Problems with Leadership in Schools

If you become a manager in an organisation, it is usually because you have carried out your role exceptionally. You are expected to lead by example, having lived out the roles of the individuals that you will now manage.

Management in teaching

Teaching, even more so: you are expected to earn your stripes at every level of the school system in order to then manage the people that come after you.
But we do not train educational leaders in what is meant by effective leadership; we train them in teaching, or a specialism (data, curriculum), but public relations, human resources, financial planning – all of these skill sets are meant to either come naturally or holistically through experience.

Inadequate training in education

Many private-sector positions train their staff at the start of a job as part of the recruitment policy. The process is anticipatory, and staff are skilled for the role that they will undertake in advance of the role itself.
In education, we seem to fill in the gaps as we go along, and not always the right gaps.

Focus in job advertisements

Tom Rees explores the concept of transformational leadership in his article for Ambition First.
- He toys with the language used for leadership advertisements in education and how the focus becomes driving a vision, perhaps more than the reflection and pragmatism that is also required for sustainable change.

Language in job advertisements

Rees highlights that job advertisements for leaders in education place adjectives such as, ‘dynamic’, ‘strong’ and ‘inspirational’ as key skills for credible leadership.
These are all predominantly masculine.
They are also lacking in the micro skill set required to manage people, as opposed to processes.

Core Problem with Leadership: Definition of Leadership

Kat believes many of the questions we have around leadership in schools root back to our diverse definition of what it is to be a leader.

Management vs leadership

Connolly, James and Fertig consider the difference between educational management and leadership.
They believe ‘educational management entails carrying the responsibility for the proper functioning of a system’ as opposed to people.

Challenges of internal promotion

Being new to leadership, particularly when the position is secured internally, brings its own challenges to the dynamics of a school: ‘Teacher leadership introduces new structures of interactions in schools that [make] teacher leaders find themselves continuously juggling between two different agendas of professional interests’ (Struyve, Meredith, Gielen).

Difficulties with hierarchy

Leaders find themselves in a different point of the school hierarchy and have to very rapidly work out how to successfully navigate that.
It may involve leading people that were previously colleagues within the same department, who they will have had an entirely different relationship with before, and some don’t know how to start paving the way to reformat those relationships.

Recruitment & retention crisis

We also cannot ignore that we are in a recruitment and retention crisis. This will inevitably result in poor leadership, where leaders are placed in positions of huge responsibility without either the training, experience or support network to help them voyage through it.

State of poor leadership

It becomes a perpetual state: inexperienced leadership is more likely to result in poor leadership in any place of work.
If we want to look at improving retention in schools, avoiding schools scrabbling around for long-term supply, we must improve our capacity as effective leaders, but also leadership’s ability to build and sustain relationships with staff so that schools keep brilliant teachers.

1Conversation & Connection

1.1Email

1.1.1Physiological Impact of Email

1.1.2Appropriate Use of Email

1.2WhatsApp

1.2.1Damaging Impacts & Advice for WhatsApp

1.3Praise & Thank-Yous

1.3.1Giving Less Praise, Better

2Being Human: Effective Relationships in Schools

2.1Dealing with Colleagues, Roles & Resolution

2.1.1Choose Your Crowd

2.1.2Changing Hats

2.1.3Resolution & Compassion

2.2Creating Professional Safety Nets

2.2.1Create Something to Belong To

2.3Educational Leaders

2.3.1Problems with Leadership in Schools

2.3.2The Qualities of the Most Effective Leaders

2.4Connections in the Classroom: Student Systems

2.4.1Behavioural Systems

Jump to other topics