Leadership and Management Development in Education (Education ...

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9The future of leadershipdevelopmentIntroduction: leadership mattersThere is great, and widespread, interest in educational leadership and management,a trend that has been accelerating in the twenty-first century. The widelyaccepted belief that effective leadership is vital for successful schooling isincreasingly being supported by evidence of its beneficial effects (Hallinger2003a; Leithwood et al. 2006). Leadership is now recognised to be the secondmost significant factor influencing school and pupil outcomes, after classroompractice (Leithwood et al. 2006). Schools and colleges often succeed because ofthe skill and commitment of their principals and senior teams. Where there isfailure, inadequate leadership is often a major contributory factor. As a result,‘school leadership has recently become one of the central concerns of educationalpolicy makers’ (Hallinger 2003b: 273).Given the importance of educational leadership, the development of effectiveleaders should not be left to chance. It should be a deliberate processdesigned to produce the best possible leadership for schools and colleges. As theNCSL (2007: 17) succinctly argues, ‘leadership must grow by design not bydefault’. Van der Westhuizen and van Vuuren (2007: 431) refer to the ‘professionalisation’of the principalship, an explicit recognition that school leadershipis a different role from teaching and requires separate and specialisedpreparation. ‘Principalship in South Africa is on its way to becoming a fullyfledgedprofession with a unique career path’ (ibid.). This is clearly true of manyother countries, including England, Singapore and the USA, although van derWesthuizen and van Vuuren overstate the case when they claim that ‘SouthAfrica is one of the few countries that do not require a compulsory and specificqualification for principalship’ (ibid.).The trend towards systematic preparation and development of school andcollege leaders, while by no means universal, has advanced to the point wherethe argument is widely accepted. However, there is continuing and ongoingdebate about the nature of such provision.125
126LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATIONContent or process?In Chapter 4, we drew on insights from nine countries to derive an international‘core’ curriculum comprising five main themes:• Instructional leadership• Law• Finance• Managing people• Administration.The NCSL (2007: 6) draws on the work of Leithwood et al. (2006) to provide analternative way of conceptualising the role of school leaders and, by implication,the ‘curriculum’ for school leadership development. It refers to ‘a core setof leadership practices that form the “basics” of successful leadership’. Theseare:• Building vision and setting directions• Understanding and developing people• Redesigning the organisation• Managing the teaching and learning programme.If these are the main practices of successful leaders, then development activitiesought to be linked to the acquisition and refinement of the skills required to carryout such tasks effectively. While two items in the NCSL list match those in theinternational ‘core curriculum’, the others seem to require a different skills set.How do you develop leaders to build vision and redesign the organisation?Arguably, such practices require a greater emphasis on process than content.As we noted in Chapter 4, there is extensive material on the use of differenttechniques in leadership development. The challenge is to find an appropriatemix of these approaches to meet the needs of leaders at different career stages,and in different contexts. The requirements of school principals in Africa, forexample, are different to those of middle managers in developed countries, andpreparation and support must be tailored to these individual and societal needs.Four central questions need to be addressed and resolved in ways that fit thespecific educational context.Where does leadership learning take place?Bush et al. (2007b) say that the most successful learning experiences occurwhen there is a bridge between the work situation and the learning situation.
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