Introduction
The global society is confronted by multiple opportunities and threats that are generating high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity. The scale and speed of business transactions and communication are breathtaking and this, in turn, has led to the disintegration of many traditional boundaries (Reich, 1992). Whilst advanced information communication technology has facilitated this, the primary driver has been corporate competition for larger profits, reduced costs and increased market share. One of the major consequences of these developments has been marked changes to employment patterns. Another critical factor leading to this increased uncertainty and insecurity is the spread of terrorism. All of this together has created a cocktail of high stress and anxiety for many people.

This paper explores the nature and demands of various stakeholders of schools of the twenty-first century, and the implications of current research findings related to capacity-building with regard to distributed leadership, as well the life and career aspirations of younger generation of teachers in our schools, especially Generation X.

Factors impinging on Building Leadership Capacity

Schools as workplaces and community centres have never been more complex and demanding. Successive policy and curricular reforms, increasing demands for accountability and more extensive levels of self-management have intensified the nature of schools as workplaces. This has resulted in subtle but important changes in the role of teacher and the role of principal, both professional and employees. For some, this is a continuing source of tension. For different reasons, schools are seen as a critical agency by governments, employers and families for the achievement of their objectives and expectations. For governments, in addition to increased emphasis on improved literacy and numeracy outcomes for all students, there are higher expectations with regard to citizenship education, and the implementation of priority health initiatives, ranging from driver education to drug education. All of this has significantly changed the landscape of the principalship in the following ways:

1. Increasing ethnic and linguistic diversity of the student population and school communities;
2. Decreasing public confidence in the quality of public schools;
3. The press for privatisation;
4. Increasing school violence;
5. Waning desirability of the principalship and the concomitantly shrinking pool of principal aspirants; and,
6. Pressures from the accountability movement to link principals ' tenure to students ' performance on standardised tests. (Collins, Blackman & Fenwick, (2000:3)

Employer expectations not only include traditional academic knowledge and skills, but also competency in the emerging skill areas such as information communication technology, enterprise education, as well the preferred attitudinal attributes that will enable students to be highly competent workers for the new knowledge economy.

Whilst families have similar expectations, they often express them differently. Not only do families want schools to provide their children with a good education, they also want their children to become happy and responsible young adults, and to achieve a year 12 cumulative score that will give them the best chance to gain entry into university or their preferred employment.

One vital ingredient, which has a high impact on a school ' s capacity to work strategically and continuously for these outcomes, is the financial and social capital they are able to add to the government ' s resourcing. For schools in disadvantaged settings, the priority and support they give to education is sometimes limited by their own educational background. Available resources are more often used to meet basic survival needs, such as before school breakfast programs. Whereas schools in more affluent settings not only have more financial and social capital resources but they purposely invest them in their children ' s education to ensure a more culturally rich and diverse education. As a consequence, these schools are usually able to appoint and retain larger numbers of more qualified and experienced teachers, and provide them and their students with better resources for keeping students engaged and assisting them to achieve better academic and cultural outcomes.

When these different levels of resources, especially social capital, are employed over the twelve years of schooling, the variations in the educational outcomes and life chances of many of the students are compelling. As Baldwin (1995: 41), Minister for Social Security in the Keating Government, stressed:

' It is not just a matter of raising the level of resources available to our clients - it is also important to maximise their capacity to effectively use all those resources (entitlements, assets, time, skills, etc) in pursuit of their own goals and projects … '

Those students and their families, who struggle to apply educational outcomes to improve access to, and participation in, further education, training and employment, would benefit if other appropriate agencies worked with them to guide their transition into work and career advancement.

Another dimension of schooling, which has increased significantly over the past decade, has been the welfare needs of larger numbers of students and their families. Recent research undertaken by the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria and the Australian Youth Research Centre, at the University of Melbourne, into the nature, range and impact of welfare issues confronting Catholic schools, reported that five key issues emerged at the top of the priority index: ' learning problems; student mental health; family problems; social health; and staff wellbeing ' (CECV, 2004: 1). It also adds weight to the difficulties facing poorer and disadvantaged families:

' …schools with high maintenance allowance (EMA) populations identified higher impacts in the areas of family break up, violence, crime, incarceration of family member, presence of troublesome outsiders and higher parental involvement in student disputes ' (p 1).

Education authorities across Australia have identified students ' behavioural and health issues as a major priority and these are further factors contributing to the complex demand environment of schools today.

The complexities and intensification of schools as workplaces are causing increasing numbers of younger and older teachers and principals to reconsider how they manage their lives in order to achieve greater personal and family wellbeing, as well as meeting all their work tasks (Neidhart & Carlin, 2003). Technological advances, such as email and mobile phones, make it more difficult for principals and teachers to protect their non-work space. Hamilton and Mail (2003) have identified a trend called ' downshifting ' , where they claim that, in excess of twenty per cent of people in the workforce in Australia are making career choice resulting in lower salaries and lower levels of responsibility, but which offer a better quality of life.

Research in Canada reinforces these findings. In a poll conducted last year, Canadians were asked to choose from eight criteria that define ' success in their career ' . Aggregate data for their first and second choices produced the following results:

• Work-life balance (41%);
• Level of responsibility over your work (28%);
• Challenge of the job (28%);
• Salary level (25%);
• Loyalties of your employees or those who report to you (22%); and,
• Opportunities to advance (22%). (Ipsos-Reid, 2003)

The gap between work-life balance and the second preference is significant. This becomes even more significant when compared to other factors that would be expected to motivate people to apply for more senior positions. This supports the findings of the VSAT study into leadership succession in Catholic schools (Carlin, d ' Arbon, Dorman, Duignan & Neidhart, 2003), where the perceived threat to a satisfactory work-life balance was nominated as the major disincentive to leadership.

Another important factor contributing to a re-examination of career value decisions comes from research on the lifestyle preferences of different generations of workers (Razi, 2004; Rodriguez, Green & Ree, 2003; and McIntosh, 2001). As Generation X workers (those born between 1963-1977 & McIntosh, 2001) are likely to be the group from which the majority of future school leaders will be drawn, it is instructive to note research findings about their work attitudes. This group is unlikely to stay in the same place of employment for more than five years, and have strong expectations about how their preferred workplaces will assist them to attain their life aspirations:

' … telecommuting, on-site day care centers, work sabbaticals, personal time-off, on-site health facilities and temporary employment arrangements … '
(McIntosh, 2001: 6)

When the key leadership concerns of Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y managers are compared (Durant & Morley, 2002: 5), it becomes clear that important differences exist. Generation X and Generation Y do not have one common issue amongst their top five concerns, whereas Baby Boomers and Generation X managers have only two issues in common: building positive relationships with others; and being flexible in responding to new ideas and change. It would seem that the ability of current leaders to develop leadership capacity and commitment, particularly among Gen X teachers, may well be a major challenge.

This is the multi-faceted context, with all its opportunities, complexities and challenges, which school leaders of today and tomorrow have to work with in the pursuit of academic, vocational and civic outcomes for all students.

The nature of school leadership

Extensive research into leadership across all organisations and institutions has identified and described a range of dimensions and approaches. This paper focuses on three: personal leadership, pedagogical leadership and organisational leadership. Personal leadership starts with inner leadership (Duignan, 2003; Covey, 2002). This requires all those with leadership roles, including teachers, to have formed, and to review regularly, their personal philosophy of leadership and life, and to live that philosophy. It is acknowledged that school leadership is becoming increasingly challenging:

' …few descriptions of transformational leadership to date devote the kind of attention…to the central importance of a core set of personal and professional values and an ability to manage competing sets of tensions and dilemmas… '
(Day, Harris, Hadfield, Tolley & Beresford, 2000: xiv)

Leaders need to develop and use an ' executive compass ' when making decisions that involve competing lobby groups and/or values wars (O ' Toole, 1995).

Personal leadership capacity and practice are the building blocks of school leadership. The challenge of education authorities and principals is to develop and channel these individual capacities into a coherent and consistent quest for improved student outcomes and staff learning and application, to enhance public confidence in the national schooling system. This requires the development of ' distributed leadership ' (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2001) or ' parallel leadership ' (Andrews, Conway, Dawson, Lewis, McMaster, Morgan & Starr, 2004). Leadership practice, within the context of effective schools, must impact on student engagement in learning and the outcomes that result:

' leadership practice is not simply a function of an individual leader ' s ability, skill, charisma and cognition. While individual leaders and their attributes do matter in constituting leadership practice, they are not all that matters. Other school leaders and followers also matter in that they help to define leading practice. Further, the situation surrounding leaders ' practice - material artefacts, tools, language, and so forth - is also a constituting element ' .
(Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2001: 27)

Persistent and purposeful alignment of distributed leadership needs to focus on core values and staff and student learning, if graduates are to be equipped to impact on a knowledge society and a democratic nation that honours social justice. This requires the collection and collegial analysis of critical data by teachers that facilitates student learning, both in terms of understanding how learning works and being taught to use that knowledge to monitor and enhance their own learning.

' …the development of learning expertise is dependent not only on the existence of a repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive information processing abilities but also on the abilities but also on the readiness of individuals to define their own goals, to be proactive, to interpret success and failure appropriately, to translate wishes into intentions and plans and to shield learning from competing intentions. ' (Weinert, 1994).

This is the nub of staff professional development, involving those who have joint responsibility for advancing the learning proficiency and outcomes of all students, collaboratively reviewing student work samples and applying assessment criteria to reach agreed and consistent understandings about all that teachers and students do to advance and reinforce good learning practice. This is very similar to the ' Authoritative Pedagogy ' dimension of the IDEAS 3-Dimensional Pedagogy (Andrews et al, 2004).

Because this is very sophisticated and constant professional work, principals and other leaders need to provide the conditions that support and encourage them to persist in this inquiry-approach to teaching and learning. Within the IDEAS project, this is achieved by being embedded it in a ' School Wide Pedagogy ' framework.

In addition to pedagogical leadership, there is an important need for leadership practice that focuses on the school as an organisation - its culture and reputation as a school committed to enhancing the life chances of its entire student body, including those students with special needs. It includes the way in which the school sets up, and deals with, student management, staff wellbeing, and building an active parent support base, so that not only is the school a learning organisation, but also a caring community. This requires clear articulation of policy and procedures in close consultation with the key stakeholders, and consistent application and communication. The ways in which schools deal with critical incidents are a powerful communicator of what is important, and how procedures are interpreted and applied. Staff [members]need to be aware that they have important leadership responsibilities in these matters. Given the diversity of student backgrounds, cultures, language spoken at home and family circumstances, this can constitute a significant dimension of teachers ' work and, under stress, can be seen as a barrier to focusing on student learning. This is where student support services within the school and the system, need to be provided in ways that address and reduce underlying causes, and maximise student participation in learning.

However, school leadership is exercised within a policy and regulatory framework set by Education, Health and Occupational Health and Safety Departments (see opening quote). Furthermore, since the mid 1980s, there has been increased specification of principal and teacher responsibilities, curriculum content and assessment targets for each subject area, and for each stage of schooling. It is the view of increasing numbers of teachers that, although consultation is a nominated part of the review and development process, their influence as professionals over the process and product of reform is decreasing. When this is added to feelings of reform fatigue and the life-work priorities of Generation X, the capacity of principals to gain and retain higher levels of commitment and performance from a critical mass of teachers is becoming more difficult.

The work of the National College of School Leadership, in England, is undertaking important work in these areas, and has been very well-resourced for the task. An area requiring further research in Australia is the identification of the conditions that can be created in schools to develop and retain leadership capacities and practice, so that the life chances of all children can be enhanced.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Paul Carlin is a Research Officer with the Australian Catholic University, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He is a member of the Flagship for Creative and Authentic Leadership. The Flagship recently completed a major research study into Leadership Succession in Catholic primary schools across Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

Dr Helga Neidhart is the State Co-ordinator of the School of Educational Leadership, at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) and a member of the Flagship for Creative and Authentic Leadership. In addition to the Leadership Succession research study, she was also part of an ACU team that was commissioned by the Catholic Education Office, in Melbourne, to undertake a review of its service delivery to schools.

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