Effective School Leadership
by Christopher Day and Alma Harris
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Overview
This paper examines and draws conclusions from the results of a significant piece of research into effective leadership.
In 1998, the National Association of Headteachers, the largest in the UK, commissioned a study of principals who were recognised as being particularly effective leaders. The selection was based on schools that had received a positive inspection report from OFSTED (the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the Education Review Office). The reports showed that the principals of these schools were all performing “better than average”, and that each had good staff relationships.
A team of interviewers visited the principals, and their wider school communities, over a number of days to focus on what it was about the leadership of the schools that was so effective. The results were surprising in that there was a consensus across all schools.
All of the principals were:
- values led
- people-centred
- achievement-oriented
- inwards and outwards facing
- able to manage a number of ongoing tensions and dilemmas.
Additionally, principals in the study were identified as being reflective, caring and highly principled people who emphasised the human dimension of working in a management role. They placed a high premium on personal values and were concerned more with cultural than structural change.
They had all moved beyond a narrow rational, managerial view of their role to a more holistic, values-led approach guided by personal experience and preference.
The paper looks at each of these points in detail, taking care to emphasise that achieving “effective leadership” was not a smooth ride for the principals in the study. Each had ongoing tensions and dilemmas to address in their roles.
It was, however, both their personal values and their abilities to maintain and develop learning and achievement cultures whilst at the same time managing ongoing tensions and dilemmas which were the main features of their success.
Reflective questions
These reflective questions might assist your reading of this article:
- The authors identify these areas of leadership as important:
- values led
- people-centred
- achievement-oriented
- inwards and outwards facing
- able to manage a number of ongoing tensions and dilemmas.
Reflect on your own position on each of these areas. What qualities and attributes do you believe you have that align with them?
- At the end of the paper, Day and Harris overview the implications for leadership training and development that emerge from this study. They note that most leadership training programmes fail to address the key themes that this research highlights, especially “the intimate link in successful leadership between the personal and the professional, between the development of the individual and the organisation”. Given the importance of these points, how might you address them in your own personal professional development programme?
References
Day, C. & Harris, A. (n.d) Effective school leadership, accessed from the National College for School Leadership website.
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