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Professor John West-Burnham National College for School Leadership England, United Kingdom
Until the late 1980s government policy for education in many countries tended to be disjointed, incremental, laissez faire, generic and enabling. Since then policy has become increasingly interventionist, specific and prescriptive. Much of it has undoubtedly worked and has had a significant and measurable effect on the way in which schools work and in improving the outcomes of educational systems. However, it may now be possible to defect an emerging trend in which formal prescription is being paralleled by more enabling approaches. This might well be an implicit recognition that there is a limit as to how far a particular paradigm can be sustained and generate improvement.
The role of policy in determining how schools work and what they do is probably more significant in England than in any other education system of comparable size and complexity. And yet, it is patently the case that, in spite of almost half-a-generation of centralised prescription, schools remain remarkably different. This is both a strength and a weakness; many schools have been able to celebrate their distinctiveness and success - others remain stubbornly resistant to improvement. While overall performance has tended to improve across systems, there is increasing variation within systems.
What is clear is that policy, context and history are not enough to explain the distinctive and differing nature of schools. Parallel with the wide range of policy initiatives has been a robust tradition of idiosyncratic innovation and creativity at the institutional level. Where this reinforces policy, it is usually lauded and rewarded, to propose alternatives to the prevailing hegemony is much more challenging. The motives for such innovative thinking are varied and complex but a consistent element is often a sense of moral disquiet, a recognition that all policies will inevitably fail some people and that the policy needs to be modified to suit all, not just those who fit the stereotypical client. Another source of this type of innovative and challenging thinking is the ability to transfer from one context to another, to use research to question prevailing practise and generate new ways of working.
The relationship between local innovation and national policy is complex. There are obvious examples of policy being informed by best practice - there are equal or even more, examples of policy being determined by dogma, selective research or political expediency. What is clear is that much policy is generational - it takes a generation for policy to catch up with changes in social practice. In England the liberalising policy changes of the 1960s were recognition of social changes that had occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. It could be argued that the educational policies of the 1980s and 1990s were addressing the problems of the 1950s and 1960s. Practice is usually ahead of policy; it is very rare for educational policy to be totally ideologically-driven, it is usually a codification and extension of existing practice. This offers a new challenge for school leaders. Firstly because current practice will, in time, inform policy and, secondly, because it may not be appropriate to wait for a generation for innovation to be consolidated into policy.
Management is concerned with making the school work now; leadership with creating the school as it needs to be. It may now be appropriate to begin to think of another dimension to school leadership - helping to shape the policy context in which the school will operate in the future. This is not to argue for greater consultation or participation in the policy-making process but rather for leadership that is focused on practice that will inform emergent policy. For school leaders who have moved beyond high quality management into exemplary leadership, there is clearly a very real tension as to how far they can move into radical innovation. The demands of formal accountability and the need to retain the confidence of stakeholders will always act as a constraint on innovative thinking and practice. The history of social, scientific and cultural innovation is dominated by examples of such tensions. But without the work of individuals who challenge orthodoxy and develop new ways of working and thinking we are doomed to repeat history.
In his seminal work, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on the factors that influence significant social change. He argues:
' Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action ' . (p 259)
Gladwell categorises those who lead significant social trends in three ways: as connectors - those who create sophisticated networks, mavens - those who accumulate knowledge and salesmen - those who persuade and influence. Gladwell ' s case studies in the book demonstrate two further characteristics, insight and courage; insight in the sense of the ability to see relationships and so create new understanding, and courage in the willingness to act on that understanding.
It is almost certainly the case that there is a great deal of innovative, distinctive and even radical activity taking place in some schools. I have little doubt that much of such change is the result of school leaders using the strategies that Gladwell identifies, albeit intuitively. Networks, shared knowledge, influence, insight and courage all play a part in most successful change leadership in schools. Significant innovation in a school might well be the result of the achievement of a tipping point - the movement from disparate, uncoordinated activity into the recognition of a new way of functioning as an organisation. What does not seem to be happening is school leaders making the connections, sharing the knowledge and developing sophisticated strategies to persuade and influence at national level. There is no doubting the insight and the courage; what are lacking are the qualities to move from random, unrelated initiatives to radical social change.
The writers, artists and musicians working in Florence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries had no idea that they were part of what is now known as the Renaissance. But through networks, shared knowledge and influence they individually created a climate that allowed a new creativity to flourish. Florence in the fifteenth century was a mass of contradictory imperatives; full of tensions between the old and new orders, church and state, and the artistic and mercantile communities. It could be argued that it was this ferment of ideas that created the Renaissance; the tensions and the complexity, combined with the networks provided both the stimulus and the means to bring about profound and fundamental change.
The work that schools are doing on raising standards, new approaches to learning, working with the community, developing relationships with other schools, rethinking school roles and structures all point to radical changes in practice that have the potential to become emergent policy. There seems little doubt that school leaders who innovate at institutional level have become highly skilled at creating knowledge (they become Mavens) which forms the basis of working through networks to influence change.
What is needed in order to inform policy in the short and long-term is an adjustment in what might be called leadership horizons. Much of the prevailing orthodoxy in educational leadership centres on (quite properly) the institution; in fact leadership is usually defined and explained in terms of the institutional context. This is a limited, and therefore relatively secure, horizon.
Policy development requires a much more extended horizon - the movement from micro to mezzo to macro, from tactics to strategy, from short-term to long-term, from institution to system, from individual creativity to an artistic movement. The problem is that the nearer the horizon the more comfortable we feel; it is the difference between sailing along the coast and out on the open sea. The European explorers of the sixteenth century ' found ' new worlds because they were willing to move out of sight of land. The significance of the discovery was often directly proportionate to distance to be travelled. There will always be those who are more comfortable near the coast (to call them coasters would be unfairly pejorative) but excellence in coastal trade does not open up ' new ' worlds. Those who redrew the maps had to display a very different set of qualities to those who crept along the coastline. Of course, there are always the ' flat earthers ' those who argued that to move out of sight of land meant falling off the edge of the world, the familiarity and security of the status quo tend to mean that it becomes the only world view. The most significant changes in our understanding of our world have been the result of paradigm shifts (eg, Galileo and Darwin) not reinventing current knowledge.
To move from the security of highly successful institutional leadership to system leadership implies a similar leap of faith, hope, optimism, courage and, possibly, foolhardiness. If future educational policy is to be informed by educational values and rooted in successful innovative practice, then we may need to begin to redefine our understanding of leadership, so that it includes the ability to work, with confidence, beyond the school. Such leadership will have all the existing knowledge, skills and qualities but will also need the following characteristics working at national level:
Professor John West-Burnham works as a teacher and consultant in leadership development. He is Senior Research Adviser at the National College for School Leadership, in England, in the UK. He was Director of Professional Research and Development at the London Leadership Centre, Institute of Education, University of London, and was previously Professor of Educational Leadership, International Leadership Centre, University of Hull.
John worked in schools, further and adult education for fifteen years before moving into higher education. He was a part-time Open University tutor for fifteen years. He has worked at Crewe and Alsager College, the University of Leicester and the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside. He was also Development Officer for Teacher Performance for Cheshire Local Education Authority. John is author of ' Managing Quality in Schools ' , co-author of ' Effective Learning in Schools ' , ' Leadership and Professional Development in Schools ' and co-editor of ' Performance Management in Schools ' , ' Educational Leadership and the Community ' , ' The Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management ' and twelve other books and over thirty articles and chapters.
John has worked in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Israel, New Zeal and, the Republic of Ireland, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, UAE and the USA. He is coordinator of the Europe an School Leadership Project. John ' s current research and writing interests include transformational leadership, leadership learning and development and educational leadership in the community. He is Honorary Professor at the International Leadership Centre, University of Hull; Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Faculty of Education, University of Manchester; Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University College and Visiting Professorial Associate at the Regional Training Unit, Northern Ireland.
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