Session Information
26 SES 09 A, School Leadership and Student Achievement: Cross Cultural Perspectives
Symposium
Contribution
This symposium will consist of presentations from partners in an EU project addressing transition in the form of school leadership and its impact on student achievement within school transformation. Occurring at the mid-point of the research, the symposium will enable the sharing of emerging learning from five countries, allowing a consideration of key issues in transformation across differing educational cultures. Perspectives will include a review of existing research, an exploration of leadership competencies and their impacts and the implications of pressurised workloads.
School Leadership Toolkit for Accelerating Achievement (SLT4AA) is an Erasmus+ project which addresses the problem of how to address inequality in the European school systems by improving the skills of school leaders. The importance of the role of school leaders has been recognised by the Commission who have set up the European Policy Network on School Leadership (EPNoSL). In August 2013 EPNoSL produced a report ‘The State of Affairs on School Leadership in Europe’ analysing current provision and need. This work analysed policy and practice from 15 EU countries and their effectiveness in dealing with equity and learning. In line with other reports, it highlights the gaps in performance between schools in challenging socio-economic areas and those in more favoured areas. It found this to be the case in all EU countries. However, it also highlighted the impact that successful and pro-active school leadership can have on the performance of these schools.
There are longer term implications for this performance gap. OECD (2010) reports ‘educational outcomes are a strong predictor of economic growth’ but also argues that educational outcomes (and thus economic growth) may be enhanced through effective school leadership strategies.
This project focuses on how to accelerate improvement in school and pupil performance through up-skilling school leaders (not just Principals but extended leadership teams) to undertake school transformation. This is seen as a priority in the ET 2020 agenda if progress to meet the targets is to be accelerated, but also if the gaps between schools in different socio-economic contexts are to be reduced.
The various measures in place for measuring educational performance such as PISA data or Eurydice statistics provide useful tools for measuring and comparing country performance, identifying trends, and progress on specific targets. This project takes the principles applied at a macro-level and applies them at an individual school level, firstly to measure, then to prioritise and finally to implement improvements.
In some countries variations are transparent as each school’s performance is subject to tight monitoring and accountability. This is particularly the case in the UK where every school’s performance is published in ‘league tables’ and there is a very rigorous inspection regime. This transparency has led to a real focus on ‘under-performing’ schools. In numerous cases these schools have been transformed to ‘high-performing’ schools in a short period of time.
This project addresses the issue of school transformation and uses the UK experience as its base-line. It examines the characteristics of successful school transformation, the practical measures taken, and develops a new set of training resources, trialled at a European level, to up-skill school leadership teams to transform low performing schools into high performing schools. It will identify how this can be done without changing the student population's socio-demographic characteristics, will base the resources on real case studies, and apply them in real situations in 4 countries. The outcomes will be a set of training materials which will be applicable to all countries.
References
European Policy Network on School Leadership, The State of Affairs on School Leadership in Europe, 2012, (EAC/42/2010)
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.