Leading Schools in Times of Change

Leadership of schools in changing times is fraught with opportunities and challenges. Leaders are expected to manage competing interests, to create conditions which form the foundation for lifelong learning, to sustain the motivation and morale of staff and to raise achievement levels of all students. Yet to date, there are few texts which examine how this is done successfully. This book seeks to meet this need. It considers effective leadership and management of schools from the perspectives of headteachers, teachers, students, ancillaries, governors and parents in a variety of reputationally good schools of different phases, locations and size. Through a mixture of participants' accounts and analysis of leadership theory, this highly readable book reveals a number of characteristics of headteachers who are both effective and successful: the centrality of personal values, people-centred leadership and the ability to manage tensions and dilemmas. The authors propose a post-transformational theory that reflects the complexity of leadership behaviour in the twenty-first century, suggesting that reliance upon rational, managerialist theory as the basis for training is inappropriate for the values-led contingency model that represents successful school leadership.