School Leadership Development

Australian Education Seeks Effective Leaders for Quality Teaching

May 19, 2007

Australian education authorities need to make school leadership a more attractive job and to develop great leaders. The issue is a current focus of Australian politics.

The public and professional debate about the quality of Australian education frequently refers not only to excellence in teaching but also to leadership excellence. Research tends to back the common belief that without a good leader the best teaching will not develop. We should ponder therefore how schools in Australia can gain great leaders.

Both the Australian Government and the governments of States and Territories have recently made education a key area for proposed reforms. In their public debates they have attributed to school leaders – apparently meaning principals – a key role in education.

Making leadership more attractive

Governments in Australia seem to equate “leader” with “principal” in schools, but for most educators principalship is not an attractive position. The leader must play concurrent but disparate – even contradictory – roles as manager, marketer and educational leader. Over the last twenty years while the educational component has remained as important, the demands for marketing and managing – especially for accountability – by the principal have grown considerably. This complexity has reduced the intrinsic satisfaction of the job while also increasing the workload. The result is that authorities find it very difficult to recruit leaders for schools, a situation reported in many countries of the world.

To encourage aspirants to leadership the Australian Government funds programs based on mentoring and coaching strategies, supplemented by some State-funded schemes. Substantial induction programs for newly appointed leaders are becoming more common as a means of support at a testing stage of their careers. In these efforts Australia is following an international trend, but only time will tell whether they make leadership recruitment any easier.

It seems useful to ask how the principal’s job can be made both more intrinsically satisfying and less daunting in its time-demands. Suggestions raised include the notion of splitting the job between a professional administrator and a professional educator. However, the answer may be to share the load even more widely, as in “distributed leadership”.

Distributed leadership and associated issues

Educators world-wide are steadily coming to accept that the most effective leadership does not emanate from a single individual. The concept of “distributed” or “participative” leadership looks to be a common basis of school organisations of the future.

The necessary skills and knowledge therefore will require development programs for teams rather than individuals. How to do this and who should comprise the teams should be a topic for research funded by governments in Australia. One issue is teacher leadership: can a leader of teachers be effective without also teaching students regularly? A long list of associated issues is likely to arise, such as how teachers aspiring to leadership can prepare for teaching adults, as opposed to children or adolescents.

What aspects of leadership in schools can be learnt?

A recent major review of research by the University of Western Sydney [Teaching and Leading for Quality Australian Schools (February 2007)] delineates three intersecting domains of school leadership:

The report gives five aspects essential to an effective educational leader’s role.

The desirable personal qualities (like passion, commitment, desire for equity and social justice) are largely value-based and probably cannot be learned. However the report points to relational and organisational skills which are amenable to training. For example, seven leadership strategies for achieving these aims can be learnt through such active methods as inter-school visits, coaching, mentoring, networking, and reflection. The environment for leading successfully can be structured through four types of organisation.

As governments continue to give school leaders increasing responsibility, reports like this one deserve careful attention as a basis for provision of appropriate professional development.

The copyright of the article School Leadership Development in Educational Issues is owned by Stephen Crabbe. Permission to republish School Leadership Development in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.