Three decades of school effectiveness and school improvement research across the world have shown that leadership matters. As Michael Fullan stated, “Leadership is to this decade what standards were to the 1990s” (2003, p. 16). It's not surprising, then, that in many countries, school leaders have been charged with improving schools and modernizing their school systems.
In England, such thinking prompted the establishment of the National College for School Leadership. The College was founded to provide a single national focus for school leadership development and research, to become a driving force for world-class leadership in our schools, and to promote excellence and innovation in education. Launched in 2000, it was the brainchild of the central government, which currently subsidizes the College to the tune of $150 million annually. The College is housed in a state-of-the-art conference center in Nottingham, England.
At the College, we are committed to an evidence-informed approach to school leadership and leadership development. A key question that guides research is, How do leaders make a difference in the schools they lead? This question stems from Hallinger and Heck's observation (1996) that research should move away from concerns about what leadership is and whether leaders make a difference to studying the pathways by which leaders influence the quality of teaching and student outcomes.
We have also been influenced by Hallinger and Heck's view that school leadership and its effects must extend beyond the principalship and permeate the school community (National College for School Leadership, 2001). We have studied what the experts say about distributed leadership (see Elmore, 2000; Leithwood, Jantzi, & Steinbach, 1999; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 1999) and worked closely with some of them to enhance our understanding of the concept. Indeed, that is one reason why we are a national college for school leadership rather than principalship, which would reflect a narrower perspective.
If the annual expenditure of $150 million seems high, consider the scale of the College's work. We boast a variety of programs designed to meet the needs of all school leaders, irrespective of their contexts and roles; five core programs, with 17,000 participants each year; networked learning communities working with 1,533 schools; and an active Web site (www.ncsl.org.uk) that receives up to 263,000 visits each month. Across England, we serve 23,500 schools, which comprise up to 300,000 school leaders and 8.3 million students.
Responding to the Stages of Leadership
- Leading from the Middle. This program develops distributed leadership and is designed to help middle-level leaders improve their effectiveness, particularly in reference to raising student achievement and creating effective teams. An in-school coach, usually the assistant principal, supports up to four middle leaders from each participating school.
- National Professional Qualification for Headship. All those appointed to headship in English schools are required to have this qualification. Potential headteachers (principals) can take a beginning, an intermediate, or an advanced route, depending on their expertise in relation to the National Standards for Headteachers. The program is rooted in bringing about school improvement.
- Early Headship. Every new headteacher in England receives a grant that he or she can use to construct a personalized leadership development program by selecting from a range of activities in this program.
- Advanced Leadership. This program helps experienced education leaders develop their leadership styles, shows how to establish a peer coaching relationship, and enables educators to visit and learn from schools abroad.
- Consultant Leadership. This program promotes system leadership. Experienced school leaders work as mentors and coaches to support the development of other school leaders.
All our programs are based on blended-learning approaches that are purposefully linked to the participants' schools. This enables school leaders to apply their learning in context and draw on these contexts as they undertake specific program activities. Various evaluation studies that universities have conducted on our behalf indicate that this technique is contributing to school improvement.
The College has also undertaken several strategic initiatives. For example, the Primary School Leadership Program prepares effective school leaders to work with their colleagues in schools whose improvement efforts have stalled or need a boost. Approximately 1,700 trained headteachers are currently supporting 4,000 schools in perhaps the most extensive system leadership initiative in the world.
Lessons Learned
Six years of intensive work by staff and College partners have resulted in a great deal of learning and development. The lessons we have learned represent one part of our intellectual capital.
Lesson 1: The Importance of Context
Successful school leaders are “exquisitely sensitive to the contexts in which they work” (Leithwood et al., 1999). Consequently, leaders rightly demand that development programs address their specific needs and reflect a diversity of education contexts: urban and rural, small and large, underperforming and high-performing, and public and faith-based.
We currently provide differentiated development opportunities. For example, our London Challenge program offers training, development, and support tailored to the specific needs of school leaders in London, with a special focus on those secondary schools facing the greatest challenges. London schools experience a high annual turnover of staff, and teachers are promoted fairly quickly. The London Challenge program provides contextualized development opportunities for relatively inexperienced middle leaders.
We also have a training program for leaders of small schools as well as an internship program for leaders who wish to move into schools in challenging circumstances. Moreover, the leadership development framework differentiates learning at the various stages of a leader's career.
Nevertheless, our next challenge is to provide more customized development opportunities relevant to individual careers and to contexts ranging from rural to inner-city. We have commissioned out a majority of our programs to providers who will tailor the programs to local and regional needs.
Status Quote
Status Quote - A Fine British Blend
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
—Henry Steele Commager
Lesson 2: Leaders as Managers
In the 1980s, management was the key concept in education administration. Today, leadership is the preferred label. However, such a shift in emphasis implies a polarized mind-set. In truth, schools need both good leadership and good management. This is not to say that we should rebadge ourselves as the National College for School Leadership and Management. However, we do need to demonstrate that school management matters and that management training is part and parcel of leadership development.
This means emphasizing not only time management, communications, and performance and project management skills, but also resource and budget management. All schools in England manage their own budgets, which include staff salaries as well as plant and equipment resources. In our largest schools, headteachers and senior staff handle multimillion-pound budgets.
Lesson 3: The Value of Coaching
The College has committed to using an effective blend of learning strategies, such as on-the-job training, face-to-face instruction, off-site training, online learning, school and classroom visits, and a wide variety of problem-based activities.
One element has taken on increasing significance: coaching. Providing leaders with a coach at all stages of their careers and at all levels of leadership learning means more than just offering professional support. It's proven to be a highly effective way of raising student achievement.
Coaching is an integral part of our Leading from the Middle program. A full-time, experienced middle leader or deputy head coaches two or three middle leaders. This practice promotes the concept of peer coaching and helps embed it in the school culture.
Lesson 4: Emphasizing the Practical
Although many school leaders are practical philosophers, they are all practitioners. As such, they are interested in craft knowledge, particularly in what works. Our learning activities focus not only on increasing participants' knowledge of themselves as leaders, but also on constructing professional knowledge.
We explore the significance of education vision in the National Professional Qualification for Headship program. Participants come to understand what motivates and drives them as leaders as they explore their values and beliefs and develop and reflect on their own education vision. Participants also learn techniques for engaging the school community in developing and implementing this vision.
Lesson 5: Keeping Up with Best Practices
Being a National College means staying in touch with what is happening internationally. Knowing about best practice worldwide ensures that the College is always at the leading edge. New knowledge challenges our assumptions, expands our repertoires and strategies, and enables us to benchmark what we are doing. Throughout the life of the College, we have assembled think tanks made up of international figures and thought leaders who offer the latest insights into leadership and leadership development practices around the world.
Lesson 6: Sticking to the Knitting
In our early days as a National College, many individuals and agencies in education approached us to work with them and explore various ideas and activities. As a result, we probably attempted to do too much. Indeed, from what we have discovered about start-up organizations, this is not uncommon. Having recognized this, we now focus much more closely on our core business—school leadership and leadership development. As Peters and Waterman (1982) put it, we're “sticking to the knitting.”
Looking Down the Road
- With 40 percent of senior education leaders reaching retirement age in the next five years, we are facing a demographic time bomb that we must defuse. We need to build leadership capacity in schools, fast-track new leaders, and improve talent management to grow tomorrow's school leaders. We must also address how we can safeguard the craft knowledge, experience, and wisdom of those who are retiring or leaving the field of education. Encouraging veteran educators to serve as tutors, mentors, and coaches is one promising practice.
- As a result of the government's five-year strategy for education, with its emphasis on diversity and school autonomy, new forms of leadership are emerging for various contexts: for example, multi-agency sites (which provide education, health, and social services on campus); federations of schools; and institutions that are open well into the night or, in a few cases, around the clock. The College is looking carefully at these new roles, gathering research and evaluation evidence to help leaders address new leadership development priorities, such as learning how to facilitate the professional development of peers and providing leadership beyond their own schools.
- To build a high-performing school system, we need to encourage effective leaders to work with other schools. On the basis of annual samples and collected data, the Office for Standards in Education, a national organization that regularly inspects all schools, rates 40 percent of our school leaders as “very good” or “excellent.” Think how much better our school system would be if this 40 percent could influence the remaining 60 percent! To this end, the central government has, with our support, introduced “school improvement partners.” A school improvement partner acts as a critical professional friend to a school, helping its leaders evaluate performance, identify priorities for improvement, and plan effective change. Partners look at student outcomes and self-evaluation processes as they offer practical support.
- We need to support leaders in this relentless, complex job charged with a high degree of accountability. We aim to dramatically reduce the isolation of headteachers and increase collaborative support inside and among schools by focusing on mentoring; networking; online opportunities, such as chat rooms; and leadership training.
A New Model
Our school systems are moving away from outdated 20th century models of leadership toward 21st century ones. The National College for School Leadership needs to support leaders through these changes. As a national institution, it should also take the lead in advising policymakers and educators so that together we can make great schools. Our children and our students deserve nothing less.
