Meeting the needs and aspirations of Māori
Developing the school's wharenui.
Duration: 02:52
The importance of developing school leadership
Peter Gall, principal of Papatoetoe High School, was surprised when he interviewed applicants for leadership roles in his school. There were a large number of “good teachers” who had “concentrated on what they do in their classrooms”, but who had little idea of the “big picture” for education, or the additional knowledge and skill required to be a good leader.
In this story Peter talks about how he became aware of the need to prepare the next generation of school leaders for their roles.
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The reason for having and looking at leadership and developing leadership in the school is, several reasons for wanting to do that, actually. I’ve interviewed a number of people over the years for leadership roles, HODships, deputy principals, both internal (and) external applicants. For many, I’ve been a little bit surprised - disappointed - at the lack of big picture, visionary thinking that there is from some of those people. Very good teachers, very much concentrated on the work that they do within their classrooms, but hadn’t really delved into some bigger picture stuff. And so working really hard to try and get people to think about that, and to start developing their philosophies on education to a wider extent.
And I think a key way for people to do that is to be involved in some post graduate study. One of the ideas behind my project and the scheme that I had in place here, was to try and encourage people to see that, ”Yeah this is something I want to take another step to go a bit further in - and the thing that I have to do to do that is to do some post graduate study.“
