Leading Educators Advisory Board Retreat, New Orleans, February 2013
by Andrea Berkeley, Leadership Development Direct at Teaching Leaders UK and Leading Educators Advisory Board Member
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| Andrea Berkeley |
The big question of the day seems to
be whether our education systems are fit for purpose. Although successive
government reforms in the UK have driven up standards overall in the last 10
years, the gap between the attainment of children from poor and affluent homes
has remained roughly the same, in some areas it has widened, and there is a
long tail of underachievement.
The legacy of the Charter School
movement in the US - KIPP in particular - echoes through the rapid emergence of
new kinds of school organisation in the UK – federations clustered around
‘Teaching Schools’ which, partnered with a university, provide professional
development from initial teacher training to leadership and management across
groups of schools; independent yet state-funded chains of academies and the new
‘Free Schools’.
These systemic changes afford more
opportunities for collaboration and the kind of distributed leadership
essential for building a self-sustaining system, where schools learn from and
support each other. This ideal is easier said than done: for some sceptics the
definition of ‘collaboration’ would seem to be ‘the suppression of mutual
loathing in pursuit of government funding’, when faced with the reality of
forced collaboration or reluctant leadership.
A McKinsey report on education
standards published in the UK two years ago emphasised the importance of school
leadership, citing research demonstrating that the quality of leadership is
second only to classroom teaching in its impact on student achievement. The
same report also published data showing that in-school variation – between
subject departments and between individual teachers – is as big a driver of the
achievement gap as school-to-school variation.
Both the UK and the US have invested
soundly in the development of school leadership in recent years, both as a
strategic management tool and as a means of growing the leadership talent
pipeline. But the focus has been mainly on senior leadership and not on those
teachers who lead on the frontline of delivering improved standards.
The imperative to address the
development needs of ‘first-line leaders’ – those middle ranking teachers who
lead teams of teachers – was raised at an Education Summit held by Leading
Educators US and Teaching Leaders UK in Washington DC in 2009. Little has been
institutionalised in developed countries since then and the concept is almost
virtually unknown in developing nations. Even in the UK and the US there is
still a prevalence of ‘first among equals’ or ‘advocate’ culture rather than
teacher-leaders who are accountable and who hold others to account.
The time for a collaborative,
networked approach that includes support for individual teacher-leaders as well
as advancing systemic change might just be right, as Generation Y, the ‘Me’
Generation is being replaced by the ‘C’ Generation, a psychographic group
emerging on both sides of the Atlantic as highly connected, pluralistic,
multi-cultural, media-savvy digital citizens with shared values and lifestyles.
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