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14 Leadership and leadership development in education

Nigel Bennett

Chapter outline

This chapter:

• Argues that there have been numerous initiatives over a number of years designed to enhance leadership in, and of, schools.

• Suggests that the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services has been of special significance since 2000. It has promoted the idea of the critical importance of headteacher leadership as well as offering programmes for leadership at other levels and emphasizing the distributed leadership model for schools.

• Evaluates and critiques the work of the College with regard to its mission of fostering school leadership.

• Has relevance for Chapter 6 on Corporate Universities.

Leadership development has become a substantial part of the landscape of teachers’ continuing professional development. In England, which is where this study will be mainly focused, a series of central government reform initiatives has placed increasing pressure on headteachers and other senior staff to deliver central government requirements in both a high-quality and cost-effective way One consequence of this has been an increasing central government emphasis on school leadership, which has led to the field being strongly dominated by one government-funded agency, the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services. This was originally founded as the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) in 2000, and its remit was expanded to cover all Children’s Services in the autumn of 2009. It is impossible to review the field of leadership development in education in England without paying considerable attention to the work of the College, and indeed its influence has extended internationally, because it has been widely seen as an exemplar of effective leadership development (see OECD 2008; Chapman and Fullan 2007; Hopkins and Higham 2007).

This chapter, therefore, is divided into four parts. It begins by outlining briefly the background to the creation of the National College in 2000. It then identifies a number of key aspects of the context of leadership development activity, before examining critically the work of the College. Lastly, it raises some further significant questions and criticisms of the College’s performance and its impact on the field.

It is, however, important to emphasize that the College is not the only provider of leadership development in England, and that its remit does not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Although all four nations have created qualifications for practising or aspiring headteachers and principals, there are differences between them; particularly

Leadership in Organizations : Current Issues and Key Trends, edited by John Storey, Taylor and Francis, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=589645. Created from apus on 2017-10-29 22:25:58.

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between England and Scotland, where the Scottish Qualification for Headship was delivered by consortia of universities and carries a postgraduate diploma. England’s National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) has never carried an academic qualification, although universities usually count it towards a Masters degree. Nor was it the first nationally funded leadership development institute – it was, for example, preceded by the leadership development centre in the National Institute of Education in Singapore, which reflects the position of the College in its close relationship with central government.

The background to the National College

The formation of the National College was the culmination of the growing involvement of central government in state education since the early 1980s. Bolam (2004) provides a good summary of this development, from early technical courses on timetabling run by HM Inspectorate of Schools, through funded secondments – ‘one-term training opportunities’ – for headteachers (the creation of a National Development Centre at Bristol University charged with producing development materials), to the creation of the School Management Task Force (SMTF) in 1988, which also produced training materials. The focus of this development and support was to promote improved educational management.

A key principle of the SMTF’s approach was that training and development should take place ‘on the job’ or ‘close to the job’, and this has guided all training provided by central government-funded agencies since. It can be seen as a response to what was regarded as an ‘over-academic’ and ‘theoretical’ approach to management development taken by the universities, where there had been a significant growth of postgraduate programmes in educational management (Brundrett 2001). The development of university diplomas and degrees in educational management had preceded this central government involvement by some fifteen years, beginning with work at the London Institute of Education (Glatter 1972) and at Birmingham University (Hughes 1973), and then spreading widely through the sector in the wake of work at the Open University.

The 1990s saw further, more systematic development of national support and training for headteachers. The Teacher Training Agency (TTA) produced the first versions of three programmes which were to form the basis of the National College’s provision: the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) as a preparation for headship; the HEADLAMP (Headteachers’ Leadership and Management Programme) for newly appointed heads; and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH) for experienced heads. Of these, HEADLAMP was a fund that was available to newly appointed heads to spend in their first two years in post on whatever forms of professional develop- ment and support that they saw as appropriate; the other two were formally prepared and presented programmes.

Accountability and diversity as a driver of leadership development provision

Two major policy thrusts, discernible in the preceding section, characterize the approach taken to the delivery of public services by both Conservative and Labour administrations since the 1980s. The first is a strong emphasis on target-driven accountability frameworks backed up by rigorous inspections. Strain (2009) has analysed the underlying performativity of this dimension of the English policy context. The English education system reviews school performance through national testing of all children in English, maths and science at ages

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seven, eleven and fourteen, and by comparing the overall performance of their pupils in the sixteen plus General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). (Tests for fourteen-year-olds were abolished in 2008, but at the time of writing the others remain. The tests for seven-year- olds are relatively informal, but eleven-year-olds still undertake traditional pencil-and-paper tests.) The results are published and ‘league tables’ of performance created. In addition, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspect schools on a regular cycle, grading them on a set of performance factors and allocating a rating to each one. If a school is rated weaker than satisfactory then it will be subject to some form of external intervention in order to bring its performance standards up to a satisfactory level. One aspect of this is the policy of creating forms of partnerships between schools, a policy that has a direct bearing on the forms of leadership development that are being provided and which are discussed below. Although there have been detail changes to the assessment structure, the overall arrangement has not changed. The Labour administration added nationally applicable performance targets against these test scores for schools to meet, and these have become more demanding over time.

The second thrust has been to introduce what Woods, Bagley and Glatter (1998) called a ‘quasi-market’ in education. This has taken several forms. First, schools have had very substantial levels of funding devolved to them, leaving them free to develop their own policies on spending. Secondly, parents are now given the choice of school, although in reality this is limited in many areas by the availability of schools and their popularity. However, this means that schools have to undertake a process of reputation management, part of which is ensuring that the school’s published test scores and examination results are as good as possible. Last, it has resulted in a wide range of different kinds of schools being created in addition to the existing religious schools which had enjoyed a certain amount of freedom of action through their voluntary aided status. These include trust schools and academies, both of which have substantial degrees of autonomy from local authorities. Academies were usually created to replace one or more schools judged to be failing as a means of raising academic performance. However, this changed after the 2010 election, when the Secretary of State announced that academies would become the norm.

(Re-)enter leadership

The policy developments chronicled above increased greatly the importance of the headteacher, and this was recognized by the Labour government. In 1999 a proposal was put forward for a training college for headteachers, and this was begun in 2000, with its new offices opened by the Prime Minister in 2002. The name of the college, the National College for School Leadership, indicated a major change of perception about the role of the head- teacher. In part it was the result of the pressures of competition and reputation management. Schools were no longer centres of largely autonomous professional action, as they had been portrayed prior to the 1980s (see, for example, Letch 1984), nor simply the agents of delivery of an externally prepared curriculum. Instead, headteachers had to create an identity for the school that was clearly different from that of their neighbours and ensure that it was well understood outside the school and strongly permeated practice within it. In many respects, this expectation was not different from that underpinning the role of the head in the public schools of the nineteenth century (see Armytage 1970), when creative and charismatic heads like Thomas Arnold and Edward Thring imbued their schools with a particular ethos. In the 1990s this perspective was presented as a response to the external demands indicated above, that would take schools beyond the demands of implementing external policy into the very world of values-driven leadership that characterized the work of these great

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nineteenth-century heads. Headteachers had to recreate a distinctive institutional identity for their schools over and above the rational-technical demands of target-driven government educational policies, and cope with the constant pressure of change as schools responded to new government initiatives and the changing social and economic expectations generated by increasing globalization. As Glatter (2004) points out, the first author to present this analysis was Grace (1995), in part as a critique of government policy, but ‘leadership’ was quickly appropriated by the government so as to emphasize the competitive and autonomous nature of state schools. Government also used the concept to play down both the extent to which schools had become delivery agents of a strongly policed, externally mandated curriculum, and the existence of the relatively mundane day-to-day work of ‘keeping things going’ (Cuthbert and Latcham 1979). With the creation of the government-funded National College for School Leadership, the term had become fully institutionalized in government thinking. Leadership as conceived in official discourse can thus be characterized as the work of generating creative responses at school level to the demands of externally mandated require- ments – transformational rather than transactional leadership (Burns 1978) – concerned with developing new understandings of educational practice and schooling, but within clearly defined parameters and increasingly directive and interventionist government policies and strategies. In the ‘loose-tight’ policy context (Peters and Waterman 1982) of centrally defined, performance-based targets and high levels of financial and market autonomy outlined above, this creative leadership was seen as differentiating schools from one another whilst promoting high performance against the mandated performance targets.

This is not the place to enter into the debate about the difference between leadership and management, although it is worth pointing out that, even as the change in discourse gathered momentum, Glatter (1997) pointed out that we should not lose sight of the importance of the organization in our move towards the emphasis on leadership. In part he was warning of a tendency to equate leadership with ‘the leader’, a charismatic figure who by force of personality creates the culture of the school and articulates the values it should seek to live by – a return, perhaps, to the very concept of headteacher as leader that was demonstrated in our perception of Arnold and Thring. This concept remains strong, and indeed has received some further support by the move towards ideas of collaborative leadership (Court 2003; Glatter and Harvey 2006), federations of schools (Lindsay et al. 2007) and systems leadership (Hopkins and Higham 2007; Chapman and Fullan 2007; Hopkins 2008) that have become dominant in the school leadership literature. In contrast, the argument that ‘leadership’ was not to be equated with the leader was already strongly articulated (Ogawa and Bossert 1995; Sergiovanni 2000). It should be noted, however, that the role of ‘the leader’ was not lost in such analyses, and the issue of values-driven action as a central dimension of leadership (Gold et al. 2003) has re-emphasized the role even as forms of shared, dispersed and distributed leadership have become advocated (Harris 2008; see also Bennett et al. 2003).

Key issues in educational leadership development

Environmental complexity and the role of the headteacher

The previous section indicates a significant challenge to the traditional perception of headteachers, both in terms of their role and their relationships with their colleagues. Their role has changed in relation to both their position in the environment of the school and their responsibilities within it. We have already indicated the potential importance of reputation management in an environment of parental choice and multiple categories of school. This

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outward-facing dimension of their work has been given further impetus by two other major government initiatives in particular. Central government policies related to their Every Child Matters agenda (DfES 2004; also at http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk) set out to integrate more effectively the different agencies that have responsibilities for aspects of children’s achievement and welfare (Glaister and Glaister 2005). They have created a strong demand for inter-agency working and stronger forms of collaboration with organizations such as social services, the health service and the police. Another part of this agenda for widening the role and provision of schools is the policy of ‘extended schools’ which began in 2003 (Cummings et al. 2007; West-Burnham et al. 2007), which has greatly increased the range of services schools offer to the community and has developed their role as generators of social capital and cohesion.

Responding to new initiatives makes the headteacher a leader and promoter of change, thereby heightening the importance of creativity referred to above. Such creativity requires a strong strategic focus, an ability to prioritize between initiatives and to develop plans for action that can deliver on these priorities (Davies 2006; Fidler 2002; Preedy et al., 2002).

The increasing demands of accountability systems

Reference was made above to the strong element of public accountability that has underpinned government policy since the late 1980s. One consequence of this has been the institution of regular inspections by Ofsted, which have required schools to submit detailed improvement or development plans that have to be updated every year. In addition, head- teachers are now required to submit a range of detailed documents providing a wide variety of information and data, which are then used to assess the school’s performance. Collecting such data involves closer monitoring and supervision of teachers and pupil progress. This has had a considerable impact on the responsibilities of the headteacher. Further, the requirement to provide this information implies an increasing level of supervision and more micromanage- ment from the centre. The data may, for example, provide benchmarks against which heads and others can assess their performance relative to equivalent schools, but finding, collating and producing the documents that provide the data is time-consuming and can foster a sense of close supervision, both from outside the school and within it.

Strategy, vision and values

The environmental complexity of the plethora of government initiatives since 1988 has created a new interest in the importance of strategic leadership (Davies 2006; Preedy et al. 2002). This goes beyond a discussion of strategies for successful change (Fullan 2007) towards an emphasis on sustained and sustainable change (Hargreaves and Fink 2006; Davies 2006). But the headteacher as the leader and promoter of change has to have some idea of the direction of the change and how to achieve it. This has often been presented in terms of vision and mission, which draws us back to the issue of values-driven leadership (Gold et al. 2003). It is perhaps worth mentioning that Wright (2001) argued trenchantly that headteachers do not have the opportunity of defining the values of the school in the centrally driven managerialist and performance-driven system created in the 1990s, these being established through the national curriculum and associated initiatives such as the national literacy and numeracy strategies. From this perspective, it would appear that the values driving school leadership are second-order values concerned with programme implementation, rather than first-order values concerned with decisions about what to teach and why.

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A central element of values-driven leadership is that the values should be both articulated and defensible: as Elmore (2008) argues, it is not a question of ‘doing the right thing’ but of ‘doing what we believe to be the right thing’. This provides a potential source of distinc- tiveness for heads and their schools. Thus, for example, Ryan (2006) argues the fundamental values of ‘inclusive leadership’; Woods (2005) puts the case for ‘democratic leadership’. In their report of a study conducted for the Department for Education and Skills, Gold et al. (2003) comment that the ten principals of schools identified by Ofsted as outstanding appeared to share what they described as ‘broadly social democratic or liberal humanist’ values, concerned with ‘such matters as inclusivity, equal opportunities and equity or justice, high expectations, engagement with stakeholders, cooperation, commitment, teamwork and understanding’ (2003: 136).

‘Doing what we believe to be the right thing’ emphasizes the importance of morality in leadership. This can have the effect for some headteachers of intensifying the dilemma of meeting their own sense of what is ‘right’ with the demands of central government policies. A good example of this is the reaction of school heads to the Standardized Achievement Tests (SATS), once set for all children aged seven, eleven and fourteen but now (2010) amended so that only the tests at age eleven are formal ones. Although many headteachers have objected to the tests – at the time of writing two teacher unions are boycotting them this year – the pressures of league tables and external reputations have led many primary school heads to place a heavy emphasis on the demands of the tests in their children’s final year, especially in areas where competition for pupils is intense.

Changing relationships with staff, particularly in the location and distribution of leadership

It has always been the case that heads have been unable to do all the work involved in managing the school, and as a result task delegation was the norm even before the intro- duction of paid promoted posts in English education in the 1950s (Wallace 1986). In the USA, the chairs of departmental subjects are still largely unpaid for the additional responsibilities they take. However, despite Mintzberg’s (1973) argument that leadership is one of the tasks of managers, the move from the language of management to that of leadership in the 1990s has been reflected in discussion of other posts in schools. The National College now refers to ‘senior leadership teams’ rather than ‘senior management teams’, and ‘middle managers’ have become ‘middle leaders’. This formalization of the idea that leadership is spread widely through the organization has helped to promote the development of the concept of ‘distributed leadership’ in the educational leadership literature.

As Bennett et al. (2003) pointed out, distributed leadership is a difficult idea to pin down. They suggested that three characteristics could be discerned in the literature they reviewed: that it is the result of concertive action, which is to say that the sum of the interaction between individuals is greater than the sum of the activities involved; that it opens the boundaries of leadership more widely than traditional formulations of leadership; and that expertise is distributed across many members of the organization, not just possessed by a few in senior positions. It will be clear that the concept of ‘middle leader’ referred to above is an attempt to marry together this dimension of distributed leadership with traditional hierarchical school structures. This formulation gives room for other models of leadership, particularly teacher leadership, to be included within the concept, and Alma Harris does approach the concept from the teacher leadership perspective.

Although it is possible to identify three broad characteristics of the term ‘distributed leadership’, it is interpreted in quite different ways by its three major theorists – Gronn (e.g.

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2003), Spillane (e.g. 2006) and Harris (e.g. 2008). Gronn roots his use of the term in activity theory, and in essence it is a way of dealing with the work intensification faced by the headteacher in response to the ever-extending range of activities indicated above. Spillane uses the term as an analytical construct through which it is possible to discuss leadership in context, and he attempts to address it from a value-neutral perspective; distributed leadership can be both good and bad, depending on the context and the purposes to which it is being put. Harris draws on her perception of teacher leadership as a radical challenge to orthodox leadership practice (Harris and Muijs 2005; Harris and Lambert 2003) to advocate dis- tributed leadership as a structural device for promoting radical change, arguing that it must rest on a moral base of providing a positive impact on learning. The case studies she provides of distributed leadership in action (Harris 2008: 66–100) demonstrate that it can be a deliberate strategy initiated by a strong leader to promote change. They suggest that head- teachers can use it to restructure schools and create degrees of uncertainty such that individuals can promote different approaches to thinking about their work. In this sense, distributed leadership may be closer to the idea of delegating responsibility to promote new thinking and collaborative work than Gronn’s approach, and more directive and hierarchical than other radical challenges to traditional views of leadership, such as those of Woods’s democratic leadership (2005) and Ryan’s inclusive leadership (2006).

Structural changes in the school system

The continuing pressure for school improvement that underpins the strong accountability and inspection systems referred to above has combined with a demographic issue to create a number of significant changes in the structure of the education service. Although the National College recently reported (NCSL 2009a) that the percentage of teachers who now aspire to headship has risen dramatically since the introduction of the revised NPQH and the introduction of the government’s ‘fast track’ scheme, there is still concern that due to the age profile of headteachers a high percentage will retire over the next five years. A National College report (NCSL 2006) stated that one-quarter of all headteachers in post then were over fifty-five, and although the ‘retirement boom’ did not peak in 2009 as was predicted in that report, the head of the College was reported in 2008 as stating that 55 per cent of current headteachers could be expected to retire by 2012 (BBC 2008).

One way of dealing with this predicted shortage of heads, that could also potentially address the school improvement issue, is the development of new models of headship which link schools together (Glatter and Harvey 2006). Since the Education Act of 2002 the government has been encouraging the concept of ‘federations’, in which two or more schools link together for some or all of their work. Federations are normally categorized as ‘soft’ or ‘hard’: the key characteristic of ‘hard’ federations is that they share a governing body. Hard federations are more likely than soft to have a single headteacher taking overall responsibility for the schools in the federation; an ‘executive head’. Where an executive head is appointed, it is likely that a deputy head will be appointed with responsibility for running one of the schools within the federation; the executive head may act as head of one school with a deputy taking responsibility for the other. Harris et al. (2006) discuss the concept of executive leadership, and it is interesting to note that as early as 1973 Hughes raised the question of whether the headteacher should be viewed as the school’s ‘chief executive’ or its ‘leading professional’ in his study of the ‘professional-as-administrator’ (Hughes 1973).

Federations can be used as a means to create practitioner support for weak or under- performing schools, which are paired with highly successful schools. The head of the success- ful school becomes the executive head, and that school becomes, in effect, a support school

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for the one that has poorer results. Thus the creation of federations is a further step in the direction of professional development by professionals themselves. It is claimed that these arrangements are created with the consent of the leadership of the weaker schools, and that significant improvements in attainment have been achieved (Chapman et al. 2008); however, the evidence remains fragmentary and it is not clear that all such arrangements are seen as unthreatening.

System leadership

The concept of federations is an important step away from the traditional relationship between the head and his or her school, and creates the idea of heads taking responsibility in some way for the work of other schools. Shortly we shall look at the idea of consultant heads and national leaders of education, when we examine the work of the National College, but the concept of working with and across schools and taking wider responsibility has given rise to an extended version of educational leadership referred to as ‘system leadership’ (Fullan 2009; Hopkins and Higham 2007; Hopkins 2008). Hopkins (2008) suggests that system leadership has to be understood as a process that moves beyond ‘technical solutions’, to problems, to seeing significant issues as ‘adaptive work’ (Heifetz 1994), which therefore require learning on the part of the person providing leadership. He identifies a range of possible activities for systems leaders, including: taking responsibility for helping other schools, through formal or informal federations; taking responsibility for a school in severely challenging circumstances; and working as a community leader to create partnerships between agencies involved in child care and welfare. These roles indicate that system leadership can be exercised both formally and informally. The key feature of system leaders is that their work is based on a strong moral purpose that views the welfare of the system as a whole as being no less important than the welfare and success of their own school. Further, system leaders recognize that activities do not occur, nor do organizations function, in isolation: they are interrelated. The emphasis is on reducing isolation, opening up practice to the insights of others and sharing insights in return; it means not providing formalized or routinized responses to issues and problems, but treating each one as unique.

In Hopkins’s (2008) presentation of system leadership we can see echoes of the charismatic leader tradition, as well as elements of concertive action as in distributed leadership and the moral basis of educational leadership. He states (2008: 33) that ‘it is clear that our best system leaders share a characteristic set of behaviours or skills’. He goes on to propose that these skills fall into two categories: first, they engage in personal development, usually informally by comparing their own achievements with those of others; and second, they have a strategic capability that enables them to convert their vision or moral purpose into operational principles.

It is appropriate to point out that although distributed leadership is usually interpreted as a means of spreading leadership responsibilities and opportunities within the organization, the concepts of federations and system leadership also suggest that leadership can be distributed more widely outside the organization by dispersing responsibility from the school leadership to those who are not formally part of the school’s structure.

In this section of the chapter we have considered some of the leadership issues and themes that characterize current thought, concluding with two analyses of leadership practice that are seen as providing ways of dealing with some of the issues raised. As stated at the outset, the major provider of leadership development activities in England is the National College, and we turn now to examine the nature of its provision and the extent to which it is addressing the issues we have raised.

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The National College

The College’s provision rests on a competency-based ‘standards’ model of leadership, a widespread approach in the field. National Standards for Headteachers were established in England in 1998 by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA); Scotland established its own (SEED 1998). A similar approach has been developed in the USA (CCSSO 1996).

The National College is funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), and receives a remit letter each year from the Secretary of State that lays out its priorities for the coming year. There is strong evidence to suggest that the government sees the College as a support agency in policy delivery: the ‘end-to-end review’, carried out in 2004 (Review Team 2004), explicitly states that:

In future it would help both parties [the Department for Education and Skills and the NCSL] to have an overall ‘agenda’ with priorities more integrated and explicit between and within the two organisations.

(NCSL Review Team 2004: 7, cited by Thrupp 2005: 19)

One aspect of this close relationship, which will be discussed later, is that the College can be criticized for generating a strongly normative approach to leadership development, resting on a prescriptive model and the questionable principle of ‘best practice’.

Crow (2004) identified three dimensions of College provision: courses, networking and research. Subsequent developments, presaged in the model of leadership development presented below, have added the idea of ‘professional as consultant’ to Crow’s original three. In addition, the College provides through its extensive website a range of resources that can be used for personal or organizational development. These resources are produced largely in response to the demands of government policies or situations the College itself has identified. There are, for example, resource packs on succession planning and inter-agency leadership.

An examination of the ways in which the College has developed Crow’s three dimensions reveals some key philosophical stances towards leadership development: a clear framework that links it to a traditional view of teacher careers; course delivery through ‘blended learning’ as a way of maximizing reach and impact; an emphasis on the use of practitioners rather than academics for the provision of programmes; and the development of research opportunities for practitioners as well as commissioning professional research and undertaking in-house work. We consider each in turn.

A clear leadership development framework

The College’s leadership development framework (NCSL 2001) postulates a five-stage cumulative developmental sequence that relates to both career development and levels of responsibility within schools’ hierarchical structures. It is:

1 Emergent leaders – teachers in their first formal leadership post, such as heads of subject departments (‘subject leaders’).

2 Established leadership – senior teachers who are not yet considering headship or who are not intending to move into headship.

3 Entry into headship – senior teachers preparing for headship. 4 Advanced leaders – established headteachers. 5 Consultant leadership – exceptional headteachers who are capable of providing wider

leadership and development support to other headteachers.

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Over time, the range of courses provided for each of these groups of staff has increased greatly. Alongside the original courses for specific groups within the framework, the College has established a wide range of courses that have reflected the changing demands of government policy, notably in relation to school improvement. However, although the College has continued with some of its original provision for established heads, notably its international fellowship programme, it has discontinued its formal course for established headteachers, arguing that:

the rapidly changing and complex context for headteachers with new models of leadership and the need for great flexibility means that a single national programme, no matter how effective, can no longer meet these increasingly diverse needs.

(The National College 2009a)

It may perhaps be seen as somewhat ironic that the College, which as we saw earlier presents leadership as widely distributed throughout the community, should single out established headteachers as needing more bespoke support to deal with the complex environ- mental pressures they face, but sees more ‘off the peg’ programmes as appropriate for less senior staff. There is perhaps a change in the College’s perception of leadership development needs from straightforward leadership training and skills development prior to headship, to a more subtle, less technical perspective on leadership once the trainee has obtained his or her headship.

‘Blended learning’

Blended learning consists of a combination of online materials, individual or group support, and face-to-face activity. This approach makes it possible to reach a large number of potential students in a cost-effective way. The individual trainers are recruited from local school leaders and others, providing a national network of potential tutors, and the courses are provided by consortia. Since the College’s ‘end-to-end review’ by the then-DfES (Review Team 2004) there has been more contracting out of course development and provision, although the specification for the course development work remains very tightly drawn.

Practitioners leading training and development

This has been a major influence on both the modes of provision and the range of courses and training activities that the College has developed over time. The idea that headteachers, as opposed to academics, could provide this expertise was presaged in the College’s fifth level of leadership development – that of ‘consultant leadership’ – and carries forward the con- cept of professional training formulated by the SMTF (DES 1990). Although the College established a Universities Partnership Group made up of universities with large educational leadership departments, this group took no part in developing the College’s programmes.

A study of the College’s provision in relation to the demands of central government’s school improvement policies is a further demonstration of this position. The College now provides training for heads to become national or local ‘leaders of Education’,1 executive heads2 and school improvement partners.3 All of these roles address the professional development needs and school effectiveness of others. The College also provides leadership development for young teachers in the government’s ‘fast track’ programme that aims to prepare outstanding graduates for senior school leadership programmes within five years of starting out in teaching.

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Learning from practitioners is also a key principle of the College’s extensive networking. From 2002 onwards it developed a scheme of online ‘networked learning communities’ (Hopkins and Jackson 2002); a national online forum, ‘Talk2Learn’; and a ‘hot seat’ arrange- ment in which leading practitioners would be available to answer questions and provoke discussion. All of these initiatives emphasized a knowledge base as possessed and articulated by individuals who were identified as leading practitioners.

The development of networks was a very important innovation. Relatively little work had been done in this field related to workplace learning, and the College was to a considerable extent blazing a trail here. The networked learning communities were local networks rather than a single national network, and provided examples of loose ‘social learning communi- ties’ (Wenger 2000), cutting across organizational boundaries and providing wide sources of learning at the individual level. However, as Tynjälä (2008) points out, such cross- organizational contact also provides opportunities for organizational learning.

Networking was important for three reasons. First, it emphasized that headteachers could learn from one another, sharing ideas and information, and provided a framework to facilitate this. Second, it enabled school leaders to move away from what Eraut (2004) calls immediate ‘receptive’ learning towards more ‘deliberative’ learning, in which discussion, review, and possibly planning for future eventualities can occur. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it offered the possibility that, simply through the interchange of ideas and experiences, practitioners could generate ‘new’ knowledge: new shared understandings of problems and issues and untried ideas about how to conceptualize and approach problems of practice. In this way networking promoted the development of professional learning communities (Stoll et al. 2006). However, Moore and Kelly (2009) suggest that there was evidence in the networks they studied that members were keeping to government agendas as they explored ways to implement the central government’s national strategies for education. They also emphasize the significance of power relations in the operation of networks, an issue addressed by Wenger but rather overlooked in other writing on professional learning communities.

Multiple approaches to research

Crow (2004) identified research as the third dimension of College activity. In-house work and research commissioned from management consultants, universities and research units underpins the regular updating of the leadership development programmes and website resources. The College has also promoted research and development work related to leadership theory and practice, both through in-house activity and projects commissioned from management consultants, universities and research units, although the interest in theory has been firmly focused on ‘theory in practice’ rather than the development of ‘theories of practice’.4 Importantly, too, given its emphasis on practitioner leadership, the College has provided research associateships for practising headteachers and other senior staff to engage in small-scale projects. All these reports are published and are freely available from the college website.

The College’s responses to the issues identified

A number of elements of the College’s work can be highlighted here, which cross-cut some of these issues. First, there is a strong emphasis on transformational leadership, and the impor- tance of the vision and values resulting from it. Second, we find a strong emphasis on what

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they call ‘learning-centred leadership’. Third, they espouse the principles of distributed lead- ership. Fourth, a significant element of their work has become the training of headteachers as national leaders of education, and supporting them in their work, especially in relation to the ‘city challenge’ projects established by the government (see note 1). Fifth, through their materials they provide resources to assist heads involved in federations, and are developing from those resources work on system leadership. We will look at each of these in turn.

Transformational leadership and the importance of vision and values

The idea of leadership as bringing about fundamental change in the organization underpins the courses and research reports provided by the College. It derives from its original purpose, and the remit letters it receives every year are always concerned with ensuring that schools can respond quickly and effectively to central government policy requirements. This leads to a strong focus on the leadership role as involving creating a vision and sharing values widely through the school so as to promote a clear and integrated organizational culture (Martin 1992).

As indicated above, a central element of values-driven leadership is that the values should be both articulated and defensible. Statements of educational values are contentious: earlier, we cited Elmore’s (2008) argument, that practice is not a question of ‘doing the right thing’ but of ‘doing what we believe to be the right thing’. The values articulated by the founder of Summerhill School (Neill 1968), for example, and the practices adopted at the school, are quite different from those put forward by national governments since the 1970s. However, both would acknowledge that it is important that school staff subscribe to the set of values espoused by the headteacher and those responsible for the school, which is one reason why it is easier to find values congruence within the staffs and parents of alternative schools and private schools, where participation is an act of deliberate choice. More recently, in work that links together issues of networks and transformational leadership as a system-wide phenom- enon, Chapman and Fullan (2007: 208) identify ‘ownership with respect to core values and vision’ as central elements to successful system change.

The College is clear about the importance of values as a basis for leadership practice. For example, in its website item on ‘Leadership for Personalized Learning’, it states,

At its most fundamental level of expression, leadership is about securing clarity of values and shared purpose. These two factors are significant variables in determining the culture of any school.

(NCSL 2009b)

This statement shares the language of the National Standards for Headteachers (DfES 2004: 6), in which the headteacher’s tasks in shaping the future are described as:

• Ensuring the vision for the school is clearly articulated, shared, understood and acted upon effectively by all;

• Demonstrating the vision and values in everyday work and practice; • Ensuring that strategic planning takes account of the diversity, values and experience of

the school and community at large.

Where and how the values are derived and communicated is not indicated: they are pre- sumably embedded in the vision, but this is not clear. The College provides its own answer

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in a recent edition of its house magazine Ldr, where Spencer (2009) describes how two headteachers who are deemed to be highly successful have achieved this coherence and unity of approach within their schools. She states that ‘their leaders recognise the need to unite all stakeholders in a common vision in order to build the trust and collaboration for improve- ment’ (2009: 37). Both heads are described as having achieved this through restructuring. One states:

‘I meet with them [the six vice-principals] twice a week. That’s where they hear it from the horse’s mouth and then spread the message throughout the academy. I also give a ‘state of the nation’ address to every member of staff four times a year, using multi-media presentations to keep it interesting and inspirational.’

(ibid.)

The other is described as having set up a new structure in which:

nine heads of faculty drive the curriculum, cascading messages in vertical meetings to second leads who in turn meet with senior members of staff, third leads who track students and fourth leads who look after ICT and specialist school work across the curriculum.

(Spencer 2009: 38)

This headteacher states that:

‘If you believe that everybody in the organization is equal and the cross-fertilisation of ideas, knowledge and experience is paramount, then you have to get away from the traditional model of departments in order to give everyone the chance to meet together and talk. Our vision is to share good practice and address succession planning by creating an environment in which everyone has somewhere to go or aspire to being’.

(ibid.)

This statement can be seen as potentially at odds with the ‘cascade’ approach to creating shared values described immediately before it. It is similar to the approach to distributed leadership proposed by Harris (2008) as a structural arrangement to force staff to question practice so as to promote change. Harris does not discuss the implications of the possibility that this process of questioning practice might result in fundamental challenges to the value system espoused and articulated by the headteacher: we are forced to return to our earlier definition of school leadership as a creative response to external demands which does not challenge the fundamental expectations of those demands.

The interpretation of the relationship between headteachers and their staff, particularly as expressed by the first principal, stands to some extent at odds with the idea of leadership being distributed more widely through the school and exercised informally. The first headteacher in particular can be seen as strongly directive, brooking no nonsense or dissent. In this, it is similar to the example of the headteacher described in Campbell et al. (2003) who pointed out that he had been successful in achieving values congruence because 80 per cent of his staff had been appointed since he took up post and he only appointed staff who shared his perceptions of the purpose of education and appropriate practice.

However, despite this emphasis on values-driven transformational leadership, Earley et al. (2002: 80) argue that ‘there is as yet no evidence to suggest that on its own, it [transformational leadership] brings about anything but modest improved consequences for pupil outcomes.’

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This conclusion reinforces that of a landmark study by Hallinger and Heck (1999), which concluded that leaders do make a difference to school outcomes, but that this effect is indirect and mediated by others; principals influence classroom practice which in turn influences pupil learning. To achieve this, Earley et al. (2002: 80) suggest that what they call the other ‘pre-eminent prescriptive model’ of educational leadership is required: instructional or pedagogical leadership. This approach has been adopted by the College under the name of ‘learning-centred leadership’ (NCSL 2005).

Learning-centred leadership

Earley et al. (2002) define instructional leadership as focused on the behaviours of staff as they engage in activities directly related to student learning. It has been dismissed by Leithwood et al. (2006: 7) as a particularly good example of leadership models which ‘typically serve as synonyms for whatever the speaker means by ‘good’ leadership – with almost no reference to models . . . that have some conceptual coherence and a body of evidence testing their effects on organizations and pupils’. However, the College promotes the principle that leadership is exercised at all levels within the school, and ‘learning-centred leadership’ is the dominant rhetoric of its provision as a companion to transformational leadership – the operational- ization of the creation of values-congruence – as Earley et al. (2002) argue. In a document that explores the influence of ‘learning-centred leadership’ on the government policy on ‘personalized learning’, the College states:

. . . it is important to investigate and develop clarity about how leaders influence what happens in classrooms. All leaders, be they heads, deputies, members of the senior leadership team, or heads of departments, key stages or subjects need to be able to answer one key question: How do you make a difference to learning and teaching?

(NCSL 2005: 5 (original emphasis))

The College’s approach to professional development through national leaders of education represents precisely the combination of transformational and learning-centred leadership advocated by Earley et al. (2002). It is also part of the government’s ‘city challenge’ initiative, which is a direct challenge to the other limitation on principal influence put forward by Hallinger and Heck (1999): the external context of the school.

Distributed leadership

The College was a relatively early advocate of distributed leadership, which it states is ‘essentially about sharing leadership across an organization’. It states that this is not a new concept, being referred to sometimes as delegated or shared leadership, and argues that it rests on three key ideas: a belief in the value of leadership teams; the need for more leaders in schools as they become more complex; and the opportunity to prepare more staff for senior leadership posts (The National College 2009b). It places so much importance on this approach to leadership that it has its own distributed leadership website and set of materials (available at http://forms.ncsl.org.uk/mediastore/image2/distributedleadership_ web/animation.htm).

These materials present distributed leadership as a form of learner-centred leadership, focusing key leadership roles on the subject leaders and other middle leaders. The College’s approach is thus more akin to the pragmatism of Gronn’s formulation as a way of coping with

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work intensification than to the others, as it stresses the development of ‘emergent leaders’, and in its pursuit of collaborative leadership it places a strong emphasis on team development.

It can be claimed that in promoting a strong emphasis on teams, and leadership by the many rather than the few, the College is addressing the issue of headteacher shortage, albeit at one remove. As was indicated above, there is a tension between the kinds of collabora- tion and teamwork on which their view of distributed leadership is predicated, and the hierarchical nature of schools and the strong accountability model within which they are working.

Networking and consultative support

A key element of the College’s provision has been the generation of networking arrange- ments, which have created a range of potential online learning communities; although as Moore and Kelly (2009) indicated, the learning horizons of at least some of the networks appear to have been somewhat limited. However, the College has also been active in promoting a consultancy-style approach in addition to more conventional networking. The National Leaders of Education (NLE) scheme and the associated Local Leaders of Education (LLE) were set up in 2006, and there is a plan to achieve 500 NLEs by 2012. The College describes NLEs as

outstanding school leaders who, together with the staff in their schools, use their knowledge and experience of teaching to provide additional leadership capacity to schools in challenging circumstances. Many NLEs will have previously worked to support schools in challenging circumstances and all have worked beyond their own school.

(The National College 2009c)

Headteachers are eligible to apply for NLE status if they meet a range of demanding criteria that are related to their school’s performance in Ofsted inspections. Their appointment is reviewed every year, and they are supported by a consultant from the College. The College keeps a register of NLEs who are deployed to schools through local authorities or, if there appears to be a justification for an NLE to work with them, they can ask the College to arrange the placement directly through the local authority. Thus the NLEs are forming a cadre of highly skilled consultant heads who can provide a support network of a different sort from the original online networks. In this arrangement, there is a more overt, though still unstated, power relationship between the NLEs and the heads with whom they are working, that rests on the status accorded to the NLE. This support network, along with the power relationships that are part of it, is expanded by designating the NLEs’ schools as ‘national support schools’ (NSS) whose staff can provide similar support for subject leaders and other members of the school.

An important aspect of the NLE and NSS scheme has been its involvement in the government’s City Challenge programme. As indicated in note 1, this began in a small number of London boroughs that faced high levels of deprivation and poor academic achievement, and has now been extended to the whole of London, to Manchester and to three Black County local authorities. The scheme aims to network schools within the area covered by the scheme on the basis of similar characteristics, and also to provide what is referred to as tailored support for individual schools. In this work the NLEs and NSSs play a major role. Thus, although the Challenge scheme is not a College activity, it plays a major

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role in its delivery, strengthening its role in policy implementation that was referred to above, and extending further the principle of professionals providing support and training to their colleagues.

The NLE programme demonstrates a move towards the concept of system leadership in its deliberate promotion of a perception of headship as including responsibility outside of the main allocated school. Although the NLE remains a consultant or support for the school with which he or she is working, it is nevertheless the case that the creation of a cadre of such headteachers begins the process of viewing the education system more holistically rather than as an atomistic collection of individual schools.

Resources to assist in leadership of federations

We can deal quickly with this point. Although the College has recently created a course for leaders of Integrated Children’s Centres to run parallel to its NPQH, it has not explored formal provision for heads working across schools in hard or soft federations. However, it has produced materials to support professional development schemes, and it is clear that it sees the provision of such resource packs as an important part of its work. It has also established a very large website which includes materials and research on both federations and system leadership (e.g. O’Leary and Craig 2007), but access to these does not require a formal application to be made to the College to join one of its courses.

Criticisms of the National College

Although the National College is widely presented in the literature as a model for other educational systems to follow (see, for example, OECD 2008), it is not without its critics. Its role as a national training organization and its relation to central government lay it open to significant criticism, some of it reminiscent of problems from before its existence. Glatter (2004) points out that the idea of a ‘staff college’ for school management development was raised periodically from the late 1960s onwards, but that it was argued against on the grounds that it ran the risk of creating a form of ‘administrative orthodoxy’. A staff college had been created in the mid-1960s for the Further Education sector at Coombe Lodge, which like the National College was separate from the university system, but differed significantly in that it was funded through a precept from local authority budgets, rather than directly by central government, and it was closed when local authority funds dried up. Although Coombe Lodge published both books and a journal it was largely concerned with technical dimensions of management, made little attempt to connect itself directly with the requirements of central government policy, and was concerned with the organization and management of much larger educational institutions than most schools. When the National College was established, the same critique Glatter refers to re-emerged, coloured further by the direct nature of its funding and the concerns of some authors about the managerialist national political and policy context within which it was working. We will finish by considering three key and closely related concerns. These relate to: its relationship to central government and the related danger of standardizing practice; its potential for reducing critical research and thinking; and, most fundamentally, the basis upon which its activities and resources have been built.

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The close relationship with central government and the danger of standardization

First, the College has been criticized for its close relation to the central government at a time when government policy was subject to powerful academic criticism. Key elements of central government’s target-driven approach to school improvement and accountability – particularly the adoption of a quasi-market for schools, a strong inspection framework, competency-based teacher training with a much smaller input from higher education, and the establishment of ‘standards’ or competency frameworks for headteachers – were seen as creating forms of control within a managerialist and performative context that denied or undermined concepts of education as a professional activity. The performative culture and the creation of competency frameworks was seen by Gronn (2003: 10–16) as promoting a new concept of leadership – which he called ‘designer leadership’, to distinguish it from leadership by ascription (where leadership characteristics are largely equated with those of the gentleman, who was naturally endowed with the requirements that fitted him for such a role) and leadership by merit, in which promotion on the basis of merit and achievement meant that individuals were formally allocated leadership responsibilities – a system that married comfortably with the characteristics of a Weberian bureaucracy. Ascription was the result of birth; merit and achievement was the basis of the training regime of the MBA and other higher education qualifications. Designer leadership, Gronn argues, was taking over from leadership by merit by creating a template of ‘good leadership’ through the adoption of competency standards, to which would-be headteachers had to fit. Thus the analogy of designer leadership is that of off-the-peg clothes rather than bespoke made to measure. With the work of revising and updating national standards being largely undertaken by the National College (see DfES 2004), it can be argued that not only has the College accepted the need to train headteachers and other leaders to meet the specification of the standards but has contributed to their creation.

A similar argument can be put forward in relation to the leadership development framework. Although the potential exists now to bypass this to some extent through the government’s Fast Track scheme, it is arguable that the framework provides an invariant progress of enculturation into a way of thinking about leadership that maps directly onto the requirements of the standards. Indeed, the Fast Track scheme can be argued to make that congruence even stronger as candidates speed through the training process.

The implication of this argument is that the College’s programmes promote both a normative view of the role of the school leader and the skills they should be able to deploy, derived from the National Standards for headteachers, and an uncritical approach to what is being offered. The criticism is reinforced by the NLE programme. Headteachers are eligible for appointment as NLEs if their schools have achieved ‘outstanding’ status in Ofsted inspections. Given the workings of the inspection system and its use of criteria against which to judge quality, it is likely that NLEs will show considerable similarity in their approach to problems and their leadership practice. Evidence to support this is provided by one NLE, quoted by the Innovative Schools Company, a company proposing to create a national chain of twenty or more non-selective academies, as stating:

I believe that in order to standardise the outcomes and ethos of a group of innovative schools, agreement has to be reached on the following crucial areas: vision, governance, learning and teaching, accountability, teacher formation, operational procedures – including recruitment, and funding. In essence a collaborative approach and reduction of autonomy of individual schools.

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In order for schools to form a cohesive organisation and guarantee standardised out- comes there must be a shared vision across all schools.

(Innovative Schools 2009)

There is reason to be concerned, then, about some aspects of the courses and programmes that the College provides.

The potential challenge to critical thinking and research

Earlier in this chapter, it was suggested that the College’s view of research as a key part of its work was a positive dimension. However, as early as 2002, Weindling (2004: cited in Thrupp 2005) calculated that more than half of all research on educational leadership and management in England was being funded by the College, and the range and scale of the College’s publications list suggests that this proportion may have increased. Much of the research comprises small-scale research projects undertaken by practitioner heads and deputies as part of the research associateship scheme, which is helpful in promoting an approach to investigating personal practice. But there is also a considerable amount of larger work. Much of this has been undertaken by academic researchers (including the present author), but management consultancies and private research organizations have always played a significant role too. A great deal of this research consists of evaluations of policy or literature reviews that are concerned with mapping a field as a contribution to programme development (e.g. Bennett et al. 2003; O’Leary and Craig 2007; Glatter 2008). As a training and development provider rather than an academic institution, the College is interested in presenting cases of what works and why, and it is reluctant to fund studies of a more academic kind that also explore reasons for failure or poor performance. Consequently, the College can be criticized for reducing the extent to which members of the educational leadership and management research community can offer serious critiques of professional development practice. However, it may be that the College is becoming more interested in monitoring progress on broader policy questions rather than evaluations of specific projects, as recent publications include reports that argue that it is too early to provide more than tentative responses to the research questions posed (e.g Chapman et al. 2008).

The questionable concept of ‘best practice’

The final issue to be considered in this part of the chapter is associated with the College’s approach to research: its emphasis on identifying and publicizing ‘best practice’. This is visible in the many pages of the College website, which include case studies and video clips of ‘successful’ schools, support materials and guides on implementation. However, as Glatter and Kydd (2003) point out, the concept of best practice is open to question. ‘Best’ implies a defined purpose which is being served by the activities being analysed or described. It also implies a single approach, which may allow for substantial variety of activities within it but is nevertheless strongly normative. A good example of this from education was the move by the government to propose a model for literacy lessons that suggested a three-stage format. This was very widely interpreted by teachers as a mandated lesson format – practice that was integral to achieving the literacy targets that had been laid down. Thus ‘best practice’ involves defining not just what needs to be done but how it should be done. It can be argued that the debate over best practice takes further the designer leadership criticism presented by Gronn (2003). To extend the analogy, it is concerned not just with ensuring that the suit is designed

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so as to iron out differences between wearers, but also with laying down how and when it should be worn. As Glatter and Kydd (2003) comment, ‘Check-lists are unhelpful in conditions of complexity – living systems cannot be directed along a linear path.’

This being said, however, there are strong traditions of good professional practice being established through codes of practice and conduct, and good or ‘proper’ craft practice being learned through apprenticeship. These vary from the moral and ethical, like the codes of conduct for doctors and lawyers, to the practical, in terms of issues like safety or the consequences of doing particular tasks in a particular order, as in pottery. There is also a deeper set of expectations about how action should be taken, variously interpreted as reflection in action (Schon 1987) or the integration of discrete items of learning into a holistic and fluent interpretation of a situation and actions appropriate in it (Eraut 2004). Eraut’s argument in particular works against the identification of ‘best practice’ that can be modelled and applied, and moves towards the creation of deeply embedded practice that results from deliberative learning but is transformed into what he refers to as pattern recognition. Although the College’s networking systems can be argued to promote deliberative learning, it can also be argued that the College’s creation and support of NLEs work against it, and in favour of implementing recommended solutions to problems that have been conceived in a particular way.

Conclusions

This chapter has focused on the work of the National College for Leadership in Schools and Children’s Services because that organization has dominated educational leadership development in England since its creation in 2000, and is widely presented in the literature as a model to emulate (OECD 2008). It is clear from the discussion that its work addresses many of the issues facing school leaders through a wide range of activities, but it is also apparent that its size and near-monopoly of professional development in the field, allied to its close connection with government policy, has raised problems for the wider development of a critical perspective on leadership practice. This is a major concern in public sector training. A relatively uncritical acceptance of the values and principles of practice of a commercial organization is one thing; to have a similar uniformity of uncritical thinking across a national system, even if publicly funded, may have significant dangers. There is considerable evidence of leadership in schools responding creatively to the demands and expectations of central government – it was suggested above that educational leadership might be interpreted as creative responses to external demands – but this creativity remains bounded within a largely uncritical acceptance of the requirements of the system and the College’s presentation of the issues facing school leaders. The College is now ten years old and its courses have provided training for thousands of teachers and school leaders. It has made major contributions to our thinking about the process of leadership development, in particular through its use of professional networking as a means to broaden and generate new professional knowledge. However, now that the NPQH is a mandatory qualification for candidates for headships, it can be hypothesized that its already wide-ranging influence on thinking and practice about school leadership will be extended further, and the normative influence of what is virtually a monopoly provider will become even stronger. The possibilities and potential dangers of this position are serious challenges to the educational system, to its leaders, and to the position of teachers within it.

It is not clear at the time of writing how the issues raised by the position and work of the College will play out in the wider provision of leadership development. Private providers of

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training may encourage a similarly uncritical acceptance of policy expectations, providing assistance to teachers wrestling with new requirements such as using phonics for teaching reading, or they may be advocating a particular approach to particular issues. It is for higher education to take responsibility for generating a critical perspective on practice and potential challenges to policy expectations, but funding and motivation are likely to be a continuing problem. Further, the Labour government’s decision to create a Masters in Teaching and Learning degree (the MTL) as a professional qualification for teachers may, if implemented, have the effect of weakening the market position for other postgraduate higher education programmes and runs the risk of creating an equally uncritical approach to practice under the guise of enhancing its professional status.

Questions for discussion

1 How effective do you think major centralized leadership development initiatives such as the National College can be? What are their advantages and disadvantages?

2 How would you interpret the reasoning behind the discontinuance of the formal course for established headteachers which is referred to in this chapter?

3 If theoretical work on leadership development and practice is important, as is implied in this chapter, how might it be incorporated into the professional networks that are being created through work supported by the National College?

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge, with thanks, the insightful and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter from Ron Glatter, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration and Management at the Open University.

Notes

1 National and local leaders of education are senior headteachers who undertake work with other headteachers to bring about professional development and school improvement. They are particularly important to the three ‘City Challenge’ schemes set up by the Department for Education and Skills (DfEE) and the Department for Schools, Children and Families (DCSF) in London, Manchester and the Black Country (see http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/citychallenge/) that are intended to improve the performance of schools, specifically in relation to their public examination scores but also in terms of wider collaboration and networking, to which we refer below.

2 Executive heads are headteachers who are concerned with overseeing the work of more than one school, through either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ federations. This approach to headship is both a means of pairing successful schools with unsuccessful schools in an attempt to improve performance, and an approach to headship that is designed to address a potential shortage of headteachers as the large number of heads in their late fifties and early sixties retire in the next five years. It is discussed in detail by Harris et al. (2006).

3 School improvement partners (SIPS) are headteachers or ex-headteachers who are partnered with another school in order to assist with its ongoing self-evaluation. Under the latest Ofsted inspection framework, schools have to prepare and maintain a self-evaluation form that reviews their ongoing progress and rates their own performance on a range of criteria. This self-evaluation form is the basis of inspections. SIPs are expected to support the development and updating of these forms as ‘critical friends’; however, anecdotally some headteachers feel that they are more critical than friendly, and form another tier of inspection rather than a form of support.

4 At a symposium organized by the Standing Conference of Researchers into Educational Leadership and Management and held at the Open University in May 2005, Professor Geoff Southworth, Director of Research at the NCSL, stated that the college was ‘not interested’ in theory.

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