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Changing times: New issues for school leaders

Article  in  School Leadership and Management · April 2011

DOI: 10.1080/13632434.2011.560599

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Tony Townsend
University of Tasmania
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Changing times: new issues for school

leaders
a
Tony Townsend
a
School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Available online: 18 Apr 2011

To cite this article: Tony Townsend (2011): Changing times: new issues for school leaders, School
Leadership & Management, 31:2, 91-92

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 School Leadership and Management
Vol. 31, No. 2, April 2011, 91
92

EDITORIAL
Changing times: new issues for school leaders

The past 30 years have seen more changes to the way in which school education is
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structured, implemented and evaluated than in the previous hundred years since
education in most western societies became compulsory (and sometimes free, and
sometimes secular). The current generation of teachers has seen the implementation
of self-managing schools, school development planning, school self-evaluation and a
variety of school improvement models, such as the Accelerated School, Success for
All, Little Red School House, and the Coalition of Essential Schools in the USA,
Improving Quality of Education for All (IQEA), High Reliability Schools (HRS) and
the Improving School Effectiveness Project in the UK and similar projects in
countries around the world, all designed to increase the level of learning of students.
Through all of this change, increasing responsibilities have been placed on school
leaders, head teachers and principals, to now not only manage the school by
implementing decisions made outside the school, but to lead the school to higher or
better levels of performance as well. Forms of leadership originally used to identify
what happened in business crossed over into the educational framework and we
started to hear about leadership that was visionary, passionate, adaptive, invitational,
servant, transactional or transformational. These were joined in more recent years by
terms that were directed at what was happening, or supposed to happen, in schools.
In the USA, the catchword was ‘instructional leadership’ and more recently in the
UK the term ‘leadership for learning’ has been used. In many places, the pressure on
the idea of the head teacher or principal as the single leader of the school has led to
new terms such as distributed leadership, shared leadership, democratic leadership,
team leadership or teacher leadership.
What these changes have meant is that the task of leading a school is much more
complex than it was not so very long ago, and this in turn means that the task of
educating teachers to become leaders of schools has had to change as well. This
special issue brings together five different approaches to the education of school
leaders, from the United Kingdom, the USA, Australia, Hong Kong and Denmark,
together with my synthesis of what all this means.
In the first of five articles from around the world, John MacBeath provides an
overview of how leadership development is organised and implemented in the United
Kingdom and demonstrates how even within this part of the world, England and
Scotland have done things quite differently. Next, Ira Bogotch from the USA
explains how, despite the fact that there are national leadership policies and
standards, states are responsible for education delivery: therefore a school leader
trained in one state might have to start all over again if they move across state
boundaries because of the very local focus that is expected by some states. Then
Steve Dinham, Michelle Anderson, Brian Caldwell, and Paul Weldon describe the
changing paradigm of educational leadership in Australia, from the single leader to
ISSN 1363-2434 print/ISSN 1364-2626 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13632434.2011.560599
http://www.informaworld.com
 92 Editorial

forms of distributed leadership, use two research projects to provide a description of

how schools can be changed through an enterprise approach to transformation and
argue for standards that consider four types of leadership capital
intellectual,
social, spiritual and financial
that are necessary for this transformation to take
place.
Lejf Moos, from Denmark, suggests that the impact of New Public Management
approaches has led to a homogenisation of the training of leaders. Now leaders from
many human service areas are trained together, which suggests that leadership of
schools is no different to leading one of many other public service organisations. He
provides a substantial list of expectations now directed at school leaders, some of
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which emerge from a move towards self-management and others that come from
leadership theory and research. He argues, as do others in this special issue, for the
need to understand context when it comes to leading schools and suggests that
currently this is not happening in Denmark. Finally Paula Kwan outlines the
substantial development of many facets of education since the Chinese took over
governance of Hong Kong from the British, through the work of the Education
Commission. She discusses the variety of training that is now expected for aspiring,
newly-appointed and experienced school leaders and discusses the future issues
associated with developing a distributed leadership approach, through training
programmes for middle leaders and teachers.
This special issue demonstrates quite clearly that although countries around the
world are facing similar issues, such as increased levels of accountability, a move
towards a market approach to education, and the search for strategies that will
increase the quality of education for all students, there is still no universal approach
to educating the people who will lead this change. Just as we have found for other
aspects of education, history, tradition and context are all vitally important elements
that will help us understand why, when it comes to educating school leaders, we
might think globally, but still act locally.

Tony Townsend
School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

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