Primary School Leadership in Context

Leading Small, Medium and Large Sized Schools

Geoff Southworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415303958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134410231
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How does school leadership differ in different sized primary schools? This book responds to the urgent need to explore how different contexts influence the nature and character of primary school leadership and shows how headteachers in different sized schools shape their leadership accordingly. Geoff Southworth draws on a trilogy of related research projects, which investigated leadership in small, medium and large sized primary schools, and sets out the main features of leadership in each category. He presents an evidence-informed portrait of leadership is presented, drawing on the views and experiences of heads, deputies, teachers and governors. As well as focussing on school size the book considers the following related issues: * Learning centred leadership - influencing what happens in classrooms * Structures and systems in schools - how leaders use them * Developing leaders and leadership - the importance of building leadership capacity This informative book sets out in a straightforward way what leaders in different sized schools need to attend to and provides many examples of how leaders can do this. Primary School Leadership in Context will be particularly valuable to headteachers, deputies and subject leaders in primary schools, those who aspire to these positions, and those who are moving schools in search of promotion. Academics and students of school leadership will also find the book useful.

Part 1

Indtroduction

This book is both late and early. It is late because attention to leadership in different-sized school is long overdue. Early because it is the first book to focus on the issue and therefore marks a development in the way we are thinking about school leadership today.

School leadership research has been — and in some ways still is — fascinated by leaders. That is, researchers have studied leaders as persons and the individual roles they perform, often to try to identify the secrets of their success. Consequently leadership research has attempted to find the personal characteristics of successful individuals and then transfuse them into would-be leaders. In other words, there has been a long-standing belief that leadership research should seek out the genetic fingerprints of ‘great’ leaders in order to create a template for everyone else.

Unfortunately, there are many flaws in this approach. One criticism is that too much emphasis is placed on the leader — usually the head teacher — and that this implies an heroic and charismatic view of leadership. Another problem is that the search for leadership traits is highly questionable. When the characteristics are identified and itemised they often produce a person specification which even a saint would have difficulty matching. Both these criticisms are important, but there is a third which is most relevant to this book. Attention to individuals frequently ignores or obscures attention to the context in which they work. One of the most robust findings from leadership research is that context matters. This is not to deny that individuals are important, but it is to say that so too are the situations they work in. Indeed, leadership is contingent upon environmental and contextual factors.

One characteristic that marks out successful leaders of schools is their ability to understand the contexts in which they operate. In many ways, effective leaders ‘read’ and comprehend their contexts like texts: they are contextually literate. They look at their schools from different angles, listen to a range of informants and commentators and use as much data as they can find to get beneath the surface of the school and understand it as well as they can.

However, while context includes the school as an organisation, that is not the only setting leaders need to attend to. They need to think about their schools’ performance levels, improvement trajectories, their staffs’ development needs, their schools’ cultures and the communities their schools serve. School leaders should also pay attention to the social and economic changes taking place locally, nationally and internationally and likely to impinge on the lives of the children in the near future. Moreover, in a devolved school system such as that in England, where schools have a great deal of discretion to manage their own affairs whilst at the same time being steered by central government policies and funding streams, head teachers and senior staff need to pay attention to the ebb and flow of educational policy formulation and direction.

Thus context is not a simple phenomenon: it is multiple, blended and variable, because contexts also change over time. A school is not a static institution. schools change in their climates and cultures over the course of half-terms, terms and the academic year. Staff become tired, while some are absent and some find their particular responsibilities especially demanding for a period of time; new staff need inducting and mentoring; pupils come and go. Pupils also grow and mature over the course of the school year, so that Year 6 children are not the same in the summer term, as they prepare for transfer to secondary school, as they were in the autumn term. Children in reception classes also change as they adjust to school and become accustomed to being ‘pupils’ and members of groups.

Thus any exploration of context needs to acknowledge that the label covers many things. Moreover, we also need to be aware that it is not just a matter of listing all the ways in which context can be itemised, but of thinking about how the different forms of context combine. It is how the specific contextual elements interact and interrelate which makes each school different from the rest. Expressed another way, it is not only the particular ingredients of an organisation’s context that makes a school different; it is also the specific blend of these elements that creates its own distinctive chemistry. Indeed, if few studies have been made of leadership combined with context, there has been a similar lack of attention to the way different combinations of contextual factors combine to create specific leadership challenges and opportunities.

It is the purpose of this book to focus on one feature of context, namely the size of the school. Although there are many other aspects of a school to consider, I have chosen this one because it is an important factor in the primary sector.

Primary schools are the largest group of schools in the English education system and also the most heterogeneous. As recent DfES documents acknowledge, primary schools are enormously diverse in character. They are closely integrated into their local communities, with rural schools being very different from those sited in inner cities. Infant and junior schools are different from all-through primaries, whilst some areas have first and lower schools, middle schools deemed primaries and schools with or without nursery units attached to them.

Although context is recognised as important to leadership and a definer of the character of schools, surprisingly little attention has been paid to it in school leadership research. Writing about school leadership too often describes or prescribes what leaders do or should do in a general manner without acknowledging contextual differences. Thus some of the literature is undifferentiated and indiscriminate. Though studies have been made of leadership in urban areas and of schools facing challenging circumstances, little empirical work has been devoted to leading different-sized primary schools.

If we accept that context matters, then researchers should clearly pay closer and more fastidious attention to it. I have always tried to make it plain that much of my research has concentrated on primary schools and leadership in them. I have done this not to be sectarian but because I want to stress that I respect sector differences and also in order to avoid what might otherwise be an imprecise discussion. This book marks another step along the path towards a more careful and sensitive appreciation of how different contexts influence leadership by examining the variable effects of school size upon leaders.

I should also acknowledge that the focus on school size is but one contextual variable. This book makes only a very modest contribution to an understanding of how contextual factors function and shape leadership. There are many other factors to study, both separately and in the ways they combine with one another. Nevertheless, by making a start I hope that what follows will stimulate attention to other important contextual variables.

At the same time as looking closely at how leadership is enacted in different-sized primary schools, the book also offers insights to middle leaders, assistant and deputy heads and head teachers wishing to move from one size of school to another. If leadership is different in larger and smaller schools, then it would help to know this and to understand how leadership roles are played out in different settings. This book attempts to do this, and I believe it provides readers with the opportunity to examine and reflect on these differences before they move into schools of a different size to their present ones. In this way it should be of interest and value to those leaders considering applying for posts in school larger (or smaller) than those in which they are currently working.

The book is based upon research I undertook to explore the effects of school size on leaders. I began by studying head teachers in small primary schools. I identified ten successful heads in small schools and visited and talked with them and their colleagues about their schools and the ways they led them. This initial study, though small in scale, was rich in its findings. It also had a powerful effect upon me, because it lifted the lid not just on small schools but on the differentiated nature of school leadership and the impact of size. Consequently I began a follow-up project looking at leadership in large and very large primary schools. As I went about this enquiry with Dick Weindling I was able to make use of the two studies as reference points for one another, contrasting ideas from the first with those I found in the second. This comparative approach was enormously helpful and raised all sorts of ideas and issues relating to school size. It also highlighted the need to look at the intermediate group of schools — those of medium size. So I used an ongoing study into school improvement in primary schools to explore what leadership in medium-sized schools was like. I then used both ends of the size spectrum — little and large schools –to frame comparisons with the middle group. By having two comparator groups I was able to devise a series of questions concerning the distinctions between leadership in them and in these medium-sized schools. This approach threw into relief all kinds of subtle differences.

From these three studies I next identified certain themes which, though common to all schools, played out differently across the three different categories of school size, namely:

• Learning-centred leadership

•Structures and systems in schools

•The development of leaders and leadership.

Learning-centred leadership focuses on how leaders influence what happens in classrooms. It is, for me, the single most important task for school leaders. Indeed, it is the responsibility which marks them out as school leaders. A great deal of what heads, deputies, assistant heads and subject leaders do is similar to what is done by leaders in other organisations and employment sectors. However, what is distinctive about school leadership is the way leaders influence the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms. Unless leaders know how to do this and practise it they may not be making a strong contribution to the success of the school as a learning centre. As OFSTED recognises, three things mark out successful leadership in schools: monitoring; evaluating the quality of teaching and learning; and taking steps to improve the quality of teaching. We know a great deal about monitoring and evaluation, but perhaps too little about the third, the steps to take to improve teaching.

The interest I have in learning-centred leadership also stems from a wish to focus on how leaders make a differences. For too long we have been preoccupied with whether leaders make a difference. This emphasis has also been at the expense of understanding the ways in which leaders actually do make a difference. The chapter looking at learning-centred leadership begins to examine the anatomy of how leaders influence the quality of teaching in classrooms.

The emergence of school structures and systems is an important finding. The fact that previous research has tended to concentrate on leaders as individuals has cast the significance of organisational, curricular and developmental structures into the shadows. In Chapter 6 I try to bring these elements out of the gloom, arguing that they play an important role in ensuring consistency of practice and opportunities for staff and curriculum development. They also play a significant role in shaping the culture of the school.

The theme of leadership development involves a number of important issues. The first is the fact that most school leaders learn to lead simply by being asked to take on responsibility for something or someone. By undertaking such tasks individuals begin to lead and learn how to lead. On-the-job, experiential learning is the commonest and most powerful form of leadership learning. Yet as the size of the school increases so too does the responsibility of the head teacher to develop large numbers of other leaders. Also, the bigger the school, the more deputies and assistant heads should play leadership and leadership development roles and the more subject leaders should be deployed as middle leaders and not as resource managers. Size plays a part in influencing the nature of school-based leadership learning.

These three themes are not disconnected from one another. Running through them is a common concern not only to improve leadership but to enhance a particular kind of leadership. If it is true that school need more leadership, then we must ask: what kind of leadership do they need more of? From the research underpinning this book I argue that it is learning-centred leadership we need to develop and distribute across each and every school. Therefore the structures and systems and the development opportunities emergent and established leaders need are those which support and sustain learning-centred leadership. In Chapters 6 and 7 I weave this idea into the discussion and show how it can be achieved.

The book is organised into three sections. The first consists of this introduction and Chapter 1. Chapter 1 explains in detail why context is important and then reviews what the literature has to say about school size and how it relates to leadership.

Section 2 covers Chapters 2, 3 and 4. These chapters in turn report and review the findings from the three enquiries I conducted into leading small-, medium-and large-size primary schools.

Section 3 includes Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapters 5 focuses on learning-centred leadership. 6 looks in detail and in some depth at the way school structures and systems influence leadership, while 7 concentrates on leadership development. Chapter 8 sets out the main conclusions to be drawn from the research and the themes I have identified.

This book shows that size matters. Leadership does differ in the way it is enacted and transacted in schools of different sizes. Given these conclusions, it follows that leadership development needs to be differentiated and sensitive to contextual variables. At the National College for School Leadership we are developing programmes and activities which are as context-sensitive and specific as possible. There are many general and cross-sector issues that school leaders can share and learn about with and from one another. While we must be careful not to over-exaggerate differences, one of the contributions the College is making to the profession is the development of a more differentiated portfolio of programmes and opportunities. This provision aims to meet the diverse needs of leaders at specific points in their careers and to address the particular issues which their schools’ circumstances and contexts demand of them. This book illuminates some of the issues for leaders in different-sized primary schools and should help to prepare those moving into leadership in a different-sized school.

1 What we know about school size and leadership

This chapter focuses on four issues. In the first section I explain why context is important for school leadership. In the second, I argue that school size is a significant but ill-defined contextual issue. In the third, I set out the trends in primary school sizes in recent years before moving on to the fourth section, where I report what the literature has to say about schools of different sizes and leadership in them.

Context matters

Research into leadership generally and school leadership in particular shows that context matters. On the face of it this seems an obvious point to make: plainly, where you are has a very important effect on what you do. On closer analysis, however, this idea contains many more subtle aspects.

If we take context to mean the school you work in, then clearly the features and factors that go to make up each and every school will have a part to play in shaping what leaders do. For example, if you are a head, deputy or subject leader in a school where the staff work well together, trust one another and support one another, this will have a bearing on how you operate. By contrast, if the staff do not work together at all, do not share and are forever criticising and attacking one another in public, then this too will shape what the leaders do.

Context is thus about understanding the culture of the school: that is, the way things are done in a particular school. However, it also involves many other factors. The school’s performance levels are very important: to be a leader in a school which the Office for Standards in Education (OF...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Leading small, medium-sized and large schools
• Part 3 Emerging themes and conclusions
• Appendix 1: Headship categories
• Appendix 2: Structures and systems in schools
• References
• Index