As plans for whole-system structural reform have developed, much of the government’s education reform strategy has come to turn on its being able to capitalise a leadership premium.
Yet, despite a massive literature that has built up around the subject, our general confidence about what makes for effective leadership and how it contributes to school improvement is not well-grounded. A number of assumptions, mutually reinforced by those engaged in school effectiveness research, have worked against the development of sensible school leadership policy.
One such assumption is of leadership’s direct impact on academic outcomes - an assumption that has had far-reaching consequences for both policy and practice.
Few studies have tried to actually quantify the contribution of leadership, but those that have find leadership variables are only modestly to weakly related to pupil outcomes. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have checked enthusiasm for theories of leadership that big up the leader as the sole cause of change in organisational performance.
Equally unfortunately, it has also diverted attention from a much more important set of questions relating to precisely how leaders exercise the influence they do have in shaping the conditions under which teachers work; how that influence might be enabled or compromised by contextual factors; and the ways in which stakeholder responses - even pupil outcomes themselves - might in turn influence leadership decisions and behaviour.
Nevertheless, an increasing minority of quantitative studies now provide some direction with respect to the most important means by which school leaders bring their influence to bear on organisation effectiveness. These include mission and goal setting, variables related to the setting of the curriculum, and the provision of instructional guidance for teachers.
The importance of these mediators is corroborated in the economic literature by a number of studies of school autonomy - the result of reforms to governance often alternatively referred to as “decentralised decision-making” or “school-based management”. In addition to changes to leadership and management structure, this research indicates that the scope to shape curriculum and instructional method, and the motivation of staff (specifically through the use of appropriate pay and conditions incentives), are important for raising academic achievement too.
These are useful, if broad, pointers - but they only take us so far. The leading question for social scientists is after all not “what works?” but “what works for whom, how, and under what circumstances?” To get at these questions we need a model, and methods, that do justice to the complexities of heads’ relationships and interactions with staff, pupils, parents, and others, in context. More detailed, longitudinal observation of leaders is required - this with a view to identifying how leaders develop strategies in context according to the challenges and opportunities that present themselves, the key decisions and patterns of decision-making and practice that follow from them; and the ways in which they may be reinforced or undermined by contextual factors.
If it can be established, over time, how far particular patterns are influenced by context or are constant, then there is a route to assessing the impact of those practices, via field experiments, and thus to identifying (and developing a more viable strategy for replicating) what works. Unfortunately, work to this end has barely begun: prevalent research strategies in the field are simply not up to the job.
We cannot, of course, wait for research that may never materialise: we have schools to run. Nevertheless a number of policy implications follow from this assessment of the evidence base.
First, we need to stop looking to “hero heads” for all the answers and desist from building policy and national school-improvement strategy on the basis of exceptions to the rule. There are too many leadership types that feed this kind of thinking, and it doesn’t help us.
The reality is that we know little about what particular practices are impactful, learnable and transferrable. This being the case we should not assume, for example, that independent school heads have all the answers for turning around under-performing state school, or that leadership of school starts should be taken forward by leaders whose experience lies in established schools.
Second, and for the same reason, it is right that participation in leadership development programmes is no longer required for service. There is no robust evidence to support claims that professional qualifications make a difference to the quality of headship. What’s required instead is a commitment to research literacy - that is, building and refreshing knowledge of what has been shown to work generally and in particularly relevant contexts. This can be supported through performance-related pay progression.
Third, it follows from the contingent and evolving nature of leader emergence that the locus of leadership identification and development should be shifted to the schools level, with mentoring - and indeed peer to peer support for already practising leaders provided by leaders of similar schools, in situ, and according to demand from those in need of advice, strategy, and support. This consultancy model would get around the misleading sense that an intervening hero head is in some way taking responsibility for the outcomes of the advice he/she has given - at present a significant grey area for advocates of collaborative approaches to system improvement.
The government, however, seems at present to be set on re-investing in hero heads and a suite of leadership development qualifications to be provided by the National College of Teaching and Leadership. This is in accord with the government’s general counterveiling tendency to override incentives-based strategy and take decision-making back to the centre - as witnessed by its ongoing control of the recruitment of academy sponsors, and increasing centralisation of decision-making in respect of national educational standards and assessments, regulation, and accountability.
Such reforms threaten to stymie the potential of its school-based management reforms by taking over recruitment at the top tier and reducing leaders’ scope to take decisions and effect strategies in the areas identified to have bearing on academic improvement. In that the potential impact that leaders can have on organisational effectiveness increases with the degree of decision-making autonomy afforded them, the government would do well to be more modest in its ambitions.
James Croft is the executive director of The Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education and author of its recently published report ‘Taking a lead: how to access the leadership premium’.
