Strengthening the Connections between Leadership and Learning

Challenges to Policy, School and Classroom Practice

John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, David Frost, Greer Johnson, Sue Swaffield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351165303
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Examining a decade of research and practice, this book makes the case for a radical reappraisal of leadership, learning, and their interrelationship in educational policy. Discussing whether policy direction is progressively constraining the professionalism and initiative of teachers and school leaders, it challenges conventional understanding and argues the case for thinking differently about the way to lead learning.

Based on the Leadership for Learning (LfL) Project, the book clarifies, extends, and refines LfL principles and practices, and their contribution to ameliorating some of the difficult conditions encountered in the contemporary educational policy environment. It starts by discussing the direction and influence of current education policy and its subsequent consequences; chapters then move on to explore the framing values informing the LfL Projects, particularly focusing on what they imply for commitments to social justice, children's rights and breadth in student learning, and considering how to create favourable conditions for learning.

Identifying a disconnect between seminal principles and the nature of day-to-day practice, Strengthening the Connections between Leadership and Learning challenges school policy and practice at national and local levels. It is an essential read for postgraduate students, especially those studying leadership in education, as well as for teachers and policymakers in schools.

1

The policy challenge

Where would we be without policy? We can, perhaps, recall a golden age when teachers didn’t have to worry about policy. Teachers taught and children learnt; “It’s as simple as that”, as a previous chief inspector in England once wrote. Since that putative golden age, we have, fortunately, come to understand that this is a more complex and contested equation. We have benefited incalculably from social, psychological, and pedagogical research. It has, to both our benefit and cost, given us a deeper understanding of the complex and contradictory nature of what Perkins, Tishman, Ritchart, Donis, and Andrade (2000) term “learning in the wild” and “learning in captivity”. We have come to understand learning as deeply “nested” within a policy environment in which the relationship between an individual and his or her learning is contained by the classroom context and constrained by the school context which is, in turn, nested within education authority and national policies.

It is all too easy to fall into the familiar language in which policies are couched and which refers almost reflexively to school leaders as the principal actors, and so the term principal is widely used in North America, Australasia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, for example. In countries where English is not the first language – in Europe for example – the French proviseur is the provider; preside in Italian, the one who presides. In the United Kingdom, the term headteacher carries different connotations again – the master pedagogue who, in many circumstances, still continues to teach. While headmaster and headmistress have travelled widely beyond the United Kingdom these terms tend to be found now mainly in private schools. These may be referred to in the United States as administrators but a visitor to the United Kingdom who asked to meet an administrator would be guided to one of the office staff.

From the 1970s onwards, the language of management and managers was becoming widely adopted, giving rise to a whole new literature and lexicon as illustrated by recent publications such as Keating and Moorcroft’s Managing the Business of Schools (2007), the emphasis on managing giving rise to “performance management”. Imported from the business sector, this idea has been defined as managing the relationship between the implementation of long-term strategic and short-term operational goals so that they are in keeping with requirements placed on employees’ performance.

In Gerald Grace’s classic 1995 text Beyond Education Management, he challenged the language and ideology of management and the rise and rise of management studies. He writes, “the language, assumptions and ideology of management has begun to dominate the language, consciousness and action of many of those working within the education sector” (p. 5). The issue at stake in this “Alice in Linguisticsland” is whether language is, or is not, worth making a fuss over. There are powerful arguments which illustrate the extent to which our perceptions, practices, and ways of understanding the world are shaped by the terminologies to which we have recourse. Recent developments in the appointment of school managers as a complement to headteachers may help to resolve some of the inherent tensions. Indeed, it is likely that language tensions were contested in a London school by the headteacher who changed the sign on her office door from headteacher to head learner.

If we are to suggest new ways of leading learning we have to recognise the power of language and an embedded discourse of leading, positional authority, and the nature of followership. We have to start with a more sophisticated understanding of the policy–practice relationship and the nature of the “force field” which may promote, but may also inhibit, a more radical agenda. In what follows, we describe eight salient consequences of policy agendas which have had, and continue to have, a powerful influence on schools and classrooms and, for that very reason, need to be subject to rigorous critique and challenge.

Eight policy consequences

1 The seductive power of managerialism

Managerialism may be described as seductive because it has an easy appeal with its endorsement of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. Who could argue against the need for a more stringent approach to an education system that has, for too many children, been ineffective, that has too often fallen short in its stewardship of public money, and failed in its accountability to parents and their children? This seductive argument has it that schools, and the organisations in which they are embedded, need to be more tightly managed, more transparent, and thus more easily held to account by their “stakeholders”. Accountability is tied to indicators or measures of performance in the classroom, the board room, the senior management, and in the local education authority.

It is argued that the effectiveness of this approach is that it may be evaluated through a focus on outputs. A business that makes profits is self-evidently more efficient than one that does not, or one that persists despite continued and ­obstinate losses. So, with the requisite tools and measures, it becomes easier to identify those schools that succeed and those that fail, those that add value or fail to add value. Unarguably, with evidence of schools that are selling children short, it follows that there needs to be more stringent accountability, incentive, and performance affirmation.

While leaders and managers clearly need to be held to account, and as it may be the performance of their employees who are compromising the efficiency of the school, this magnifies the argument for a more stringent regime of target setting and benchmarking. Acknowledging that some of the blame may lie with parents, a tighter set of contractual arrangements and sanctions then needs to be put in place, including legal sanctions for absence and, in England for example, the prohibition on parents taking children for holidays during school time.

These measures may be described as seductive because they are hard to oppose. Who could argue against transparency and accountability? Who could dispute the need for measures or “indicators” of how well schools are performing? The questions that need to be asked, however, are:

• Accountability for what? And how is that accountability made transparent? How may it be contested and open to dialogue?

• What is measured, by whom, and in what way? And how do we guarantee the value of what is measured and the means by which practice is then affected?

• How do we disentangle the school effect from that of communities, social agencies, private tutoring, tuition centres and, most importantly, the social and educational capital residing in nuclear and extended families?

• How and where can we begin to undo or unravel the tightly woven skein of top-down strictures and accountabilities?

2 Control versus autonomy – successful and failing schools – reputational damage

The notion of “successful” and “failing” schools is now so embedded in common discourse that the rhetoric has become almost impossible to contest or reframe. The more the latitude for parental choice, the greater the patronage of successful schools and the less the attraction of so-called failing schools. The correlation between the social mix and parental choice is now so well established in so many different countries that policy initiatives have rarely been able to tackle the essential dilemma. Redrawing zoning and school catchment and other forms of social and demographic engineering have been attempted in order to mitigate the reputational effect. The policy of bussing in the United States (which has been in place since the 1960s), like so many other equalisation policies, is now widely regarded as a well-intentioned failure. While the adoption of community schools has enjoyed mixed success, the attendant problem is that as schools become microcosms of their local communities they are seen as bringing with them deprivations in language, motivation, learning difficulties, disaffection, violence, and challenges in home work and home study. Assisted places schemes which operate in some countries, giving some children entry to elite schools, further deprive low-status schools of social and educational capital. These are all compounding factors which are reflected in schools in which low attainment brings with it sanctions in different forms (e.g., in some countries such as New Zealand, report cards which urge schools and school leaders to “do better”; in England and Wales, schools categorised as in need of “special measures”).

The issues are so historic, so systemic, and so international in character that it is difficult to conceive of solutions. Rather than seeing these issues as a counsel of despair, however, the educational community needs to engage strategically, with new partnerships and in new ways of thinking which do not simply re-tread familiar and tired programs.

3 The resilience of positional power and hierarchy in schools

Schools tend to be hierarchical places. That they could be otherwise seems unthinkable. The assumption tends to be that adults know more than children and some adults know more than others, while some professionals are not only better at teaching but also better at managing. It is further assumed that schools also need to be led and managed by those with high levels of expertise and insight. Position brings with it discretionary and institutional power so that on occasions when hard and uncomfortable decisions have to be made, teachers have to be reminded, as one headteacher put it, that “this is not a democracy”. A common feature of schools across the globe is a three- or four-fold power structure with government, some form of local authority (perhaps regional plus district offices), and the front-end “delivery” system – schools. Each layer of the system is upwardly accountable and commonly held in place by some form of inspection or review.

The only escape from this policy and political hierarchy appears to be through private organisations, sanctioned in most countries by way of foundations, dissenting bodies, parental fees, and conditional government measures. At best, these privatised bodies loosen some of the hierarchical ties, allowing greater opportunity for teachers and young people to enjoy greater influence and decision-making power. The most radical alternatives, “free” schools, collectives (e.g., multi-academy trusts), and learning communities have almost everywhere enjoyed a brief life span. Places where democratic schools have been incorporated within the mainstream (Deans Centre and Wester Hailes in Scotland, Countesthorpe and Risinghill in England, for example) have all had to modify their ambitions and been progressively brought back into a more conforming mould by successive governments.

“Power distance” between highest and lowest levels of the educational hierarchy is one of the yardsticks used by Geert Hofstede (1983) in his comparative studies of schools internationally. While in some cultures the differential has been decreasing under the influence of international intelligence, in other historically more democratic countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (e.g., Abrahams & Aas, 2016; Møller, 1999) the differential is now increasing as the decision-making independence of pupils, teachers, and heads has been curtailed.

Happily, there are headteachers and teachers resilient and professionally committed enough to work around the hierarchy, to diminish positional power, and to develop a strong internal accountability which increases individual and collective initiative. This requires an ability and willingness to “swim upstream” against the current which is constantly pushing for stronger individual leadership.

4 The pressure for stronger individual leadership

There is a common understanding of leadership as something practised by individuals, often heroic people. Historically, they have rescued their countries from tyranny, freed the oppressed, built new empires, and pioneered emergent democracies. There is a general acknowledgement that we owe a debt to those leaders because we couldn’t have done it ourselves and without their heroism our lives would be very different.

Leaders are expected to be strong while weak leaders are deplored. We live virtually daily with that dichotomy in politics, business, and education. We rely on our elected, or self-elected, leaders to act fairly and in our interests, to tackle discrimination, inequality, and oppression, and to make our worlds better, more congenial places. At the same time under these conditions, we allow ourselves to be disempowered individually and collectively.

It is not only educational governance that favours strong heads and principals. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The policy challenge
• 2 The backdrop to policy reform
• 3 Leadership for learning
• 4 Professional integrity
• 5 Leadership as practice
• 6 Thinking differently about learning and teaching
• 7 Enhancing teacher professionality
• 8 Challenging policy, school, and classroom practice
• Index