School Leaders Leading

Abstract

The last decade or so has seen an emerging literature supporting the position that school leaders and school leadership are important. This article argues, however, that recent developments in the area of school leadership have led to an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged and tested. It is an orthodoxy that has been driven essentially by those outside the school leadership profession and is one constrained by external accountability demands. The arguments here are that school leaders should be the ones driving a critical examination of their profession whereby the shackles of accountability on them are replaced by a new liberating professionalism for school leaders framed around notions of professional responsibility. To this end, three propositions are considered to stimulate debate among the school leadership profession. The first is that we need to frame school leadership by critically examining the question: school leadership for what and about what? Second, we need to shift the debate about school leadership from one dominated by accountability to one grounded in notions of professional responsibility. And finally, that the profession needs to be leading the debates and setting the agendas about school leadership, not simply responding and reacting to externally determined agendas.

Keywords

accountability and school leadership conceptualizing school leadership educational leadership professional responsibility school leadership professionalism school leadership

Introduction

The last decade or so has seen a growing literature on school leadership. In essence, the evidence is in that school leaders and school leadership are important. However, the debate over how school leadership is conceptualized and enacted remains contested. Given the accountability constraints under which most school leaders now operate, it could be argued that the debate has not been sufficiently extensive nor inclusive, particularly when one sees school leadership now typically ‘defined’ in sets of standards and statements of expectations as to what school leaders should do. Often, such standards and statements are not driven and developed by the school leadership profession, rather by those outside or parallel to it, although the profession may be invited to comment on drafts of these, usually post hoc.

This article argues that such developments in the area of school leadership have led to an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged and tested. For example, under this orthodoxy, the expected answer to the question, school leadership for what and about what, is student learning, which is now typically defined as narrow aspects of the academic curriculum and which can be measured by national and international testing programs. However, educators, especially school leaders, know – or should know – that schooling is about much more than that. Indeed, for the future of society, it had better be about more than that. The arguments here are that we need to critically examine the question posed above, that school leaders should be the ones driving that process, and that the constraints of accountability on school leaders need to be replaced by a new liberating professionalism for school leaders framed around notions of professional responsibility. The ideas offered here hopefully will serve to catalyse critical debate and discussion about such matters, especially among the school leadership profession.

Some background: school leaders and school leadership are important

There is no doubt that school leadership is now widely accepted as vital to school success and student learning, with a growing body of research deepening our understandings of the complexities and contributions leadership makes in this regard (see for example, Leithwood, et al, 2004; Robinson et al, 2009). Internationally, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in their work on school leadership noted that:

School leadership … plays a key role in improving school outcomes by influencing the motivations and capacities of teachers, as well as the school climate … effective school leadership is essential to improve the efficiency and equity of schooling. (Pont et al., 2008: 9)

Similar sentiments have been expressed at national levels, with education ministers in Australia, for example, declaring that:

School principals and other school leaders play a critical role in supporting and fostering quality teaching through coaching and mentoring teachers to find the best ways to facilitate learning, and by promoting a culture of high expectations in schools. … School leaders are responsible for creating and sustaining the learning environment and the conditions under which quality teaching and learning take place. (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008: 11)

In New Zealand, the comprehensive Best Evidence Synthesis on school leadership and student outcomes confirmed that: ‘… school leaders can indeed make a difference to student achievement and well-being’ (Robinson et al., 2009: 35). In the UK, the considerable resources, research and writing contributed to, and by the National Council for Leadership of Schools re-enforces that school leadership no longer can be ignored as a key contributor to quality schooling.

Examining contemporary school leadership

Among the rhetoric and the apparent universal enthusiasm about school leadership, there has been a growing debate and critique as to how school leadership is being conceptualized, normalized and potentially formularized (see Eacott, 2009; Gunter and Fitzgerald, 2008; Gronn, 2003; Ruairc, 2010). In much of this there is an acknowledgement that a good deal of the current orthodoxy around school leadership has been shaped across the past decade or so by the increasing challenges and constraints offered by new public management reforms characterized by an era of standards-based agendas, enhanced centralized accountability systems where improved student learning, narrowly defined, becomes the mantra for school leaders, who themselves are subjected to enhanced accountabilities. Counterpointing earlier times of an almost laissez faire approach, Hargreaves and Shirley (2009: 19) argue, and it is an argument supported here, that we need new ways and new ideas, observing that:

[E]ducation in the 21st century must move beyond the control of self-serving professionals under freewheeling progressivism and beyond the dark thicket of prescription and standardisation that limit capacity and stifles initiative.

Such prescription and standardization seem highly inappropriate given that schools are operating in what Limerick and colleagues described as times of discontinuous, unpredictable and turbulent change (Limerick et al, 2002). Here, the roles and expectations on school leaders have changed, so too has the context within which they work. The rhetoric of self-management and devolution across some decades now has not resulted in schools and school leaders (that is, the professionals) determining and driving educational priorities. Rather, the curriculum, and the accountabilities associated with the curriculum, are essentially handed to school leaders by policy makers and others for actioning. In this, many school leaders have become the ‘doers’ of the bidding of others, constrained in their critiques for fear of some form of retribution and straining to find a professional profile and real educational leadership roles among what Gronn 2003) described as the greedy work of school leadership. Wright (2001) summarizes the situation well:

[T]he economic and political climate has effectively reduced the ability of school leaders to transcend matters of government policy, their own values and preferred practice being submerged beneath a deluge of managerialist rhetoric, paperwork and legislated practice. (Cited in Bottery, 2004: 198-199).

Eacott (2009: 1, 2) agrees, noting that we have:

[A] standards based agenda which attempts to define, breakdown and measure leadership as though it is something out there that can be captured, combined with the performative measures … (with) Educational leadership being limited to ‘what leaders do’.

Hargreaves and Shirley (2009) describe this state as the second way of markets and standardization: that is, the second of what they see as four ways of conceptualizing educational change. That is, it is a set of constructs from the past and for the past, with little demonstrable evidence that quality education results. In the conclusion of a recent edited collection examining school leadership in Australia, it was argued that change was needed, and that school leaders should be at the vanguard of such changes:

‘New managerialism’ which embraced managerial efficiency and effectiveness through bureaucracy and accountability as key levers for meeting higher community expectations and reforming schools, has failed. ... it is time that the professionals, the school leaders, ensure that what happens in schools, now and in the future, is what they want to happen. The professionals need to re-establish their individual and collective educational agency. (Mulford et al., 2009: 417)

In short, we have seen bureaucratic centralism dominating the educational landscape (Bush, 2008), and by implication, school leaders and school leadership.

Breaking the shackles, questioning the orthodoxy

Despite the plethora of writing and research about the changing roles and responsibilities of and for schools leaders in recent years and the now accepted importance of it to quality schooling, a good deal of school leadership writing and research has been somewhat uncritical and accepting of the prevailing orthodoxy of the times. While some writers have started to question how school leadership should be conceptualized and enacted (Bottery, 2004; Cranston and Ehrich, 2009; Eacott, 2009; Gunter and Fitzgerald, 2008, 2009), such critique of some of the dominant assumptions that drive most of the debates about school leadership is still rare. Importantly, the voices of dissent are rarely those of the school leadership profession itself, such as principals and headteachers, who seemed constrained to pursue agendas determined by those external to the school without the input of rich critical insights available among the profession. Accountability, external accountability in particular, seems to dominate and constrain and has effectively re-defined school leadership professionalism. This is despite the considerable educational capital held by school leaders, individually and collectively, which could, and should, be playing a lead role in shaping school leadership professionalism and education more broadly for the 21st century.

Thus to the focus of this paper captured in the title, School leaders leading. This focus is examined by considering three propositions which are offered as catalysts to try to stimulate debate among the school leadership profession. They are that we need:

to frame school leadership by critically examining the question: school leadership for what and about what

to shift the debate about school leadership from one dominated by accountability to one grounded in notions of professional responsibility

the profession to be leading the debates and setting the agendas about school leadership, not simply responding/reacting to externally determined agendas.

School leadership for what and about what

An outsider to education could be forgiven for thinking that schooling today was concerned mainly with achievement and test performance about the ‘basics’, that is, reading, writing and mathematics, as these are the main topics that seem to dominate many public and political debates about education. Indeed, if one were to also accept the importance given to competition and market forces now evident in education via league tables and the urging by politicians for parents to exercise choice in the selection of schools for their children, one might also believe that schooling was driven primarily by individual and economic purposes. That is, schooling for young people is about gaining greater social and economic advantage. As Gunter and Fitzgerald (2010: 197) put it, it seems that there is a ‘compelling logic that education is both a "good" and a service to be procured, purchased and consumed by individuals’. This is despite alternative public utterings that schooling has a moral purpose, and that as well as academic learnings, young people also need to be helped to grow emotionally and socially – for the benefit of both the individual and the wider society. Such sentiments echo the arguments of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim some 150 years ago, that education is an eminently social matter and that it is about forming the child into an ‘ideal adult’ ready to take his or her place in society, and that through education, society prepares the conditions for its own survival (Demaine, 1981).

These broader views of education are evident in the rhetoric of many contemporary public statements about education, nationally and internationally. In Australia for example, the Melbourne Declaration (MCEETYA, 2008: 4) noted:

As a nation Australia values the central role of education in building a democratic, equitable and just society – a society that is prosperous, cohesive and culturally diverse …Schools play a vital role in promoting the intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians, and in ensuring the nation’s ongoing economic prosperity and social cohesion.

Australia is not alone in such utterances, with New Zealand recently declaring that a major challenge for schooling was to ‘strengthen valued social outcomes, including the ability of students to relate well to each other’ (Robinson et al., 2009: 36). Internationally, the OECD (2007: 3) has highlighted that:

(e)ducation is vital for economic success, both at the national and the individual level. But education also has significant social effects. … a general level of education is indeed important in helping people to achieve good health and to become active citizens.

So, on the one hand we have school leaders charged, as a priority, with improving test scores about limited aspects of the curriculum: across the world, such test scores are available in the public domain (for example, in Australia via the My School website), with parents and the wider community encouraged to make judgments about schools, teachers and school leaders based on such data. On the other hand, the rhetoric of government policies and statements from respected international bodies reminds school leaders that they also have much broader responsibilities in educating young people for the future.

What are some of these broader purposes of education and how are schools and school leaders responding to them? A recent national Australian Research Council study (Cranston, Mulford, Reid and Keating, 2010; Cranston, Kimber, Mulford, Reid and Keating, 2010) examined the purposes of schooling in primary schools in Australia. The research sought to examine the rhetoric around such matters (for example, statements in policy documents, statements by key policymakers, such as education ministers and department heads) and the reality; that is, the enactment of particular purposes in practice (for example, principals’ views, observations via in-depth case studies). For this research, three purposes of schooling were identified, drawing on the earlier work of Labaree (1997). The first of these are democratic purposes, which are concerned with schools holding responsibilities for developing active and competent citizens, the outcomes of which benefit society – these are public purposes and consistent with the statements above from documents such as the Melbourne Declaration. The second set of purposes are individual and are focused on gaining advantage for the individual with respect to social and economic matters – these are private purposes, and can be seen to derive from competition and choice presses, where notions of the best and winning are evident and where there are winners and losers. The final set of purposes, economic, are concerned with developing students as competent contributors to society, for example, contributing to the economic prosperity of the country – these are both public and private in their orientation.

In brief, what this research revealed was that, in schools, democratic (public) purposes have been swamped by individual and economic purposes. Principals would prefer otherwise as would (some) policymakers, such that there is generally a lack of alignment between aspiration for these (democratic/public) purposes and their enactment. Key barriers to a focus on democratic (public) purposes included government policies and agendas, such as those focusing on national testing regimes (Cranston, Mulford, Reid and Keating, 2010: 533). What is noteworthy, however, is that there is evidence (for example, from the research case study schools) that it is possible to address such broader focus/purposes by deeply embedding them in the goals and culture of the school, through an overt commitment and drive toward them by school leaders, and where those school leaders were able to manage competing agendas, allowing them to accommodate external accountability demands and internal responsibility priorities, such as these broader purposes. In these instances, the school leaders led and shaped debates about such matters in their communities, and did not allow the potential for narrow views of schooling to dominate. These were school leaders who were strongly values-driven, saw school leadership as a morally responsible activity and understood the limitations imposed by external accountability agendas.

The essence of the argument here is captured in the following statement drawn from a comprehensive review of the school leadership literature from a few years ago. The statement provides a response to the proposition, school leadership for what and about what.

While learning is the raison d’être of schools, educational leadership ought to be a purposeful values-driven, moral and ethical activity. Educational leaders need to be aware of their own values, beliefs and principles as well as those of their school, system and community, and be driven to develop their schools as socially just and inclusive institutions. … Educational leaders operating in this way see their schools as holding community-service and social responsibilities, seeking to develop young people as mature individuals who are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to create a better, more just and sustainable future. (Cranston and Ehrich, 2006: 13)

Some broader questions arise from this, such as how, when and where are school leaders playing a role in leading debates about such matters – in their schools, in their communities, in wider societal forums? If some school leaders can do this, why not more? Why does it seem that many school leaders have vacated the public (and professional) spaces for debates about such things? Have prevailing accountability agendas stifled such debates? These matters are explored a little further below. But for now, the argument is that the question of school leadership for what and about what needs to be considered critically by the profession of school leaders. And the answers need to find their way into the broader educational agendas of the day.

From accountability to professional responsibility

Essentially, many of the current accountability agendas dominating education can be sourced back to earlier reforms from outside the education sector such as new public management. Notably, they have been pre-eminent in education for a number of decades such that for many, they have become uncritically well established. Indeed, some prominent educators have become the advocates of such agendas. The rhetoric of competition, choice, quality and in particular, accountability, dominate. These notions are consistent with the ‘Second way of markets and standardization’ as described by Hargreaves and Shirley (2009), framed around such practices as competition among schools fuelled by publication of ranking of test results and a prescribed curriculum in areas of learning narrowly defined with political targets and timetables for delivering improved results.

Why do we need to look critically at accountability in particular when we think about re-conceptualizing and re-shaping our thinking about school leadership? The answer to this is both anecdotal and research based – school leaders and aspiring school leaders almost universally see accountability, and its associated management and administrative demands as a major factor in how their roles as school leaders are defined and actualized (see Cranston, 2007; Early et al., 2002). Many school leaders report accountability forcing them into management roles and abandoning many leadership roles (Cranston, 2008). Sackney and Mitchell’s (2008) research reported school leaders to be more concerned with accounting than with learning, with control than with teaching, with compliance than with risk-taking, and with public relations than with student experiences.

In these contexts, accountability, as the dominant agenda, is typically designed externally, driven externally, and essentially for external audiences and for external purposes. Earl (2005: 7) would describe such accountability as really just accounting, as ‘real’ accountability is ‘conversation about what information means and how it fits with everything we know and about how to use it to make positive changes’. This is empowering accountability. That is, accountability that can make a difference at the local level (Forster, 1999). MacBeath (2009: 137) argues that ‘(l)eadership for learning rests on a shared sense of accountability’, with Earl (2005: 7) reminding us that real accountability ‘engenders respect, trust, shared understanding and mutual support’. In short, this is accountability that goes beyond the ‘must do’ to the ‘need to’ because it is in the best interest of the students – and it is accountability that is not constrained by narrow testing regimes, rather it encompasses all aspects of the learning and development of the students. That is, it is about the purposes of education, where these purposes are more broadly conceptualized as discussed earlier. It is no longer accountability as we have known it in education for some time, rather it is about responsibility, professional responsibility.

The argument here is that the impact, mainly negative, of many current narrow accountability agendas around the world is to remove the professional imperatives from school leaders as to what is important in schools, what should be the focus of what needs to be done in schools, and how schools ensure that they are doing the best they can to support the learning and development of students. Hoyle and Wallace (2005) have argued that this represents ‘de-professionalization, rather than an altered professionalization. Or as Evans (2008: 20) has observed, ‘(p)rofessionalism … is not what it was’.

Firestone and Shipps (2007: 271) have described school leaders who simply respond to bureaucratic accountabilities as acting as functionaries complying with external regulations. But there is an alternative professional responsibility position, one that sees school leaders playing a balancing act between the external mandated requirements of external accountabilities (for example, continued funding may be dependent on doing so) and internal improvement accountabilities that can make a real difference for students. This professional responsibility position places greater discretion with the school leaders to actually lead.

Strong professional internal accountability (or responsibility) can provide a filtering of external accountability requirements (Firestone and Shipps, 2005, 2007) – here, school leaders need to clearly understand the priorities and needs of their schools and how to meet these. This is about moral accountability and a peer-enforced shared accountability. These professional and moral accountabilities (or responsibilities) highlight the strong human aspects of school leadership (Ehrich, 2000), a matter often overlooked when the dominant focus is about high-stakes testing.

To change the focus away from accountability, indeed to change the mindsets of school leaders, it is argued here that we need to change the language. Gunter and Fitzgerald (2008: 273) have challenged that ‘(i)f we want to develop educational leadership then we need to frame it, debate it and conceptualise it’. While the notion of professional accountability is an advancement on accountability alone, the term professional responsibility is much more powerful. Hargreaves and Shirley (2009) saw the shift from accountability to responsibility as emphasizing the internal, the professional and the individual and collective notions referred to above. By emphasizing professional, we shift the agenda of action in schools from an externally determined one, to one that is internal and contextualized and one that requires the professionals (that is, the school leaders) to be directly and acutely engaged. School leaders become more than just the doers of others bidding – they lead. By using the term responsibility, the moral aspects of the school leader’s role is highlighted. Questions like: ‘is this in the best interests of our students’ and ‘is this the best we can do’ start to become key criteria around which decision making processes in schools can pivot. These are not external matters, nor are they matters that can necessarily be checked with a test. Rather they are at the heart of what educators, and particularly school leaders, should be about – they resonate with the challenges set by Durkheim noted earlier, and emphasize why we need to shift our purposes and foci in schools beyond just individual and economic purposes to those more public and democratic in nature.

By way of summary, the notion of the professionally responsible school leader is captured well by Brown (2005: 137):

For those with a deep sense of purpose and strong desire to improve education, the principalship is a role replete with great potential. Being a leader of learners yields numerous opportunities for personal and professional growth and development. The shift in transformed schools from power-over to power-with approaches signifies a reorientation toward moral leadership, professional empowerment, and collegial interdependence.

School leaders leading

If we accept professional responsibility as a defining characteristic of school leadership, then we ought to see school leaders:

enacting an overt moral commitment to their students;

taking the lead of/in educational agendas and debates – in their schools, in the wider community – nationally and internationally;

contributing constructively and knowledgably to the future for education and their schools, rather than just responding to the current externally received ‘wisdom’;

driven not by what they do, but by why they do and for whom they do, what they do;

critically reflecting on their own performances, and adopting collaborative learning strategies to address needs; and,

accommodating external accountability demands within a framework of a clear set of locally developed purposes for their school – relevant to their school context and their students.

Such notions resonate with those proposed by Eraut (1996) and others as to what helps define professionalism. They are the antithesis of how Smyth (2008) sees the current state. He draws on Bottery’s (1992: 230) notion of school leaders doing the prudent thing, namely that they lower their heads to pull the cart rather than raising their heads to look at the road. There is no questioning ‘of the road, where it leads, whether the direction is appropriate and what is in the cart’ (Wright, 2003: 141).

Fitzgerald (2008: 128) argues that educators need to ‘speak back to policies and processes that de-professionalise their work’. This is about school leaders leading debates about their purpose as leaders of school communities and what they do to achieve those purposes, not abrogating those agendas to those outside. It is about school leaders leading and taking on the role of asking ‘the difficult questions, not be co-opted to ventriloquise an agenda, … it is about speaking back and about being restless about what is occurring' (Gunter and Fitzgerald, 2008: 262). But there are huge challenges, especially for school leaders in this. As Mulford and colleagues (2009: 417) noted recently:

The major professional challenge for any school leader is overcoming the gap between dependence on, or a feeling of, the inevitability of political, system or bureaucracies being the means of achieving what they want, and actively working to implement their preferred model of schools as social centres, learning organisations or professional learning communities.

Importantly there is also a role here for others, such as university academics working in the educational leadership area. They potentially have much to contribute to these debates, especially when school leaders in some sectors are constrained by their employers in what they might say publically about such matters. In this regard, the editors of the Journal of Educational Administration and History (Professors Gunter and Fitzgerald) have for some years been publishing papers outside what might be considered the academic ‘mainstream’ (see for example, themed issues Volume 40, Number 2, ‘The state of the field of educational administration’ and Volume 41, Number 4, ‘Critical historical perspectives on educational administration’). It is argued here that such debates now need to be shared more widely.

The professional role requirements for school leaders who wish to meet and overcome the challenges raised here are complex and themselves challenging. Indeed, to aspire to professional responsibility school leaders will need to navigate through, and reverse, the current culture of low trust or mistrust of educators, which Fitzgerald (2008: 113) has observed as ‘(o)ne of the new and emerging threats … (with) the consequent public certainty that the imposition of standards, target, and accountability is the antidote’. Power (1994) described such responses as an ‘audit explosion’. Trust, MacBeath (2009: 143) argues, lies at the ‘heart of professional responsibility’. Bottery (2004: 191) posits that a change in trust will only occur through ‘professional transparency, openness and accessibility to the public, and to a wider educational role than has formerly been conceived’. These are some of the changes and challenges ahead for those wishing to construct a new professionally responsible school leadership.

Discussion and conclusion: a way ahead

The arguments here are not about a closed inward looking esoteric professionalism characterizized by mystique and a ‘trust me’ ethos – those are a throw back to past times. Rather, they are about opening up the school leadership profession and engaging the relevant constituencies and stakeholders in understanding more deeply what education and leading schools is, and ought to be about in the 21st century. Bottery (2004) argues this is about school leaders engaging in dialectic about what is asked of them. This requires dialogue and the re-shaping of the profession through the views of both the profession and those outside it. Much greater professional critical self-reflection is required, where school leaders gain, or perhaps regain a professionalism that is characterized by responsibility – a professional responsibility that is internal not external, and that is individual and collective across the school. In short, instead of externally imposed accountability and externally developed standards driving school leadership agendas, the argument is for a focus on professional responsibility, a notion that is underpinned by values, beliefs and principles, and which is grounded in shared understandings about the purposes of education and schooling. And this is at all levels – among politicians, among system leaders, among school leaders, teachers and school communities. MacBeath (2009: 143) captures the concepts well when he notes:

Professional accountability (here ‘responsibility’) recognises the commitment that educators bring first and foremost to their students, underpinned by a strongly held value position (and replaces) the culture of compliance to external mandate.

There are some real challenges here for school leaders if they are to move to, and be afforded a ‘new’ professional responsibility. By way of endeavouring to catalyse further discussion on the matters raised in this article, a number of principles are offered for consideration. These have been synthesised from the extant research to underpin explication of professional responsibility for school leaders. They have, in large part, been drawn from two bodies of work but they resonate with writing from many other sources. The first was a comprehensive review of the school leadership literature (Cranston and Ehrich, 2006). The second was in-depth leadership research involving some non-education leaders (Cranston and Ehrich. 2007). They may be helpful in conceptualizing a professional responsibility framework for school leaders. It is not an exhaustive set of principles, but it is a start. And of course, many of these notions are not new – but some have become so embedded in the rhetoric about school leadership that their deeper meanings have been lost and/or their enactment muzzled. Others have been swamped by other more dominant presses. However, the argument here is that professionally responsible school leaders need to engage or re-engage seriously with them if they are create new meaning in their work for the future.

The first key principle is that school leadership must be about something. It must be vision-driven, it must enliven commitment and passion not only within the leader as an individual, but also among those with whom the leader works. This is about purposeful, values driven leadership concerned with creating a better future. This more holistic purpose of leadership echoes a theme noted earlier that, school leadership has a moral purpose. It has a wider societal purpose and one that impacts on us all in the community. Bottery (2004) has described this as leaders having a moral compass. Here there is a need for leaders to show empathy for others, to be driven by commitment to social justice, equity and human rights. This requires the school leader to be a leader of people and of ideas and to understand the broader purposes of education, and that the learning and development of students is multi-faceted, is not defined just by the demands of externally imposed tests. And it requires young people to leave schools as critical and socially aware citizens who can contribute to the community.

The second principle concerns learning – that is, leaders themselves must be learners, and be seen to be learners. Simply stated, leadership is a journey of learning. This locates the school leader as a learner, and as a proactive rather than reactive professional, and as a global intellectual who is both engaged and engaging in current debates and trends, especially as they impact on their schools and their students. This also requires the school leader to engage with others, inside and outside their profession, and model learning, critical reflection and improvement as mandatory professional actions.

The third principle is that leaders need to accept responsibily for their actions, while at the same time demonstrating understanding and compassion in the drive to do better tomorrow than today. This is a moral responsibility. This is a professional responsibility that goes well beyond complying with externally required accountability demands.

The final principle is that leadership is an on-going journey. It is not easy, with risk taking and creativity often required to achieve the desired vision. Commitment and conviction are mandatory. This requires school leaders to develop as professionals, they need to learn with and from others about what school leadership needs to be about for their students in this rapidly changing world and they need to take others with them on their learning journey.

The profession needs to drive and lead the journey to a new place and state for school leadership and hence for schools and students. Currently, those beyond the profession are doing it for them, via for example, leadership standards. But in that journey there are challenges, tensions and paradoxes that school leaders will need to navigate through. These are the realities of the expectations and demands on school leaders. Creativity will be needed to accommodate these – and that is a creativity of and by the profession itself. These challenges include (Cranston and Ehrich, 2006):

Responding to both local and system level demands and priorities when they might not always be compatible – this is about being aware that school leadership must be practised in the realities of accepting that one is constrained in part by, for example, government expectations. Accommodating external accountabilities and internal responsibilities is required.

Being seen and act as the leader while empowering others for distributed, shared, multiple leadership roles. This involves the need to develop creative synergies with others, and to embrace school leadership as a collaborative endeavour.

Driving a future-oriented sustainable vision for their schools in discontinuously changing and challenging times while managing the realities of ‘the now’ of schools.

Continuing their professional learning journey, keeping abreast of educational and related developments and trends while managing the many competing demands on school leaders.

Allocating limited resources in effective, efficient and equitable ways to maximize the learning of all students.

Achieving work-life balance when the professional and personal demands of being a school leader are significant.

These challenges can be framed around a higher purpose for school leaders captured so well by Hedley Beare (2010: 22) when he noted that many in education are driven by:

That sense of mission, that restless urge to keep going, to make improvements, and to come upon new pastures for schooling and learning … borne out of a commitment to do the best for our young people. It comes from an undefined conviction that the future, both of country and of individual learners, is at stake.

To be professionally responsible, school leaders will need to understand the fundamental values, principals and purposes of what they are doing, why they are doing what they are doing, and just as important how their their own values and driving principles contribute to their understandings and enactment of leadership. If they do this, they position themselves as proactive reflexive leadership professionals, not reactive managers.

The challenge is for the profession to lead – it is the responsibility for the profession to lead. Decades of research reports school leaders satisfied yet frustrated in their roles. More of the same should not an option. Because more of the same will make Bottery’s (2004: 195-196) observation the legacy of a generation of school leaders.

(W)e already have a situation where educational leaders are shorn of any proper leadership. They will hardly be worthy of the name, for if they are incapable, or fail to articulate what education is for they fail to be leaders and become no more than servants of the powerful. [T]here can be no greater abnegation of professional responsibility than to do others bidding without questioning whether this constitutes what they believe to be good education.

Such a legacy is not what any professionally responsible school leader would want.

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