teaching programmes and the provision of extracurricular activities.
7	There are three broad phases of leadership success. Heads identified three phases of leadership. In the first, the foundation phase, heads tended to prioritise issues including improving the physical environment and setting directions and communicating expectations. For the middle, developmental phase, heads prioritised distributing leadership roles and promoting the use of data to inform decision-making; and in the third, enrichment phase, heads focused on personalising and enriching the curriculum as well as the further distribution of leadership.
8	Heads grow and secure success by layering leadership strategies and actions. Heads build on an initial leadership framework to develop multiple layers of leadership strategy, making decisions about what is continued and what has become less relevant to priorities for development.
9	Successful heads distribute leadership progressively. There is a connection between a distributed approach to leadership and the improvement of student outcomes. Distribution of leadership is common, but Day and colleagues (2010) note that patterns vary and the distribution of leadership responsibility and power varies depending on local context.
10	The successful distribution of leadership depends on the establishment of trust. Trust underpins successful leadership. It supports the distribution of leadership and the development and maintenance of a positive ethos.

These ‘strong claims’ highlight a number of key messages relating to successful leadership. Perhaps most potent is the importance of context. As we have argued previously (Chapman, 2004), differing approaches are needed for different school contexts. A key question we seek to address in this book is what does high-leverage leadership look like in these different contexts? What works, and why? And what form of leadership has the highest leverage in a given context? Here we look to our framework of Navigation, Management and Partnership to offer a way forward.

Despite the volume of quantitative and qualitative evidence suggesting the importance of school leadership, there remains a number of doubts about the substance of the relationship. These doubts are often underestimated and sometimes ignored, and they raise some important issues.

The first issue is that the relationship between leadership and school improvement is not as well established as one might think, given the current policy discourse. In England this is highlighted by the government's own inspection evidence. Over the past decade we have seen an upward trend in inspection judgements regarding the quality of leadership, the quality of teaching and student progress. The paradox is that the first has increased at a greater rate than the last two. This challenges the arguments claiming a strong relationship between leadership and improved student outcomes

The second issue relates to research funding. Much of the leadership research over past decades has been undertaken on behalf of government and its agencies. The nature of this type of funding raises the possibility of interference by sponsors, and therefore, potentially, issues of objectivity. For some researchers in the field of leadership and policy studies, it is seen as a ‘badge of honour’ not to have undertaken this type of work. This raises questions about the objectivity of the alternative, so-called ‘independent’ research, which itself may be biased by an anti-government political position. Both the nature of funding bodies and the values and beliefs of researchers can muddy the waters.

The third issue relates to stability and sustainability of effects over time. There is a growing body of work exploring how leadership practice can vary over time. Some of the most recent work in this area conducted by Day and colleagues (2011) offers useful insights into how leaders’ actions, approaches and the strategies they employ change as their school becomes more effective. However, understanding about the complexity of the relationship between leadership and school effects over time remains elusive.

The fourth issue relates to managerialism and performativity (Gleeson and Husbands, 2001). Some would argue that ‘leadership’ has developed a dominant discourse located with the official policy doctrines of central governments. And furthermore, this has generated an orthodoxy of the ‘right kind’ of leadership. One only has to look around any centrally administered, accredited leadership course. The candidates speak in the same language, think in similar ways, they often dress and look similar. We have a conveyor belt of cloned leaders. This is a form of the Panopticon (Foucault, 1977) at work, whereby leaders are trained in an orthodoxy and placed under surveillance through mechanisms such as inspection regimes. Foucault (p. 201) argues that the major effect of the Panopticon is to:

…induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary …Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unve...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• High-Leverage Leadership
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Educational leadership: Professional imperative or misguided optimism?
• 2 High-leverage leadership
• 3 Navigation
• 4 Management
• 5 Partnership
• 6 Organisational pathology and high-leverage leadership
• 7 Governance, accountability and impact
• 8 Reflections on high-leverage leadership in education
• References
• Index