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Changing times: new issues for school leaders

The past 30 years have seen more changes to the way in which school education is 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 School Leadership and Management Vol. 31, No. 2, April 2011, 91 92