Sustaining emotional resilience for school leadership

Driven by the country's need to compete in a global economy, the UK government is imposing rapid and relentless educational change on schools. School leaders face the challenge of managing the impact of externally driven change and supporting others' resilience while frequently paying scant attention to their own. Six semi-structured interviews with headteachers and a review of the literature provide an insight into complex relationships which underpin school leaders' emotional resilience. A model is proposed which suggests where attention should be focused to strengthen resilience. Recommendations are made affecting headteachers, school governors, authors of leadership development materials and government policy-makers.     

Meanings of success and successful leadership in Ontario,Canada, in neo-liberal times

The provincial government of Ontario, Canada, has committed itself to raising student achievement, closing achievement gaps, and increasing the public's confidence in public education. It has introduced many policies, including the Ontario Leadership Strategy (OLS), to support these goals. Our study examined how teachers, administrators, support staff, and parents in three elementary schools in Ontario understand and enact school success and successful school leadership within this (neo-liberal) context. Findings of a comparative analysis of Ontario policy texts and data from interviews with administrators, teachers, support staff, and parents in the schools demonstrate that the school-based participants defined success as academic learning, a positive school climate, and students' well-being. This definition differs from the definition prioritised by Ontario's government: high scores on standardised provincial and international tests. However, principals in the schools enacted leadership practices advocated by OLS to support locally defined notions of success.     

School reforms,principal leadership,and teacher resistance: evidence from Korea

Many countries design and implement school change with a focus on the fundamental reconfiguration in the structures of schooling. In this article, we examined the relationship between principal leadership and teacher resistance to school reforms driven by external interveners. For an empirical analysis, we took advantage of extensive data derived from 967 teachers and 32 principals in Korean vocational high schools that are now experiencing school reforms launched by the government. Our results revealed the importance of human aspects of school changes and reforms, in particular, driven by the external intervener. We first showed that a principal's initiative leadership is significantly related to the reduction of teacher resistance to change, in particular on the emotional and behavioural dimensions. Not surprisingly, teachers showed a higher level of resistance when their schools participate in the government-driven reform. Finally, teacher resistance depended upon characteristics of teachers as well as principals. These findings provide some useful policy implications for facilitating successful school reform efforts. Foremost, school reformers are advised to rethink the school change model design in a way of fully capturing human aspects in the reform process.     

Sustaining resilience in times of change: stories from Chinese teachers

To teach, and to teach at one's best over time, has always required resilience and commitment. Drawing upon findings of a questionnaire survey of 568 primary and secondary school teachers in Beijing and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a sub-sample of six teachers with different years of experience, the paper provides empirical evidence about how teachers sustain their sense of resilience and commitment in the context of persistent top-down neoliberal reforms in China's educational system. It argues that being a resilient teacher means more than “bouncing back” from difficulties. Rather, it is influenced by the nature of the contexts in which teachers' work and lives are embedded and driven by their vocational commitment to serve the learning and achievement of the children on an everyday basis and also, over the course of their professional lives.     

Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times

This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy.     

the emergence of blissful thinking in the management of education

By the year 2000, the management of education in England had lost much of its capacity to ensure the commitment of headteachers and teachers. As market forces engendered competition among schools, the bureaucratic monitoring of schools by agencies of government increased on the grounds that objective and comparable data about schools should be made public so that parents could express a rational choice of school. Levels of stress increased; workloads intensified. Thereafter, a series of ‘softer’ approaches emerged in order to deal with this. They have coalesced around the concept of ‘leadership’, particularly distributed leadership and, more recently, emotional leadership and spiritual leadership. Distributed leadership draws on socio-cultural activity theory; emotional leadership is informed by positive psychology; spiritual leadership by eastern mysticism. Each has its advocates and its critics. At issue, however, is not so much their relative effectiveness but rather it is to relate them to the economic, cultural and political trends which have allowed them to emerge. These ‘soft’ normative leadership approaches have not supplanted a digitally-informed rational bureaucratic form in education; they are supplementing it. The theoretical stance taken falls within the field of critical theory.     

学校变革中的“教师领导”

依靠源自学校内部的力量而进行的持久的学校革新,应该采取不同于以往的革新方式;促成教师基于角色转型和职业生活方式改变的专业力量的兴起,是决定学校变革成败的关键因素。教师领导这一新的角色被视为教师增权、促进变革和教师专业社群建设的必然选择。教师领导意味着教师要成为促进学生学业发展的领导者,要推动其他教师改进教育教学实践,促进学校内部领导群体的形成。教师领导的途径包括"参与"、"互动"和致力于生成"合作文化"。     

Investigating instructional leadership in Kuwait's educational reform context: school leaders’ perspectives

This study explores the practices of Kuwaiti school principals acting as instructional leaders during education reforms, using qualitative content analysis of standardised open-ended interviews with 28 randomly selected school principals. The results showed that principals faced obstacles related to the deeply-ingrained centralised structure in the Ministry of Education, whose mandates conflicted with the stated goal of building principals’ capacity. There were variations in instructional leadership dimensions, including defining the school’s mission, managing the instructional programme, and creating a positive climate for teaching and learning. A gradual, planned decentralisation is recommended to improve educational leadership practices in Kuwait.     

School leadership for the future: heroic or distributed? Translating international discourses in Norwegian policy documents

School leadership as a key for school reforms has become a dominant theme in education, as demonstrated by a growing body of research during the last 15 years. Still, little attention has been paid to how changing international discourses on school leadership are translated into national public policy documents during the last decade. As such, this study provides additional insight into this field by analysing how Norwegian policy documents translate international discourses and re-contextualise national constructs of school leadership. Inspired by a critical approach, the authors address this issue by identifying discursive shifts in ideas about school leadership roles and practices. Based on an examination of four recent white papers on Norwegian education and school leadership, the authors argue that the policy documents constructed a tension between an international ‘explicit’ principal and a national ‘docile’ principal in 2003–2004, while recent documents construct a consensus-oriented, distributed leadership role for principals through the term ‘facilitating school leaders’. This may lead to contested interpretations as to how to perform school leadership in practice.     

The politics of education policy in England

In this appreciative discussion paper I provide an overview of the reforms made to education in England, and engage with the politics of education through examining the simultaneous and inter-related processes of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation of educational matters. I engage in a discussion of the papers in this special issue through this framework.     

Educational leadership and the Capabilities Approach: evidence from Ghana

School leaders play a central role in affecting the educational development of the young people for whom they have responsibility. This is especially the case where school leaders are operating in challenging low-income environments. This paper argues that a focus on Sen’s notions of individual agency and freedom are a necessary but not a sufficient factor in the conversion of capabilities into functionings for these school leaders. This is done through using the Capabilities Approach as a lens through which to carry out a retrospective analysis and evaluation of the activities of a group of primary school headteachers in Ghana involved in a UK Government-funded project focused on education quality. The paper argues that headteachers with the capability of initiating change in the education process in their schools are unlikely to act in this way unless they feel that they have permission to do so. It is also important that headteachers feel that they are working within a context and an environment where acting in ways which aim to improve pupil learning is seen as central to their role. This kind of supportive context for school leaders (and for other educational practitioners) cannot be divorced from a policy environment which sanctions such activities, and, hence, it is argued that such a context is crucial to policy developments which seek to establish and sustain the core capabilities which are at the heart of Nussbaum’s essentialist approach. The paper also brings to the foreground the tensions that exist between the notion of individuals being free to make choices about what they have reason to value, on the one hand, and the implications that these choices have for the freedoms of other individuals with whom they are connected to make such choices. Finally, it is argued in the paper that the action research approach used in the Leadership & Management Project in Ghana, allied to a positive policy context, provides both the sensitivity to context and a practice-oriented focus which can enable school leaders to bring about the conversion of their individual capabilities into functionings.     

Quality and equality: the mask of discursive conflation in education policy texts

Two key themes of recent UK education policy texts have been a focus on ‘quality’ in public sector performance, and on ‘equality’ in the form of New Labour’s stated commitment to equality of opportunity as a key policy objective. This twin approach can be seen at its most obvious in the concept of ‘excellence for all’. This paper contends that in recent policy texts the vocabularies of quality management discourse and egalitarian discourse have become conflated, serving to mask key issues relating to educational inequality, seen at its most stark in the attainment gap. The paper argues that this has led to a failure to distinguish between the goals of quality management and the ends of egalitarianism. Discursive conflation of this sort risks obscuring the significance of socio‐economic context and the limited impact of within‐school action. The paper also suggests that the focus on equality in terms of school provision paradoxically risks entrenching social inequalities despite the appearance of egalitarian commitment.     

Policy reform: testing times for teacher education in Australia

In Australia as well as elsewhere, initial teacher education has become centre stage to a political agenda that calls for global competitiveness in the knowledge economy. The common problem cited has been declining educational standards linked with the quality of teaching and teacher education. The avalanche of review and policy reform has exposed teacher education to neoliberal demands as well as political and public scrutiny. A policy web of interconnected concerns related to selection, curriculum, professional practice, graduation as well as employment fuels current reforms.     

福建近代女子教育述评

福建近代教会创办的女子教育和中国人自办女子教育有各自产生的历史社会背景和发展变化以及基本教学形式,通过对比这2种教育方式的利弊得失,指出它们对福建的近代化进程都有着较为深刻的影响.     

The policy reassembly of Afghanistan's higher education system

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how a national higher education sector can be assembled upon a relatively narrow ideological foundation during and in the aftermath of violent conflict. It analyses the case of Afghanistan's higher education system, and argues that the violent disintegration of this system during the 1980s and 1990s created the conditions for a neoliberal reassembly and subsequent expansion of higher education from 2001. This paper draws on data gathered from document analysis, and semi-structured interviews with key policy actors. It identifies an ideological grounding in neoliberalism within higher education policies which are responsible for directing the sector's growth since 2010. I argue that this neoliberal agenda, largely driven by globalised influences, has exploited Afghanistan's conflict-affected context to position higher education primarily as a driver of economic growth, thus limiting policy emphasis on higher education's non-economic dividends. The paper concludes by critiquing the underlying assumption that this role is sufficient if higher education is to serve as a key institution in Afghanistan's ongoing national development.     

Sustainable school projects as the education tool for delivering sustainability

In the past ten years, many exemplar projects are completed in China to encourage the sharing of knowledge and experience of sustainability. Many of these projects are landmark buildings, and because they can attract more public attentions, they raise more awareness of sustainable development. However, school projects are rarely mentioned in the news and annual inspirational project lists. The fundamental point of this paper is to challenge the common concept in China that school buildings are only used exclusively by children in formal education. According to the paper’s review of the school schemes in England and Wales, not only the inspirational sustainable schools created the opportunities and responsibilities to accelerate positive changes, but also they developed a vision of an asset that supports lifelong learning and sustainable lifestyles for the whole community. In this paper, the definition of a ‘sustainable school’ is summarised by comparing the statements and concepts in England and Wales. Moreover, a wide range of benefits gained by project stakeholders and communities are also demonstrated through case studies. In the end, lessons and innovations which can be learnt by Chinese school projects are concluded. The illustrations provided by this paper do not aim to solve all issues of promoting a sustainable school in China, but to open people’s minds to the impacts of their actions, and to build the knowledge and cooperative framework to promote public sustainable projects.     

Implementing the SENCo system in Hong Kong: an initial investigation

Monitoring mechanisms of support services for students with special needs can be broadly classified as external and internal. Resembling the UK model, Hong Kong has adopted an internal mechanism through the establishment of the SENCo post. This investigation, written by Dr Kim Fong Poon‐McBrayer, of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, explores how SENCos understand the policy intention of their roles, what the role entails in practice, and what work conditions are usual for participants. This qualitative study involved semi‐structured interviews to probe SENCos' experiences. Findings reveal that SENCos assume management but not leadership roles in special educational needs provision. Policy deviation, and the prevalent autocratic leadership style across schools in Hong Kong, are the key contributors to conditions seen as unsatisfactory, of overwork, of the inadequate planning of provision, and of the need for professional and clerical support. It is concluded that policymakers can make improvements through implementing practical training in participatory governance for headteachers, developing a training model for SENCos, and providing SENCos with additional personnel resources. Further studies to gain a fuller picture of the organisational contexts are recommended.     

This way please! Improving school leadership: the OECD way

In August 2008, the OECD published Improving School Leadership Volume 1: Policy and Practice and Improving School Leadership Volume 2: Case Studies on System Leadership. The main objectives of these reports were to compare school leadership policy between participating countries and to identify innovative practices and options for policy development. As part of the preparation for the final report, a background report on school leadership in the Republic of Ireland was prepared by the Department of Education and Science in 2007. This report will be analysed in this paper in order to identify the degree to which the background report achieved the objective of capturing the current and emerging issues facing school leaders in Ireland. A critique of the ‘one size fits all’ approach to policy in the area of school leadership detailed in Volume 1 of the OECD report follows. This critique contests that some of the policy recommendations contained in the report are based on a narrow and selective range of supporting evidence. A number of these are a cause of some concern particularly when considered in the context of specific features of the schools in the Republic of Ireland.     

对英国NCSL学院的学校领导教育模式的研究

简要介绍了英国NCSL学院的学校领导教育模式，并分析其特点和存在的问题，进而提出其教学模式对我国的学校领导教育体系的构建和大学治理的启示。     

Engaging with centralised policy initiatives: the Malta experience

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades Malta has been witnessing wave after wave of reforms. Whilst official documents speak of the need for more decentralised forms of governance the reality shows otherwise. Data from a series of studies involving school leaders show that they still feel that a top-down approach is being adopted leaving limited space for distributed forms of governance. The issue of power and control remains a bone of contention with the centre identified as still determining college/school policies. In fact, what is being experienced can be described as policy-mandated collegiality. This paper presents findings of one such study. This study highlights the concern that heads feel towards the way reforms are being introduced and implemented; the constant reference to work overload and stress, the need for greater support at the personal and collective level, and the need to start letting go so that schools can take the initiative.