Leadership and Management Development in Education (Education ...

8The impact of leadershipdevelopmentIntroductionIn Chapter 3, we outlined the evidence that leadership developmentcontributes to modified leadership and management practice, and toenhanced school and student outcomes. There is a widespread belief in theefficacy of development programmes, leading to the introduction and growthof such interventions in many countries (Hallinger 2003c; Huber 2004a;Watson 2003b). Governments are investing substantial sums in leadershipdevelopment because they believe that it will produce better leaders and moreeffective schools’ systems. Individuals are also contributing their time, andoften their own resources, to their own professional development because theythink that it will enhance their career prospects and make them better leaders.However, as we noted in Chapter 3, the empirical evidence for suchassumptions is modest. In this chapter we address the intended impact ofleadership development, consider models designed to assess such effects, andexamine the evidence that preparation and development succeed inenhancing leadership practice and producing better educational institutions.The purpose of leadership and managementdevelopmentThe impact of leadership preparation, induction and ongoing support cannotbe assessed independently of the intended outcomes of such activities. Aninformed judgement about their effects depends on the nature and purpose ofleadership development. There is limited discussion of this issue in the literatureand those few sources tend to focus almost exclusively, and often uncritically,on student outcomes or the vaguer notion of ‘school improvement’. Thepurpose of this section is to examine the aims of leadership development witha view to providing categories of ‘impact’ against which programmes and107