School Leadership for Public Value (PDF)

School Leadership for Public Value is a timely contribution to the debate about the purpose and structure of schooling in England. It describes how some schools enhance pupil attainment by creating strong alliances with their neighbourhood communities. Those alliances enable the neighbourhood community to help raise the academic attainment of pupils as well as to improve the much wider range of outcomes for children and young people. In turn, the school's resources are deployed sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly to encourage community growth or regeneration. This book claims that schools working like these are writing a 'new story' for education which abandons institutional isolation and recreates powerful and positive relationships between communities and their schools. It is a story of disciplined educational and social innovation, led by headteachers and others with a mixture of passion and pragmatism, determination and ingenuity. It is a narrative which will help leaders from schools, local authorities and third sector services to understand the benefits which increasingly autonomous schools can both derive from and contribute to a strong engagement with local communities. At a time when national policy and financial constraints will tempt some schools into a siege mentality focussed internally and exclusively on classroom craft, this book offers an alternative, broader framework within which both higher attainment and improved well-being can be pursued.