The perceptions of secondary school middle leaders regarding their needs following a middle leadership development programme

Abstract

The importance of middle leaders in bringing about improvement in schools is well recognized in the UK, as in many other countries, with the ever-present demand for raising standards and achievement. This article outlines some initial findings and discussion points emerging from the first stage of a project exploring how middle leaders in secondary schools in the United Kingdom perceive their leadership development needs, having recently completed a major middle leadership programme. An online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to uncover the perspectives of middle leaders about aspects of their role in which they feel confident, their immediate development needs and what they perceive would help them to meet these needs. Most respondents felt confident in their role but, somewhat paradoxically, expressed a need for further development in their areas of greatest confidence, which may well reflect the increasing complexity of the role of the middle leaders in schools.

Keywords

leadership development middle leaders secondary schools mentoring and coaching

Introduction

This article outlines some initial findings and discussion points emerging from the first stage of a project exploring how middle leaders in secondary schools in the UK perceive their leadership development needs, having recently completed a major middle leadership programme. The objectives of the study are to uncover the perspectives of current middle leaders about the aspects of their role which they felt confident about, what they saw as their immediate development needs and what would help them to meet these needs. Recent events in England prompted us to consider middle leadership development in relation to the current responsibilities of middle leaders’ responsibilities rather than senior leadership career development aspirations. New middle leadership development programmes are now offered through the National College’s licencing arrangements (Department for Education, 2013), and programmes are also being developed outside of the National College (for example, The PiXL Club, undated).

Middle Leadership development in secondary schools

Much is written about the development of senior leaders especially in relation to the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers (NPQH) (Bush, 2008; Cowie and Crawford, 2009) and the trajectories of government policy have been mostly concerned with headteachers (Simkins, 2012). In comparison, middle leadership development in schools has received less attention (Fitzgerald et al., 2006; Bennet et al., 2007), particularly with regard to the exercise of middle leadership itself as opposed to seeing such posts as stepping stones to senior leadership positions.

There have been evaluations of existing middle leadership development programmes such as the National College’s ‘Leading from the Middle’ (Simkins et al., 2009), now discontinued and replaced by the National Professional Qualification for Middle Leadership (Department for Education, 2013). Significant outcomes from such programmes include changes in leadership practices, changes that affect school outcomes and changes in teaching and learning processes and in pupil outcomes. Simkins et al. (2009) note that the particular in-school context can either promote the continuing development of the individual participant or limit it. Gentry et al. (2013) consider the needs of participants prior to starting leadership development programmes, but research has not discussed the continuing development needs of the middle leaders following participation in such programmes specifically in a school context.

The importance of middle leaders in bringing about change and improvement in schools is well-recognised and the demands upon them to ‘raise standards’ (which often translates into getting higher exam results) is ever present. Two significant tensions affecting subject leaders are first, ‘between expectations that [the] role had a whole school focus and their loyalty to their department, and second, between a growing school culture of line management within a hierarchical framework and a professional rhetoric of collegiality’ (Bennett et al., 2007:455). The monitoring of colleagues’ work and passing on assessments to more senior colleagues are an example of a situation in which these tensions can emerge (Glover et al., 1998) as classroom observation by middle leaders has been seen by many departmental members as demonstrating a failure of trust and an implementation of a culture of surveillance (Wise, 2001).

Wallace et al. (2011) explore the challenges of developing leadership capacity in schools and universities and acknowledge initiatives in leadership development, discussing ‘hard’ levers such as accountability through, for example, performance tables, and ‘soft’ levers of which programmes run by the National College are an example. The head and deputy head respondents recognized the need to respond to policy imperatives and their role as agents of change, yet whilst the importance of middle leaders is implied in the discussion through the mention of distributed and collaborative leadership ‘connoting collective endeavour towards transformational goals’ (Wallace et al., 2011:32), the development needs of middle leaders are not discussed, hence our focus in this article.

The place of coaching and mentoring in leadership development

Coaching and mentoring are often ranked highly as developmental activities by middle leaders as well as senior leaders and teachers in school settings (Hobson and Sharp, 2005; Allan, 2007; Rhodes and Brundrett, 2009). Coaching and mentoring are components of the most popular approach to leadership development of ‘training through skill building’ which also encompasses communication and team building skills (Boerema, 2011). The differences between coaching and mentoring have been explored in the wider literature (CUREE, 2005; Hobson and Sharp, 2005). Mentoring has historically placed an emphasis on the ‘wise and trusted guide, advisor or counsellor’ (Hobson and Sharp, 2005:25) and characterised as a structured, sustained process for supporting professional learners through significant career transitions (Fabian and Simpson, 2002; CUREE, 2005). Holden outlines the role of mentoring in establishing and sustaining communities of practice in schools involving ‘the accumulation of shared wisdom through ongoing critical conversations’ (Holden, 2002:20). Coaching in contrast has been viewed as more directive through enabling the development of a specific aspect of a professional learner’s practice (CUREE, 2005), focusing on individual needs and the improvement of performance (Tomlinson, 2004) with the coach as a critical friend (Wise and Jacobo, 2010). Suggett (2006), writing for the National College for School Leadership, identifies the ‘wide variations in the ways’ senior leaders in the six schools he investigated were deploying coaching including its use not only with employees but also with students and their parents.

However, whilst some see coaching as a subset of mentoring (Allan, 2007), the terms are often somewhat blurred in writing about school settings (see MacBeath, 2011; Pegg, 2000; Rogers, 2004 and Whitmore, 2002) so obscuring the contentious nature of coaching in the minds of many education professionals who prefer the broadness of the term mentoring to the narrower concerns of the coaching (Hobson and Sharp, 2005). MacBeath, for example, argues that headteachers in his research valued the coach and/or mentor as part of effective leadership development ‘whatever the model and whatever the terminology’ (MacBeath, 2011:118). Yet Hobson and Sharp (2005) had previously commented on the ‘notable gaps’ in the empirical evidence of the success of mentoring and, in particular, coaching.

Additionally there are various practical challenges associated with successful coaching and mentoring of leaders such as the time and financial resource demands (Hobson and Sharp, 2005; Suggett, 2006), the requirement for mentors and coaches to be trained (Hobson and Sharp, 2005; Hoigaard and Mathisen, 2009), whether it is better for the coaches or mentors to come from within or be outside of the organizations of the people they are working with (Ladegård, 2011; Wise and Jacobo, 2010), and the ethical and other dangers posed by the complexity of multiple relationships between co-workers, who might be both the line manager and the coach or mentor (Barnett, 2008; Johnson, 2008). We are concerned to uncover the perceptions of middle leaders about coaching and mentoring in relation to the themes of the project.

Methodology

The participants were middle leaders from maintained state secondary schools in the south-east of England who had recently completed a major middle leader development programme. The research questions were based around what they perceived to be their needs beyond the programme in terms of their confidence in their current middle leadership role, their immediate development needs and what would help them to meet these needs.

An online questionnaire (n.33) and semi-structured interviews (n.6) with middle leaders were used to collect the data. The construction of both research instruments drew upon widely accepted categories and roles of secondary school middle leaders in the UK (Wise and Bennett, 2003; Goodall et al., 2005; and Pedder et al., 2008). The questionnaire focused on areas of confidence and immediate development needs, whilst the use of semi-structured interviews also encompassed questions about ways to meet these perceived needs. Content analysis and simple standard statistical measures were used to draw out themes in line with an interpretivist, qualitative approach rather than any attempt at identifying statistical significant correlations between responses. The ‘needs’ are those that the participants believe they have as, whilst we recognize that senior leaders and other colleagues might well identify different needs for middle leaders, expectancy theories of motivation have long placed an emphasis upon the importance of identifying self-perceived needs in the workplace and planning of development programmes (Vroom, 1964; Gentry et al., 2013).

The invitation to complete the questionnaire (using Survey Monkey) was distributed via email to middle leaders in state secondary schools and the majority of the 33 questionnaire respondents were leaders of major single curriculum subject areas but the sample included significant numbers of leaders of a curriculum area containing a number of subjects, pastoral leaders, and leaders with cross-curricular responsibilities. The majority of the respondents were between the ages of 30 and 40 years old, having been in a middle leader role for no more than five years. The group was split approximately 60/40 female to male. The survey’s final question invited participants to include their contact details if they were happy to participate in the interview phase of the project and, of those who provided these, six interviewees (four female and two male) from three maintained state secondary schools were selected (we have used the codes ML1-ML6 to identify the interviewees in the following section). The majority of interviewees had a plurality of focus to their role and were working across subject department structures within the school making them particularly interesting due to the complexity of their role.

Findings

Current levels of confidence

Questionnaire respondents were asked to rate their confidence in relation to aspects of their middle leadership roles and, in general, respondents were confident in their role particularly those aspects of being accountable for their role and team, raising learning and teaching standards, and working with others outside of their team. There was less confidence in monitoring and holding their teams to account and linking with the community, though this latter aspect was identified as a low priority. The interviewees reflected these areas of confidence in comments such as:

Thinking of different ways to intervene outside of the classroom- coming up with reward strategies and becoming involved in data far more than I ever was before and really tying down the kids. (ML5)

I think I feel confident about strategic planning and forward planning. Seeing the long term, bigger picture of where things want to go and then conveying that and planning for all that. (ML4)

I suppose it was learning to lead staff to get them to do the things I wanted them to do even if they didn’t quite agree with it all the time – at the end of the day it is on my head and if it doesn’t go right then it’s up to me. (ML5)

Our interviewees identified the influence of coaching and mentoring from their development programme as leading to an improvement in their confidence in the middle leader role, for example,

I’m quite good at communicating and sharing my vision, rather than saying ‘This is what we must do.’ . I think that’s definitely something from Leading from the Middle, the idea of coaching. (ML3)

Immediate development needs for current middle leader role

Though questionnaire respondents expressed high levels of confidence in raising learning and teaching standards, they also identified this as a high priority in terms of immediate need and urgency for further development along with ‘Monitoring and Holding team to account’, and ‘Data Analysis’. These immediate development needs seem contradictory when compared with the reported high confidence levels in the same areas.

A similar, though slightly less marked, pattern emerged when we explored the points above in the interviews. Overall, the interviewees were often unclear about their immediate needs. However, one theme was that of curriculum and content knowledge especially for those middle leaders in portfolio roles, for example one respondent identified curriculum knowledge say that a problem was ‘embracing subjects neither of which are necessarily my specialisms . I need guidance and support here’ (ML1).

Another identified need was for team leadership skills including the confidence to ask for help and direct team members particularly those more senior to them as in the case of a new middle leader needing engagement of the teaching team in developing the curriculum.

I wanted the team to assist me with preparation of lessons and say it was very much a team effort. But I did feel I wasn’t ready to ask the team . they’re quite high up in the school . I think I’ll still need my line manager to help with expectations. (ML1)

The theme of team leadership emerged again in the form of a concern about providing continuing professional development for the team and leading training sessions, for example,

I think continuing to develop my ability to lead training sessions and things like that. [.] Next year I’ll be leading a CPD group of my own and that actually terrifies me because it’s not something I’m confident about. (ML3)

A further immediate need was that of time management skills and prioritizing the demands of their roles often arising from what are complex portfolios, including the need for more information and skills on the functions and systems within the school with a greater awareness of how things fit together. This need was expressed by one middle leaders as being around time management and,

…trying to weigh up and triage what the priorities are … because of the widely varied roles and their different needs, it’s sometimes hard to marry all three in the time I’ve got for each one. (ML4)

How to be accountable for a disparate team and accountable for others was a major need identified by some interviewees including skills in sharing expectations, getting the team members to accept responsibility and raising standards through others. Engaging and motivating members of staff was another way in which this immediate need emerged through a concern about dealing with failing staff and developing new staff,

I’m really concerned about how you would deal with a tutor. who is struggling [as a tutor and as a subject teacher]. Where does my role start and finish? (ML2)

Some interviewees saw the team as a ‘mutual support’ so with regards to rigour, they felt a tension between their own accountability and accountability of the people they lead in line with the findings of Bennet et al. (2007). An example of this difficulty in monitoring and ensuring accountability can be seen in this response from a middle leader in relation to the psychological but also geographical challenges posed within a secondary school:

One team I work with is a very disparate group because it’s made up of people who teach other subjects and they have two or three extra hours on their timetable, you know, to fill. So that can be quite challenging and then there’s a lack of confidence, of subject knowledge. And then you can’t monitor as closely as you could if you were a head of department, because you’re not in location all the time. (ML4)

The development needs of other middle leaders in the school was not something our interviewees appeared to have considered (see Simkins et al., 2009) and, even with further probing, the need of ‘raising achievement’ was not identified. The issues that did emerge seemed to echo the interviewees’ own concerns including a need for more formal induction programmes for new heads of department, managing people and leading a team including ‘something about how to be diplomatic in leading’ (ML3).

Perhaps the most striking aspect to emerge from the theme of immediate development needs is the questionnaire respondents’ perceptions that they needed further development in the areas that they reported as having the greatest confidence in such as raising learning and teaching standards. The interviewees provide more nuanced responses illustrating the dominance of the raising standards agenda whilst indicating that the development needs they really felt they needed lay elsewhere in the realm of leading and managing people in a wide variety of situations. Yet articulating their immediate needs and those of middle leader colleagues in their schools was not something that our respondents found easy in the less structured setting of the interviews.

Meeting needs

Our interviewees identified one to one relationships such as that given through on-going coaching and mentoring as a crucial way to meet their development needs, for example,

So to have half an hour with someone who would say ‘This is where you were, this is where you’ve got to, now where are you going to go?’. (ML2)

I suppose sometimes it’s just hearing something from somebody you respect. (ML5)

There were considerable variations in the ways and the extent to which, coaching and mentoring appeared in the interviews. One interviewee said mentoring was distinct from coaching and linked the idea of ‘buddying’ to mentoring, including the need for her to ‘buddy up with somebody, another head of department someone who has a more established department with good results’ (ML1). Another interviewee (ML2) linked coaching with ‘counselling’ which she identified, along with other interviewees, as a prominent element in the Leading from the Middle programme but spoke of mentoring and coaching as interchangeable ideas. Coaching was sometimes presented as requiring a degree of guile, for example, ‘It’s a little bit manipulative in the sense that you may make someone see something the way you want them to see it without them realising it’ (ML3).

One of the interviewees spoke of herself as having a formal coaching role for other teachers in the school and saw coaching as different from mentoring but thought she needed a ‘cross between coaching and mentoring’ saying ‘in business you get mentors, but not in schools’ (ML4). The same person suggested that the coach/mentor should come from outside of the school,

It would probably be more beneficial to be someone from outside school, who doesn’t know you and doesn’t know your school, because of the confidentiality. and then it would be quite confidential and it would need to be quite confidential (ML4).

We noticed that where there had been a person who was particularly influential in the development of their middle leadership career (though often this had been someone who undertook the coach or mentor role informally), the interviewees looked for this experience again in their current roles in the form of coaching and/or mentoring. In one case, a previous head of department of an interviewee had informally continued to ‘offer advice and support in other roles that I’ve had within the school (ML1). Another interviewee spoke of the need for such this relationship to be individualised and private.

It has to be one to one, because no two people’s work is the same, because it has to be private as well. And you have to feel able to say anything and discuss your concern. (ML4)

However, this coaching and mentoring experience could involve them acting as the coach and mentor for middle leader colleagues without being the line manager (ML5 & 6) or working with someone else from outside of the school such as from the Local Authority (ML4).

A second way to meet development needs was through greater consultation from senior leaders and being encouraged to make an input with time and opportunities for self-reflection ‘quite often we’re just told what to do, rather than given a chance to think about it, maybe come back with positives and negatives [.] being given time to process something and then discuss it’ (ML3). However, inset for new heads of department was also identified such as that which could be provided through ‘a course that shows me what a good co-ordinator is within the subject’ (ML1). So no single way was identified as a ‘one size fits all’ solution to meeting the development needs of middle leaders.

Conclusion

We recognise the limited generalizability of our preliminary findings and the tentative nature of the conclusions at this preliminary stage. However, what has emerged from the study so far is that respondents to the questionnaire somewhat paradoxically perceive they needed further development in the areas that they reported as having the greatest confidence in. Perhaps this ambiguity that has emerged is in part due to the emphasis placed on results in schools and/or an example of ambiguity irony theory at work (Hoyle and Wallace, 2005) which helps to understand how middle leaders say one thing when presented with a list of options in a questionnaire but, under more probing in the context of an interview, identify other more pressing needs. Hence an over emphasis on techniques for raising exam results in continuing middle leadership development programmes may well not meet the real perceived needs and so work against making real improvements to leading teams which can contribute in turn to improved educational outcomes (Mulford and Silins, 2011).

Coaching and mentoring were rated highly by most of the interviewees as a method of development rather than further middle leadership development courses. However, the interviewees also expressed a need for further training in the techniques of leadership and management suggesting that middle leaders are not a homogeneous group and do not necessarily have the same set of needs which means ‘one size fits all’ further development programmes and techniques are not appropriate. Coaching and mentoring may make flexible development tools, which relate well to circumstances characterized by a constant state of flux, but what do middle leaders understand by these two terms and are they seeking mentoring rather than coaching or vice versa? Is our interviewees’ wish for more mentoring and/or coaching reflecting fashionable answers to leadership development rather than effective methods? The importance of personalized leadership development accords with Crawford and Earley (2011) but how can this be done with constraints of time and finance?

The initial findings from the project may well reflect the increasing complexity of the role of the middle leaders in schools and the ever challenging role of leading and managing people in their teams. The second stage of our research will seek to explore points identified from the initial stage through follow up interviews with the six original respondents and a small number of other middle leaders. The roles of middle leaders remain crucial in meeting the challenge of bringing about sustained improvements within schools so the findings discussed in this article have important implications for developing middle leaders in their current roles. As we have mentioned, whilst there are many ways to approach this topic, a focus on what middle leaders think is a legitimate one that can be otherwise overlooked by both policy makers and those with a responsibility for middle leadership development.

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