Abstract
This is the sixth title in the Leadership for Learning series co-edited by the author with Mark Brundrett and Les Bell. As its subtitle suggests, the book falls into three sections. The first conceptualizes and contextualizes leadership specifically focused on building capacity for improving schools. The second segment is the most substantial, examining more closely some of the currently popular leadership labels: learning-centred leadership, distributed leadership, professional learning communities and leadership development. The final section looks at the impact on leadership of policies for school specialism and schooling as preparation for the shift to knowledge-based economies, and in the last chapter re-visits the various components of leadership previously discussed. The over-arching theme throughout is on leadership for capacity building, though the author is careful to make it clear the contested nature of many definitions, including that of ‘capacity building’. He draws on a wide range of international sources to sustain his arguments throughout.
The author examines forensically what is known about leadership and identifies substantial gaps in current knowledge. In the opening chapter he challenges the questions which researchers have asked about leadership and contends that important questions have been overlooked. In the final chapter he re-visits the issue of what should be on the research agenda for leadership and persuasively makes a case for broadening enquiries, collecting data over wider systems and clarifying exactly what it is that leaders do in their various different contexts and in their different levels within school organizations that really improves outcomes.
The book’s preface indicates the intention to reach a wide readership: higher degree students, school leaders, policymakers and researchers in the UK, USA and Asia. It can be read as a single through-text but individual chapters can be read standalone. Those who work with both teacher-students and school leaders, all of them busy people, know that the time they spend reading is limited and precious. To be useful to them, books need to be both well structured and credibly based on empirical sources: this book is both. Each chapter is organized in the same way, with an opening précis of content, followed by clear critical commentary on the chosen themes, and ending with a summary of the propositions made. It is thus very easy to decide if a particular chapter is relevant to one’s immediate needs, and also to check at the end that one has understood the author’s intentions because he so helpfully states again what he intended his main messages to be. For all readers this could be a helpful steer; students will also find it easy to go back and look something up if they decide to cite it in their own writing.
The writi\ng consistently offers well-evidenced critique. On the rare occasions when the author allows himself to espouse a particularly perspective, it is usually highlighted by precise and imaginative choice of adverbs, so one can see when one is being persuaded. Throughout the referencing is meticulously detailed (down to clarity in the text about which Hargreaves is cited at any given point). A couple of casual references did escape attribution: the first mention of tacit knowledge on page 29 (though this is revisited and attributed later, but one does not know that until one reaches page 170), and ‘Taylorist ways of running schools’ (p. 6). Most readers will know all about Taylor, but all of us had to meet him for the first time and for some readers this could be their first such encounter. This is, however, but a very minor caveat.
Given the current enthusiasm of the UK Secretary of State for Education (at the time of writing this review, August 2012) for adapting what he thinks are the successful educational strategies of schools in Singapore and Hong Kong, with very little apparent scrutiny of their wider systems, what the author says about the Asian context is very telling. Speaking from personal experience as well as a strong evidence base, he points out that how ‘cultural nuances shape the trajectory of instructional leadership has been grossly under-examined, with the peril of misrepresenting, or unduly simplifying, the characteristics of instructional leadership in Asian educational systems’ (p. 93). Earlier in the book he also deprecates the limited nature of research into links between principals’ effectiveness and the contexts in which they operate, their personal dispositions and values, and how they prioritize purposes. There is emerging evidence that high-quality educational leadership may require robust moral purposes, need to draw strongly on the intellectual and social capital of teachers, and require principals to deploy organizational capital effectively, though we do not yet know the optimum proportions for these elements. There is no evidence that ‘one size fits all’.