It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single school in a state of poor fortune must be in want of a leader. And not just any leader. A leader who brings a kaleidoscope of skills to the enchanting task of nurturing young hearts and minds, inspiring and securing a stable and effective team, serving a sometimes disparate community and generally adding to the gaiety of nations. I haven’t yet found anyone who would disagree with the thrust of these sentiments and aspirations.
Are these truths self evident? Over the last ten years or so one of the most tangible assertions in education is that if every child matters then so does every leader.
The National College for School leadership (NCSL) was established in 2000 to act as a focus for growing and supporting current and future school leaders so that they could have a positive impact within and beyond their schools. It was designed to bring the power of research, strategic thinking and operational support to a profession coping with a massive new agenda of change and accountability. The current NCSL programme ‘Tomorrow’s Leaders Today’ is reaching out to every local authority in order to meet the challenge of identifying and growing leaders who are ‘fit for purpose’ in the increasingly complex learning environment.
So herein lies the rub. Who knows what ‘fit for purpose’ looks like now? Or will look like in 2010? Who is scanning the learning landscape of 2020? Each of us has a view of the characteristics and attributes of great leaders, born from personal and professional observation and experience. I like the definition of leadership from the Charles Clore Foundation, which includes the concept of articulating a clear sense of direction and working with others to achieve mutual goals ’both in hostile and benign circumstances’, because let’s face it, that’s life.
The need for a steady focus on leadership succession planning at institutional, local and national scale has never been greater. And I believe that the focus is there. But there is a lack of clarity about how this task nestles within a myriad of other local and national initiatives.
Increasingly, it is being driven by clusters and networks of schools wishing to be proactive in shaping their own destinies within a local community. Leadership development sits cheek by jowl with performance management, workforce development, and school improvement. It should be a fulcrum from which to re-invest in potent relationships with a range of partners: governors, the diocesan and faith groups, and the professional associations. It is inexorably linked to school place planning, building schools for the future, capital programmes and locality and area development. It requires accurate and timely data on which to build strategically, and demands strong links with human resources departments.
There must also be a synergy across Children’s Services in order to secure the most powerful and harmonious approaches to developing leaders who can reflect the local authority aspirations for, and pledges to its citizens. This means recognising and endorsing the local democratic and community leadership role of elected members.
Let’s reflect on school place planning at all levels. This reveals a turbulent scene, and the highly visible confluence of politics and Politics. Every day we hear news of the distress and anxiety felt by local communities when the threat of school closures is raised. No one would dispute that a school can define and lie at the heart of a community, but the emphasis on value for money, particularly public money, requires dispassionate action on the part of local authorities to secure the best for most. These are decisions of the head and not necessarily the heart.
Then there are academies and trusts to be accommodated, as well as the possibilities of other new models yet to be brought into existence. Is there any responsibility within the local planning agenda to recognise the private sector? What liaison takes place across local authorities and within government regions? Is there anyone out there who has any idea of the answer to a fundamental question: what will the national learning landscape look like in, say, 2020? Does anyone know how many schools there will be? Or Children’s Centres? Or Community Centres which include learning institutions of one kind or another?
Has anyone assembled the big picture? Does someone have the pieces of the jigsaw, or are we already missing a vital bit of sky? Does this conundrum epitomise Kenneth Tynan’s reflection that the most difficult challenges are like completing a jigsaw puzzle made of quicksilver? It would seem so.
How are dioceses and other faith groups involved in planning decisions? We should be both celebrating diversity and encouraging social cohesion, but recent events have exposed the fragility of that deeply important relationship. Can the equation be solved? What part could and should education have to play? How does each of us role model concepts such as justice and truth?
There are now a number of new leadership models which have been created to meet local need; 'loose' and ‘tight’ federations, co-headships, secondments and sabbaticals, executive headships, all-through schools and community and children’s centres, to name but some. All probably require similar skills, but as the kaleidoscope creates different patterns from a basic source, these leaders will use their skills in a myriad of ways.
But really it’s too early to evaluate impact: the structures are too new for longitudinal studies, so we can’t yet tell which of these and other emerging models will best reflect the needs of future generations. That doesn’t stop thinking, planning, hypothesising and stargazing, but we can’t be certain about which might be the pole star.
New learning environments will demand new staffing structures, and embrace leaders from a host of different disciplines. Already there are examples of colleagues such as business managers playing a central and much appreciated role in senior leadership. Tomorrow’s leaders will need to be capable of managing highly decentralised institutions, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be sensitive to diversity. But there will always need to be a focus on pedagogy as a specialism, with a leader of learning who may not be called a head.
Schools are value laden places; values added is surely as important a concept as value added. Leaders are dealers in hope. Articulating a vision requires the ability to confront ourselves with the reality of what is there now, as well as painting a vibrant picture of a future in which high aspiration and dogged determination line the road to excellence. I suppose 20:20 hindsight vision would be a sought after commodity, but alas, it’s not available.
All of this has a profound bearing on the kind of leaders we need to develop. Michelangelo’s assertion that inside every block of marble there is a magnificent statue, and that chiselling away at the material obscuring it reveals the work of art within, is equally applicable to the process of revealing what young people might be, and not what they so often infuriatingly are.
If education is what you have left when you’ve forgotten everything you learned at school, then our mission must be to identify and nurture leaders who are values driven, passionate, inventive, flexible and above all courageous.
In education, leadership development is the only green agenda in town. Stunning leadership is our bequest to future generations, and is perhaps the greatest gift we can bestow. Children should live in colour, and as Dennis Potter so movingly said as he approached death, ’the newness of everything is absolutely wondrous... The fact is if you see in the present tense, boy do you see it!’ He was reflecting on the way in which the certainty of death sharpens the senses, but our task it to ensure that each second of now - in the present or future - brings with it the possibility of making a difference for every child. This cannot be accomplished by any one part of the system acting alone: it is a collective responsibility of the profession and by the profession for the profession.
