Abstract
Vision has been regarded as an essential component of effective leadership for more than 20 years. It is valuable because it provides the sense of purpose and direction required for educational organisations to thrive. All stakeholders expect principals, in particular, to develop and communicate vision clearly, as Dempster and Logan’s (1998) Australian research demonstrates. However, there are a number of problems with the vision-building process. As long ago as 1993, Bolam et al. showed that even leaders of highly effective British schools were unable to articulate a distinctive vision; the vision statements were very similar. This links to another problem: the extent to which ‘visions’ have to follow government imperatives rather than being grounded in the specific needs of schools and their students and communities (Bottery, 1998). Hoyle and Wallace (2005) go further and contrast what they call ‘visionary rhetoric’ with the ‘prosaic reality’ experienced by students, staff and parents.
This brief introduction links to the opening paper in this issue, by Joseph Murphy and Daniela Torre, which provides an integrative review of vision. These authors note that vision ‘routinely surfaces’ in studies of effective organisations and that the principal is generally the essential figure in creating a school’s vision. Their paper provides ‘intellectual architecture’ or ‘essential scaffolding’ for this concept, drawing on an ‘exhaustive review’ of the literature from 1975 to 2011. They developed a framework from this review, comprising mission, goals and expectations. They conclude by stressing the importance of context, recognising that vision ‘does not take place in a vacuum’.
Vision is expected to be underpinned by clear educational values and this informs the second paper, by Linda Hammersley-Fletcher. She explores the tensions facing English headteachers as they implement government initiatives which may be contrary to their values. Drawing on reflections from ten primary and secondary school heads, she shows that they felt it was imperative for them to meet the external targets set for them, a form of ‘compliance’, even when they conflicted with their values.
The leadership field is replete with labels, of which ‘distributed’, ‘transformational’ and ‘instructional’ are perhaps the most frequently used in the 21st century. Trevor Male and Ioanna Palaiologou explore a different concept, that of pedagogical leadership. They define this notion as ‘forms of practice that shape and form teaching and learning’. Drawing on interviews with headteachers in secondary, primary and early years contexts, they connect pedagogical leadership to values, beliefs and culture, and conclude that leaders need to respond with fluidity to unpredictable events, within and beyond the classroom.
School leadership in conflict zones is rarely researched, unsurprisingly, so Melanie C. Brooks’s paper on school principals in Southern Thailand is a welcome contribution to the literature. She reports on the work of school principals in areas targeted by Muslim separatist groups. The purpose of the research was to establish how school principals sustain trust with community leaders during times of conflict. She interviewed 20 such principals and notes that trust was compromised by the barbed wire and guns used to guard schools. She concludes that school leaders who were able to build trust did so through strong interpersonal skills and leadership competence.
The next paper, by Grant P. Lenarduzzi, discusses the impact of school closure on principals, using critical incident analysis. He notes that school closure ‘creates a negative ethos and a potential toxic setting in which the principal must operate’. The author interviewed six principals and two superintendents associated with closed schools in British Columbia, Canada. The narratives showed that the school closures were characterised by anger, mistrust and uncertainty, but the principals subsequently conveyed increased strength and ability to lead educational communities.
The technological revolution has led to the availability of unprecedented quantities of data to underpin educational decision-making and the next two papers both reflect aspects of this phenomenon. Julie A Marsh and Caitlin C. Farrell report on the findings of a comparative case study of three interventions designed to improve teachers’ capacity to use data to improve teaching and learning in six secondary schools in the United States. Drawing on interviews with district and school leaders, and with teachers, as well as observation and documentary analysis, they conclude that while data use is likely to persist a range of questions needs to be addressed in deciding how to do so.
Liz Browne and Steve Rayner discuss the use of data in the English higher education context. They note the advent of the Time Resource Allocation Method (TRAC) to record academic activity, and Key Information Sets (KIS) for students, describing such initiatives as ‘constant surveillance’ and ‘performativity’. They conclude that intellectual and academic leadership is showing signs of strain and erosion as new challenges are presented in a managerialist methodology.
In the next paper, Geoffrey Elliott explores leadership in post-compulsory education in England and asks whether such organisations can be led effectively within the unstable and turbulent environment facing both further and higher education. He points to the importance of values and beliefs but asks a central question: whose values? He espouses the adoption of ‘critical practice leadership’, embracing leadership of learning, as an antidote to unethical leadership.
The final paper, by Pat O’Connor and Anita Goransson, examines the variation in gender stereotypes in university management in Sweden and Ireland. They explored this issue through interviews with 23 senior manager-academics in Ireland and ten in Sweden. In Ireland, gender stereotypes were regarded as credible, reinforced by the minority of women in such positions, and by the wider societal and cultural context. The Swedish respondents were aware of stereotypes, but they had not experienced them because women now hold the majority of senior posts in universities. They conclude that Swedish gender equality policy is rooted in a long tradition of social equality while gender equality values do not evoke the same response in Ireland.