Learning to Lead in the Secondary School

Becoming an Effective Head of Department

Mark Brundrett, Ian Terrell, Mark Brundrett, Ian Terrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134471621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Learning to Lead in the Secondary School is designed to meet the needs of subject leaders and heads of department in secondary schools, offering practical advice and guidance to teachers taking on these demanding roles.

This highly informative book is structured around six sections that address all of the key areas in leading a department including:

* becoming a subject leader
* managing effective teaching and learning
* leading and managing people
* the strategic direction and development of a department
* the deployment of staff and resources
* managing personal performance and development.

This guidewill be invaluable to middle managers in schools, subject leaders and heads of departments. It will be of interest to teachers and managers at all levels and will also be useful to those undertaking research or further qualifications in educational leadership and management.

Section 1

Becoming a Subject Leader: Roles, Values and Accountability

1.1 The Role of the Subject Leader

Mark Brundrett

Introduction

Objectives

By the end of this Unit you should:

• Know about the discoveries in the school effectiveness and improvement movements that have emphasised the importance of leadership in enhancing school outcomes;
• Be able to conceptualise clearly the role of the middle manager or subject leader in schools;
• Have a clear understanding of the developing national framework of standards for teachers and school leaders;
• Be aware of the development of training opportunities for middle managers and subject leaders.

The school effectiveness and improvement movements have become an international phenomenon that has begun to reveal some of the key issues in enhancing school performance. A generation of such studies had emphasised and re-emphasised the vital importance of school leadership in developing schools in order to ensure that pupils and students gain as much as possible from their educational experiences. The early research studies in these movements tended to focus on the importance of the school headteacher or principal in managing change in order to drive up standards in education but, more recently, there has been an increasing realisation of the vital role that is played by middle managers or subject leaders in developing schools and colleges. This reinvigoration of the middle manager’s role has been recognised and embraced both in higher education institutions and at the highest levels in government and a number of programmes have now developed, tailored to meet the needs of those heads of department or subject leaders.

The Importance of Good Leadership in School Effectiveness and Improvement

Over the period of a generation, leading educational researchers have attempted to discover the factors that can enhance school effectiveness. In particular the work of Rutter et al. (1979) and Mortimore et al. (1988) have come to be seen as seminal empirical studies that revealed that some schools were more effective than others, even when the social background of students was taken into account. Rutter et al. famously identified a number of key features as being associated with success (Rutter et al., 1979), amongst which was noted the requirement for a combination of firm leadership and teacher involvement. The equally celebrated work of Mortimore et al. was also able to suggest a group of nodal factors that can lead to effective schooling including: purposeful leadership of the staff by the headteacher; involvement of the deputy head; and involvement of teachers (Mortimore et al., 1988: 250).

Such findings have been replicated and extended in North America, the UK, the Netherlands and Australia. Teddlie and Reynolds (2000: 4) point out that there have been numerous summaries of the research on school effectiveness stretching over a period of a generation of researchers. This plethora of international research has been undertaken using increasingly sophisticated techniques but the factors observed by Rutter and Mortimore and their researchers have continued to emerge with tantalising consistency. Research in the UK itself has, for instance, produced startlingly similar lists of conditions upon which high quality teaching and learning appears to be contingent amongst which effective leadership seems to be one ubiquitous, indeed universal, feature (see, for instance, the work of Alexander, 1992; Sammons et al., 1995; Barber et al., 1995). Indeed the most compelling feature of school effectiveness research is its remarkable consistency of findings over time and across different cultural contexts.

The problem with such findings, especially those which provide lists of desirable features of school management and organisation, is, however, that they tend to be both descriptive and normative (Ouston, 1999). It is of little surprise that good schools have good leaders and that the staff of successful schools work together; the problem appears to lie in devising the methods by which institutions can ensure that they select the best staff and enhance the skills of those already appointed. It is, perhaps, partly as a response to this central criticism of the school effectiveness movement that many researchers have chosen to pursue the related but divergent path of school improvement. Whereas school effectivess attempts to define the what of change, school improvement is the how of change (Stoll and Fink, 1996). The distinctive difference in the ‘improvement’ definitions lies in their emphasis on the relationship between change and educational outcomes (Duncan, 1999). In the formulation set out by Hopkins et al. (1994), for instance, the stress is on the importance of assessing the outcomes of improvement for the pupils, the aim being to bring about a much closer link between the school and the classroom. This postulation of the complex relationship between institutional constructs and learning processes can be seen as a seminal feature of much of recent influential work in the UK (see, for instance, Stoll and Fink, 1996; MacGilchrist et al., 1997). Gray et al. (1996) have noted, however, that the gap between the two traditions of effectiveness and improvement is now beginning to close and increasingly researchers are drawing on both fields of research for insights on how to help schools make desirable changes (Mortimore, 1998; Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000). It seems evident from both traditions that high quality education can be developed within schools and that such development is essentially derived from the production of a supportive nexus of connections amongst staff, pupils, parents and other stakeholders within school communities in order to develop a positive, learning-centred culture. Within this nexus good leadership is a feature that seems to be universally recognised. In their major study of the field Teddlie and Reynolds have stated that:

We do not know of a study that has not shown that leadership is important within effective schools … Indeed leadership is now centrally synonymous with school effectiveness for many, including many operating within the school improvement paradigm …

(Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000: 141)

It is notable, however, that Teddlie and Reynolds indicate that this leadership is usually seen as being provided by the headteacher or principal. It is the central contention of this text that this investment of leadership in one overarching super-ordinate is an insufficient and inadequate description of leadership in schools.

The Increasing Realisation of the Importance of the Middle Manager in Schools

Recent governmental emphases have focused on notions of excellence defined in terms of achievable targets both in the UK and in the international context. This notion of effectiveness can be viewed as both a challenge and burden for school leaders in that it clearly delineates goals for achievement but is susceptible to the critique that it offers a debased and instrumental depiction of education. One thing that has become abundantly clear from the effectiveness and improvement studies is, however, that good leadership plays a vital role in creating the culture that enhances learning in schools. It is therefore of no great surprise that ‘leadership’ has become one of the areas of greatest interest in educational research and writing in recent years. Even a brief exemplification of the literature in the field would reveal that there is a large and growing range of texts focusing on ‘leadership’. Within these texts a number of themes have emerged which include the efficacy of centralised versus distributed notions of leadership; the contrast between competency and academic models of leadership development; and the contradistinction between functionalist and democratic models of leadership.

More recently there has been an increasing realisation that schools cannot reach their full potential unless all the staff are involved in developing the school. Both governments and academics have argued consistently for an innovative restructuring of school leadership in order to enhance school-based management (Dimmock, 2000). With the development of local management of schools there is really just too much to do in a school that involves leadership, management and administration for this to be the preserve of one person or even a small group of senior staff. This has led some commentators to suggest that what is needed is a complete reconceptualisation of what we mean by leadership in schools. One way of expressing this new notion of leadership is that it should be distributed throughout the school rather than focused in any one person or small group of individuals (Gronn, 2000) and a number of studies have now shown that in most effective schools leadership extends beyond the senior management team (Harris, 1999; Busher and Harris, 2000).

One of the most important groups within this distributed leadership is at the middle management or subject leadership level (Harris et al., 2003: 131). Those working at this level in schools inevitably carry with them a wealth of personal experience which it is vital for the school to key into if the organisation is to achieve its goals. Subject leaders will have mastered the craft of teaching and will be expert in developing the learning of children and students; they will also be at a level in the organisation which enables them, possibly uniquely, to act as a fulcrum between those working in the classroom and the senior management team of the school. National and local government, parents, governors, headteachers and senior managers may set the agenda for school development but this can only be enacted successfully if those who work with children on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis are informed, consulted and empowered to do so. The subject leader is frequently the figure who interprets, negotiates and enacts the policy and may, indeed, write the relevant policy document for the initiative for their subject or subjects. In this way middle managers are the glue that holds together schools since they are frequently the ones to turn policy into action.

Sadly research shows that subject leaders are poorly catered for in terms of training (Adey, 2000) and few higher education institutions or Local Education Authorities have developed comprehensive specialist courses for middle managers (Harris et al., 2003: 134). It is to be hoped that the recent development of national programmes for school leadership, outlined below, may eventually rectify this situation.

The Role of Middle Managers in Helping Schools to Meet their Goals and the Need for Training.

The development of ‘national programmes’ for school leadership in the UK and internationally has revealed that those in authority in many countries, particularly in the West, realise the importance of well trained leaders in schools (Brundrett, 2000). These national programmes are often based on an adapted ‘competency’ or ‘standards’ framework such as that for subject leaders. These standards-based qualifications can contrast with the academic qualifications in school leadership and management, usually at master’s degree level, that have been provided by institutions of higher education for a number of years. There is a danger of ‘political control’ and increasing ‘bureau-cratisation’ of national qualifications but the commitment to school leadership shown by these developments is greatly to be applauded and many higher education institutions have increasingly tried to ensure that the national standards framework is reflected in the content of higher degree programmes.

One such example of this governmental commitment to school leadership is shown in the development of the National College for School Leadership which was established at Nottingham, England, in 2000 in order to ‘provide a single national focus for leadership development and research’ (DfEE, 1999). The College has been responsible for the continued development of a national network of school leadership development which provides a ladder of opportunity and qualifications for school leaders including the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) for those aspiring to headship, the Headteachers Leadership and Management Programme (HEADLAMP) for those recently appointed to headship and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH) for experienced school leaders. It is clear from this list that the major commitment in the early years of the development of these programmes has been to the enhancement of the knowledge and skills of the most senior management in schools but, happily, there are increasing signs that there is a growing commitment to the development of leadership throughout schools.

The National Standards for Subject Leaders were originally published in 1998 by the Teacher Training Agency as part of an attempt to define a professional development framework for teachers at all levels in schools. The standards are cross-phase and are structured in four sections:

• Strategic direction and development of the subject;
• Teaching and learning;
• Leading and managing staff;
• Efficient and effective deployment of staff and resources.

(TTA, 1998)

The standards give official imprimatur to the importance of the subject leader in schools:

While the headteacher and governors carry responsibility for overall school improvement, a subject leader has responsibility for securing high standards in teaching and learning in their subject as well as playing a major role in the development of school policy and practice. Throughout their work, a subject leader ensures that practices improve the quality of education provided, meet the needs and aspirations of all pupils, and raise standards of achievement in the school.

(TTA, 1998: 4)

Few statements could convey so decisively the centrality of the middle manager or subject leader. Such statements are re-echoed in the Teaching Standards Framework published by the...