Bill Boyle - The Headteacher as Effective Leader

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THE HEADTEACHERAS EFFECTIVE LEADER

To Gerry Clarke, an inspiring headteacher and leader and Trudy Boyle, a follower of Lao-Tse

The Headteacher as Effective Leader

Bill Boyle
Paul Clarke

First published 1998 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Bill Boyle and Paul Clarke 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 97004411

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-34432-7 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-429-43858-5 (ebk)

Contents

Guide

A leader is best When people barely know that he exists, Not so good when people obey and acclaim him, Worst when they despise him ... But of a good leader, who talks little, When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, They will all say, 'We did this ourselves.' Lao-tse

The learning community is 'a place where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together' (Senge, 1990).

How might a headteacher deal with the task of effectively leading a school in times of considerable change? This is an interesting question because many of the tasks that a headteacher does have little to do with change and everything to do with stability. Some of the changes that the headteacher might be expected to carry out are incomprehensible in educational terms, and yet headteachers are expected to lead in these areas. A book that intends to explore the change process through the lens of the headteacher and the leading role that the headteacher might take could be considered overambitious in the current context of school reform. Many innovations derive from outside the school gates and are optimistically expected to be in place in difficult if not impossible, time-scales. It is little wonder that headteachers see themselves as managers more than leaders, and frequently managers of the status quo rather than managers and leaders of a changing organisation.

Leaders are often required to do those things that many people find daunting. Senge (1990) describes a learning organisation using many of those words and images that leaders draw upon to engage and enthuse colleagues into action. The imagery and language used in the quote to describe a learning organisation, however, is perhaps quite different from those metaphors used to describe the current climate of schools. We often hear of the school 'struggling' to accommodate the required reforms, and 'battling' to maintain numbers, and 'scratching around' for resources. Such language says a lot about how our schools operate as organisations, how we go about establishing procedures and making and taking decisions inside this way of thinking.

Such combative terminology is often driven by what is described as 'top-down' management. This approach frequently functions by fragmenting the school into compartments, each of which is then analysed to make sense of its component parts, and delegated to a member of staff to deal with. We hear of line management, of accountability routes and areas of responsibility. These frameworks serve to provide a shape and in turn establish an internal meaning to the school. The meaning is therefore available to staff, and depending upon how well they all adhere to the shape, the system operates.

Were a school to be so simple and so simplistically possible to model and run! In a linear, rational and perhaps people-free world such a management approach would no doubt flourish. But the world that schools occupy is a world of messiness as well as clarity, of profound complexity, of numerous and often contradictory pressures, a world in which teachers still have sole custody of and the requirement to educate and nurture young minds on their future role in society.

Let us for a moment return to Senge's description of the learning organisation. He uses concepts such as expanding capacity, creating results that are desired, nurturing thinking and new ideas, aspiring collectively and learning together. All of these images of an organisation present a quite startling notion of those people who embody the organisation, having the power to make of it what they want.

The ways in which such an organisation is created are not impossible, wish-fulfilling dreams; they are built upon practical, people-centred strategies and processes that centre on:

• how decisions are made,
• how different systems are interlocked,
• how new ideas are facilitated,
• how priorities are established,
• how people understand each other's needs as well as those that they have themselves.

It has been suggested that these practices can be thought of in terms of two basic concepts: the first addresses people and interpersonal relationships, the second concerns that of production and task achievement (Blake and Moulton, 1984). This has recently been further developed to give a more dynamic representation of the role of leader addressing four frames for understanding organisations (Bolman and Deal, 1991):

• structural,
• human resource,
• political,
• and symbolic frames.

In the context of a school, Sergiovanni (1984) notes five leadership forces that explain how the performance of a leader is related to the performance of an excellent school:

• technical leadership - the way things get done,
• human leadership - assisting people to succeed,
• educational leadership - the head 'teacher',
• symbolic leadership - leading by example,
• cultural leadership - creating a climate for success.

Much of the research literature describes these various types of leadership, and advocates them as the routes to be taken for establishing a successful school. However, a limitation of much of the literature is the lack of any clear practical strategies that can facilitate, for example, a successful educational leadership role in school.

Using these concepts in this book, our aim is to be able to provide you with some of the routes that you might wish to explore with colleagues to create just such schools. We will examine each area and facet of the five types with reference to material that has been tried and tested in schools as they come to respond to change.

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