School Leadership in the 21st Century

Christopher Bowring-Carr, Brent Davies, Linda Ellison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134466580
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Education reform continues to be a dominating feature of education in the UK and many other countries throughout the world. As a result of this, it is now more important than ever that headteachers and school managers develop the skills which enable them to manage their new responsibilities effectively.

In School Leadership in the 21st Century all the major aspects of school leadership are discussed, including:

• the strategic and ethical dimensions of leadership
• leading and managing change
• leading and managing staff in high performance schools
• information for student learning and organisational learning
• transformation of schools in the tewnty-first century.

The authors of this completely updated and revised edition have addressed the new standards and competency frameworks, making this an essential read for all headteachers and aspiring headteachers on NPQH or LPSH courses and anyone else with an interest in school leadership.

1 Introduction

Brent Davies

Since the publication seven years ago of School Leadership for the 21st Century, considerable change has enveloped the educational world. In the UK, the elections of the ‘New’ Labour Government have resulted in many policy initiatives and structural changes impacting on school leadership. Most significantly, the creation of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) has given both a national focus and national resources to the development of leadership in schools. Linda Ellison and I have been pleased with the popularity of the book and gratified by the number of reprints. When the publishers Routledge (now RoutledgeFalmer) invited us to write a second edition we were delighted. However, the delight turned to apprehension with the realisation that it was not possible to rewrite the original edition but it was necessary to create a completely new book with different chapters and new insights. This we have done and we have renamed the book School Leadership in the 21st Century, engaging our good friend and colleague Christopher Bowring-Carr to assist us. Sadly, two of the contributors to the first edition have met untimely deaths through illness. Mike Billingham and Max Sawatzki were outstanding educators and in recognition of that we have dedicated this rewritten book to them. Max’s outstanding chapter is the only one retained in full from the first book; it was, and remains, a classic.

‘THE LEADERSHIP DEBATE’ AND OTHER CHANGES

This new book is set against the backcloth of significant developments in the field. The NCSL has put forward ‘Ten school leadership propositions’ (National College for School Leadership 2001) which demonstrate a significant broadening of the government’s previous views on effective leadership. The wider academic community, both in the UK and overseas, has produced an increasing number of volumes on every type of leadership. We do not intend to replicate every one of these many perspectives but to take some key issues both in the type of leadership that the twenty-first-century school leader needs to deploy and in the specific areas in which leadership is needed.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

We have organised the book into four parts. Part I aims to provide readers with a framework to review their own leadership and the leadership necessary to develop their schools. It does not replicate the discussions about the different theories of leadership but seeks to explore three perspectives that leaders should have and that they need to develop with others in the school. The first perspective, which is explored in Chapter 2, is that strategic leadership, by most standard definitions, is forward-looking, seeking a new future for the school and, to achieve this, the leaders in the school need to develop a strategic view and strategic leadership skills. As well as taking a strategic view, leaders are faced with a very turbulent environment and have to make many decisions under pressure. In this environment it is vital that decision-making is based on our second perspective, a sound ethical basis. To this end the ethical dimension of leadership is examined in Chapter 3. Concluding this first part of the book, we draw on the competence and competency movements within leadership development in Chapter 4. While the competency framework has been a dominant theme over the past ten years with the adoption of that framework by many NCSL courses, it is not without its critics. Although we consider that it is not the only framework for effective leadership, it remains a core one. Of particular value is exploring the distinction between competence, competency and the much-used term ‘standards’.

Part II considers some of the major leadership challenges that schools face and activities which must take place. The first challenge is that of leading the organisation in a sustainable way, not just in the short term but also over the medium to long term. In Chapter 5 the concepts of strategy and strategic thinking as well as traditional concepts of planning are reviewed in a completely new framework for establishing the strategic direction of the school. This chapter is focused on what should be done in order to establish a strategic process and approach which will enable strategic leadership to flourish. It is inevitable that any strategic process that takes the school from its present place to some future position will involve a considerable amount of change. How to lead and manage this change process is therefore the focus of Chapter 6. This is followed, in Chapter 7, by a key insight into how we can lead and manage staff to achieve the aims and objectives of the school.

Part III addresses the key issue of learning and the support for learning. Chapter 8 seeks ways to avoid the problem of seeing leadership and management as an end in itself and focuses on leadership in relation to the core purpose of schools, learning. The informational approach used by schools should promote deep fundamental learning rather than simple test results. The next two chapters look at using information to support learning in secondary and primary schools. The maxim ‘assessment for learning’ rather than ‘assessment of learning’ is critical in Chapter 9, while Chapter 10 focuses on information for organisational learning. Chapter 11 then addresses how learning and the school are resourced by considering school finance. While many school leaders may consider the ‘fair funding’ concept to be an oxymoron and may feel that there is little room for manoeuvre within current fiscal restraints, we do not consider that to be an accurate picture. The advent of multiple initiatives from central government has resulted in a bidding culture where resource management has become both more significant and more complex, requiring leadership as well as management dimensions.

The final section, as befits a book on leadership, is a profound and insightful chapter which considers the future of the education system by examining the need for transformation and the components of a blueprint for the future of schools.

In meeting the challenge of creating the new book we have kept true to the ambitions which we had for the first book. Those were to make it both useful and accessible to practitioners, to provide leaders in schools with insights and perspectives that would assist them in leading their schools in a positive and creative way, and to be futures-orientated, seeing leadership, like education, as a broadening and enlightening process and not a reductionist managerial agenda. The way the book has been received by leaders in schools has been very encouraging.

Part I

The dimensions of leadership

2 The strategic dimensions of leadership

3 The ethical dimension of leadership

4 The competent leader

2 The strategic dimensions of leadership

Barbara J. Davies and Brent Davies

CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC LEADERS

Brent Davies, in Chapter 5 of this book, argues for the development of the strategically focused school. Key to that strategic focus is the quality of the strategic leadership in the school. If we are to support and enhance the development of strategic leadership in schools, we need to be able to build a framework of understanding of what strategic leadership might comprise. This chapter will consider what organisational abilities and individual characteristics can be associated with strategic leadership. The chapter does not purport to describe a new form of leadership, such as transformational or instructional leadership, but analyses the strategic element in the leadership repertoire. It identifies characteristics of individuals who are successfully undertaking a strategic leadership role or skill. However, there is a difficulty in isolating out the strategic element of good leadership as B. Davies (2003: 303) has identified:

The difficulty in reviewing the literature, or interpreting the results of my current research, is that it is not always easy to distinguish the characteristics of ‘good leadership’ from those of ‘strategic leadership’.

The second difficulty to consider is whether we are talking only about strategic leadership being associated with the formal leader of an organisation, or about a broader base of individuals who contribute leadership insights to the strategic process. In this chapter, we recognise that there may be a number of individuals in an organisation who demonstrate a strategic perspective or ability. Thus, we take the view of distributed leadership (Bennett et al. 2003) which involves several individuals within the organisation being involved with the strategy.

With these concerns in mind, the chapter attempts to draw out those distinctive strategic elements of leadership. Strategy, as defined in Chapter 5, encompasses direction-setting, broad aggregated agendas, a perspective to view the future and a template against which to evaluate current activities. Leadership is defined by Bush and Glover (2003: 10) as:

a process of influence leading to the achievement of desired purposes. It involves inspiring and supporting others towards the achievement of a vision for the school which is based on clear personal and professional values.

What successful activities or behaviours do strategic leaders engage in? To facilitate discussion, we put forward nine factors associated with strategic leadership. These are, first, those abilities to undertake organisational activity and, second, individual abilities.

Strategic leaders have the organisational ability to:

• be strategically oriented;
• translate strategy into action;
• align people and organisations;
• determine effective strategic intervention points;
• develop strategic capabilities.

Strategic leaders have personal characteristics which display:

• dissatisfaction or restlessness with the present;
• absorptive capacity;
• adaptive capacity;
• leadership wisdom.

Each factor will be considered in turn.

Strategic leaders have the ability to be strategically oriented

This quality involves the ability to consider both the long-term future (Adair 2002, Beare 2001, Boisot 2003, Stacey 1992), seeing the bigger picture, as well as understanding the current contextual setting of the organisation. Strategic orientation is the ability to link long-range visions and concepts to daily work. Korac-Kakabadse and Kakabadse (1998: 9) suggest that ‘visionary leadership is transformational by nature, and as such, quite different from planning, which is a managerial or a transactional process’. Javidon (1991), quoted in Korac-Kakabadse and Kakabadse (1998: 10), suggests that ‘visioning depends on understanding existing realities (culture, history, formative context) and developing a clear sense of direction for the organisation’.

However, it is necessary to treat the concept of vision or visioning with caution. Seeking to analyse trends and their meaning for the future of the organisation can be seen as a good thing if it engenders debate and if future scenarios become the basis for strategic conversations. Buley (1998: 216) issues a timely warning when discussing the work of Schwenk (1997):

he argues that a powerful vision can actually do damage to an organization. In his view, by creating and communicating a clear vision, and by creating conditions which require his ‘followers’ to commit themselves to that vision, a leader is in danger of imposing uniformity of thinking and of stifling healthy debate which can have dire consequences. . . . Imposed values, he argues, destroy dissent and discussion which are essential to creative decision making.

The importance of creating the strategy with others, and not just communicating it to others, may be the critical skill that strategic leaders deploy in determining the strategic direction of the organisation, (Boal and Hooijberg 2001; Kakabadse et al. 1998). Strategic orientation can be considered to be the establishment of an outward-looking organisation, which builds an understanding of possible future directions, and involves engaging in strategic conversations and debate to focus on the most appropriate direction and approach.

Strategic leaders have the ability to translate strategy into action

In addition to strategic leaders leading the creation of an appropriate strategy for the organisation is the need to translate strategy into action by converting it into operational terms. Kaplan and Norton (2001) argue that this can be done by ‘strategy maps’ and ‘balanced scorecards’ and suggest that such approaches ‘provide a framework to describe and communicate strategy in a consistent and insightful way’ (p. 10). What strategic leaders are able to do is step back and articulate the main features of the current organisation, the strategic architecture of the school, and lead others in defining what the future of the school and the new architecture will be. This is a process that Tichy and Sharman (1993) call the rearchitecturing stage, which involves identifying a series of projects that need to be undertaken to move the organisation from its current to its future state. Tichy and Sharman (1993) put forward a three-stage process that strategic leaders are able to undertake, the components of which are:

• awakening;
• envisioning;
• rearchitecturing.

The awakening stage involves building an agreement within the school that a continuation of the current way of working is inadequate if it wants to be effective in the future. This may involve the process, described in Chapter 5, of enhancing participation and motivation to understand the necessity for change, through strategic conversations. The envisioning stage is building a clear and understandable picture of what this new way of operating looks like. This may initially involve the creation of strategic intent (Hamel and Prahalad 1994) and building the capacity to achieve it. Once this has been completed then the new architecture of the school will emerge and be the organisational basis for action.

Many schools have strategies that are written in different sorts of formal plans. Changing those strategies into action is very difficult. The key assessment of a leader’s ability to operate in the strategic domain may be to ask staff in the school how this week’s or this term’s activities fit into the strategic plan or direction of the school. If the teacher can articulate, in broad terms, where the school is going an...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE DIMENSIONS OF LEADERSHIP
• PART II: LEADING STRATEGIC CHANGE
• PART III: LEADING LEARNING
• PART IV: LEADING TRANSFORMATION