Session Information
26 SES 11 A, Heading for the Future- Principalship beyond 2020 Implications for Research (Part 2)
Symposium continued from 26 SES 10 A
Contribution
The pace and volume of educational reform overseen by successive and cross party governments over the last quarter of a century in England has, arguably, intensified under successive government interventions. The new government has freed up the system to a previously unseen extent (Hatcher and Jones, 2011; Stevenson, 2011) in a series of policy initiatives aimed at creating a ‘self-improving system’ (Hargreaves, 2010; 2012). Throughout this period the work of the school leader has increased in both volume and diversity so that many principals are no longer responsible for leading solely with a single setting but increasingly between multiple-schools and with external agencies and service providers (PwC, 2001; 2007; Chapman et al, 2009). Furthermore, while the decline of local authorities( Districts/Municipalities) and the simultaneous growth in the local decision making power of ‘Academies’ and ‘Teaching School Alliances’ has handed schools more autonomy, at the same time they are facing more stringent and punitive accountability measures and higher levels of governmental and public scrutiny than ever before (Gunter, 2011; Glatter, 2012). As such, it is easy to see why the notion of distributed leadership has become part of the dominant school leadership discourse in England, as it would appear to represent a logical solution to the ways in which the role of the school leader has developed and evolved in recent years. Perhaps the most important developments in knowledge of effective and successful principalship has come from mixed methods research studies that have been able to take advantage of the wealth of classroom and school data about student progress and achievement that now exists. This growing corpus of research literature on principalship in effective schools in improving schools in England has identified the phased distribution of leadership as a key facet of the work of headteachers (Chapman, 2004; Day et al, 2009). This empirical research has identified also that leadership values, qualities, strategies and behavior e.g. trust and resilience (Day and Gu, 2014) are much more important to the achievement of success than ‘style’.
References
Day, C. & Armstrong, P, (2016) School Leadership Research in England In Helene Ärlestig, Christopher Day, Olof Johansson (Eds) A Decade of Research on School Principals: Cases from 24 countries (Dordrecht: Springer),
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