LEADERSHIP


Do I want to be a leader?


Margaret Adams looks at how to decide if you want the


top job, and how to go about getting there


that taking on leadership responsibilities is the best way to develop your career. Other people will disagree strongly with the idea that you should become a leader, and make quite different suggestions. You will be faced with making sense of the


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different views about whether you should take up a leadership opportunity on many occasions during your life as a teacher. Considering your options and your preferences before you are faced with career choices makes a lot of sense. Decide whether, at present, you think you want to become a leader by answering the following questions.


Do I want to lead a school? If you know you want to become a headteacher, than you have already made a decision that will shape your career and your CPD in a very particular way. All your development choices will be geared


towards helping you to be ready to take on whole- school responsibilities. From your earliest years in teaching, you will be looking for cross-school projects to take part in. You will be looking to work in different types of


teams and in different roles to help you to broaden your knowledge of how schools work. You will also be keen to work in a number of different schools to ensure that


However, knowing


that two very different types of leadership exist will help you to


be clear about the sort of leadership role you intend to look for


SecEd • July 1 2010 ’


HIS IS a question you have probably asked yourself more than once. Some people will tell you that


seeking a leadership role is the obvious career move for any teacher who has spent a few years in the classroom. Some people will suggest


you develop a good understanding of the many ways in which schools can be organised and managed. You probably already know that a headteacher


exerts a great deal of influence over a school’s ethos, its values, its culture and its way of working, and that a head’s personal leadership style shapes many aspects of school life. If you intend to become a head, one of your most important development tasks will be to define your own leadership style. This will take time. Yet, when you become a head,


you will need to be confident that you know how you will deal with a range of leadership issues, from the day-to-day curriculum and people management activities, to such tasks as managing conflict, dissent and crises. You will also need to know yourself well enough to understand if your personal style leads you to assume the role chief executive or to be the first among equals in school. If you want to make progress towards headship,


seek out successful headteachers in any school you have access to. Work out why a head succeeds, and consider which of the approaches to leadership you observe you would like to emulate. Use your knowledge to support your development.


What other leadership roles might I consider?


Leadership is a very broad concept and there are lots of approaches that succeed. To help you to make sense of them, think about the sort of authority you want to hold. When you consider the concept of leadership, do


you think in terms of managing people and leading a team? Do you see yourself having formal authority


over people, directing their work and managing their development? If this type of leadership appeals to you, then you are


probably looking for line management responsibility. You could progress to such a role via the academic route or the pastoral route, by becoming a head of department or a head of year. The route you choose is less important than being


certain that your objective is to take responsibility for the delivery of an aspect of your school’s provision. Alternatively, you may prefer the idea of being an


expert in something. That is, you may prefer to become the person your school calls on to answer difficult questions about an area of expertise. If this type of leadership appeals to you, you are


looking for other people to recognise and value your expert status, and to follow your advice because they accept that you know your subject or your discipline. Expert leadership is different from line management


responsibility. You might be your school’s expert in assessment, staff development or in the management of boys’ behaviour, but in this type of role you probably will not have formal authority over other people. That is, you will not be able to insist that things are done in a particular way. You will be the expert advisor who influences the decision-makers. Of course, many leadership roles combine formal


authority and authority of expertise. A good head of department, for example, may be both an expert in terms of subject knowledge and a good leader of people. However, knowing that two very different types of


leadership exist will help you to be clear about the sort of leadership role you intend to look for. This knowledge will also help you to be aware of


the fact that you might need to develop yourself in both areas, if you are to succeed as a leader.


How will I get to be a leader?


The best way of setting out on your journey towards leadership is to be clear about the sort of leadership role you want. Then, think about where the roles you are looking


for exist in school. Find out how the people who currently hold those responsibilities got where they are. Establish what experience and learning – both formal and informal – prepared them for their role and what they had to learn quickly once they took up their responsibilities. Ask them about the sort of experience they think prepared them well for their


Union address: ASCL Retiring thoughts


This summer,Dr John Dunford steps down as


the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. In his final union address, he looks back over 12 years of education policy


LOOKING BACK over 12 years as ASCL general secretary, my main thoughts are of the immense commitment of the school staff who have produced a massive improvement in secondary schools – and of the accompanying political noise that has done its best to divert us from our focus on raising attainment through an unceasing torrent of initiatives. As I have often said in response to the August


results newsfest, any commercial company would be immensely proud of the 22-year record of success that GCSE has been or the high proportion of the student population passing A levels, in comparison with the seven per cent taking that examination when I was at school. Instead we get the usual suspects restating their


outdated views of a world long gone. Quite simply, a 21st century education system needs to produce lots of highly qualified young people ready to change the world with their knowledge and skills honed to the highest possible level. The hierarchical society is dead and buried and, if I have played some small part in that by working in comprehensive schools for all but the first two years of my career in schools, I can draw great satisfaction from that. As general secretary, I meet about 2,000 school


leaders a year and I am in awe of what they achieve. Their job is so much more difficult than when I was


working in school leadership teams from 1974 to 1998. The span of responsibility has grown hugely, with a parallel growth in accountability, and all so much more in the public gaze. Up to 1984, inspection reports on individual


schools were few and far between, and they were not published, but were private to the school and the local authority. Alongside this increase in responsibility and accountability has come – especially in recent years – an increase in vulnerability, with ASCL seeing a marked growth in the number of school leaders facing the sack. The progress made by schools over this period


is now thankfully recognised by the government, in the way in which it uses school leaders to support other schools through schemes such as National Support Schools and the London Challenge. The commitment of school leaders not only to improve their own schools but to help to improve other schools too is simply awesome, matched by the commitment, skill and adaptability of their staff. Meanwhile, schools have been subjected to


countless initiatives. The Department of Bright Ideas has been in sparkling form in its aptly named SanctuaryBuilding. From the focused drive of David Blunkett and his literacy and numeracy initiatives (the success of the latter being declared by David before it had even started!) to the frenzied pre- election activity of EdBalls with his pupil and parent guarantees, school report card and licence to practise, there has nearly always been at least one solution being introduced, usually in search of a problem to solve. Imagine a secondary school with seven heads


in 13 years and frequent changes in the rest of the leadership team, each introducing a wholly new range of policies into the school, as well as continuing to implement those of the former heads. It would be crazy to run a school in this manner – but the reality is that it is the way in which England Education Ltd has run its school system. As a head, my most useful piece of office


furniture was the round green “filing cabinet” on the floor. Use it whenever you can.Good luck to you all.


• Dr John Dunford retires as general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders on August 31. Visit www.ascl.org.uk


current jobs. Ask them also what advice they would offer to someone looking to follow in their footsteps. Armed with that knowledge you will be in a good


position to work out your own leadership development route and to estimate how long it is likely to take you to reach your goal. Your journey will be smoother, if you plan your development. It will also be smoother once you know what sort of leader you want to be.


SecEd


• Margaret Adams is a former teacher and the author of How To Take Charge Of Your Teaching Career (Continuum International Publishing, 2008).


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