Shaping Futures of Education: Why Leadership Comes First
The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated many of the pre-existing challenges and inequalities in education provision worldwide, including the hundreds of millions of children who were not in school before the pandemic and those not learning while in school (Save the Children, 2021). When reconsidering how the futures of education can fulfil the learning potential of children in schools, we must understand why leadership comes first.
Drawing on what we have learned from real leaders in real
primary and secondary schools globally, I wanted to share four strong research-informed
claims about successful school leadership:
Research Claim 1:
There are differences in culture between schools and between countries, but
challenges are broadly the same.
One of the key challenges facing school leaders in many
countries across the world is to enact incoherent, disjointed, and at times contradictory
external policy initiatives successfully. Policy shifts have become unavoidable
political realities of education in many systems.
We have learned from successful principals that policy
enactment is a necessary, but not primary focus of their work. How these
leaders make sense of what a particular policy means to their schools reveals
their educational values, their leaders’ identities, and their judgement of the
school’s needs and priorities. It follows that how the policy is interpreted and
implemented by their teachers is influenced by the ways in which they decide “whether
and how to ignore, adapt, or adopt” this policy (Spillane et al, 2002, p.
733). Principals who do well know how to use policies as opportunities (rather
than threats) to anchor core values of the school and regenerate
capacities for further growth and development. They know how to design the
social and intellectual conditions that engage the hearts and minds of
individuals in the school, and through this, harness their ideas, experiences,
knowledge, and relationships to fulfil shared values and achieve shared goals
(Gu, Sammons & Chen, 2018).
Put simply, policy enactment is, in essence, about change;
and enacting policy in ways that advance further improvement of the school is
what leadership is about.
Research Claim 2: Almost all successful leaders draw
on the same repertoire of basic leadership practices, but there is no single
model for achieving success.
Research disapproves the myth that there is a magic formula
for school success. This is because the contexts, cultures and conditions of different
schools – either within or across different systems – vary; and school leaders’
experiences and capabilities vary too.
However, research consistently shows that all successful
principals focus on developing teachers. Leadership practice that promotes teacher
learning and development has the strongest impact on student learning (Robinson
et al., 2009). Our own research also shows that school leaders’ ability to
drive professional development in their own schools (leader self-efficacy) and
to collaborate with other leaders and other schools (leader collective
efficacy) creates ‘the new capacities that must be developed to sustain
and extend’ the initial improvement efforts over time (Bryk et al, 2010, p.220,
italics in original; Gu et al., 2021).
It is then no surprise that teachers working in schools with
more supportive professional environments do not plateau over their first 3-5
years in teaching (Sutton Trust, 2014). They continue to improve significantly
after three years, while teachers in the least supportive schools actually
declined in their effectiveness.
Research Claim 3: Principals achieve and sustain success
through who they are and the combination and accumulation of various relatively
small effects of leadership practices that influence different aspects of
school improvement processes in the same direction.
Leaders are the architects of social relations and learning
conditions in schools. School leadership that fosters the learning, growth and
development of every teacher in their school matters most in establishing a
collaborative professional culture that nurtures, supports and improves teacher
wellbeing.
Learning-focused leadership is characterised by purposeful
choices and decisions that buffer and align external resources—intellectual,
material, relational, and social resources—to nurture the knowledge and skills
of the whole staff and expand their capabilities and horizons for further
improvement. Key in this regard is the use of such resources to enrich organisational
learning that enables the creativity, efficacy, resilience and wellbeing of
teachers with different years of teaching experience and different role-related
professional needs.
Research Claim 4: School leaders positively influence improvements and equity in their schools in almost everything they do, not just through some practices that are uniquely designed for improving equity. Equity-oriented school leaders enact almost all successful leadership practices in their schools. But the impacts of two leadership practices were found to be particularly significant: 1) building productive partnerships among parents, schools, and the larger community, and 2) encouraging teachers to engage in forms of instruction with all students that are both ambitious and culturally responsive (Leithwood, 2021).
- . Rooting schools at the heart of their communities
- . Tackling growing inequalities
- . Harnessing the power of technology
- Preparing children better for life and learning
- Strengthening capacity through collaboration
Professor Qing Gu
UCL Centre for Educational
Leadership, UCL Institute of Education
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