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Strengthening The Connections Between Leadership And Learning:

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STRENGTHENING THE
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN
LEADERSHIP AND LEARNING

Examining a decade of research and practice, this book makes the case for a radical
­reappraisal of leadership, learning, and their interrelationship in educational policy.
Discussing whether policy direction is progressively constraining the professional-
ism and initiative of teachers and school leaders, it challenges conventional under-
standing and argues the case for thinking differently about the way to lead learning.
Based on the Leadership for Learning (LfL) Project, the book clarifies, extends,
and refines LfL principles and practices, and their contribution to ameliorating
some of the difficult conditions encountered in the contemporary educational pol-
icy environment. It starts by discussing the direction and influence of current edu-
cation policy and its subsequent consequences; chapters then move on to explore
the framing values informing the LfL Projects, particularly focusing on what they
imply for commitments to social justice, children’s rights and breadth in student
learning, and considering how to create favourable conditions for learning.
Identifying a disconnect between seminal principles and the nature of day-to-
day practice, Strengthening the Connections between Leadership and Learning challenges
school policy and practice at national and local levels. It is an essential read for
postgraduate students, especially those studying leadership in education, as well as
for teachers and policymakers in schools.

John MacBeath is Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge, UK, co-founder

of Leadership for Learning: the Cambridge Network, and Fellow of Hughes Hall.

Neil Dempster is Emeritus Professor at Griffith University and former Dean of

the Griffith University Faculty of Education, Australia.

David Frost was a member of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge,

UK, for 20 years. He was one of the co-founders of Leadership for Learning: the
Cambridge Network and the founder of the HertsCam Network.
Greer Johnson is Director of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research at
Griffith University, Australia, and was previously a member of the Australian team
on the Leadership for Learning Project.

Sue Swaffield teaches and researches in educational leadership and school

improvement at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK. Sue is a
co-founder of Leadership for Learning: the Cambridge Network.
STRENGTHENING
THE CONNECTIONS
BETWEEN LEADERSHIP
AND LEARNING
Challenges to Policy, School and
Classroom Practice

John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, David Frost,

Greer Johnson and Sue Swaffield
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, David Frost, Greer Johnson and
Sue Swaffield
The right of John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, David Frost, Greer Johnson
and Sue Swaffield to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted
by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
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.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-8153-4914-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-8153-4915-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-16532-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
CONTENTS

List of illustrations viii

Acknowledgementsix

Introduction 1

1 The policy challenge 5

Eight policy consequences 6

Productive failure 13
From dutiful compliance to rule breaking 14
The policy dilemma space 15
Conclusion 17
References 19

2 The backdrop to policy reform 21

Global policy trends and the policy dilemma space 21

The global policy backdrop and flirtation with
managerialism 24
Global policy effects in Carpe Vitam Project countries 25
Change without improvement 34
Conclusion 35
References 35
vi Contents

3 Leadership for Learning: An essential narrative

in a challenge to policy 37

Millennium change 37
The Carpe Vitam Leadership for Learning Project 38
Leadership for Learning: Principles for practice 41
A challenge to policy 49
Conclusion 53
References 55

4 Professional integrity 58

Moral purpose 59
Professional integrity 59
Test-driven narrowness versus a broad education 61
The rights of the child, moral purpose, and
professional integrity 63
Social justice dimensions as a further test for
professional integrity in education 67
Testing integrity questions for school leaders
­implementing projects and programs 68
Two illustrative international Leadership
for Learning cases 69
A final word on critical friendship 80
Conclusion 81
References 83

5 Leadership as practice 87

Towards understanding leadership as practice 88

The leader-practitioner 90
Leadership as a set of practices 90
Summary 95
Leadership in the flow of practice 96
Summary 97
Vignette 1 98
Vignette 2 101
Conclusion 105
References 106
 Contents vii

6 Thinking differently about learning and teaching 109

Case study: The Learning School 112

What we have learnt 114
Modes of knowing and being 118
Storyline: Telling and creating stories 127
Conclusion 130
References 131

7 Enhancing teacher professionality 133

Teacher quality, effectiveness, and standards 133

Professionalism, professionality, and professional identity 135
What counts as knowledge 136
The Leadership for Learning alternative 136
Case 1: The Teacher Leader Fellowship
in Florida 138
Case 2: The HertsCam Network approach
to teacher leadership 141
Individual and collective agency in enhancing professionalism 147
Conclusion 148
References 149

8 Challenging policy, school, and classroom practice 154

What we have argued in this book 156

The four fields of endeavour – key points 159
Continuing the struggle 163
Inherited intelligence or hard work? 165
Autonomy and the dark side 166
The inertia of change 168
Conclusion 169
References 170

Index173
ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
3.1 Leadership for Learning and its principles 42
4.1 The PALLIC Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint 76
7.1 The theory of non-positional teacher leadership 143
8.1 A platform for challenges to policy, school,
and classroom practice 157

Tables
4.1 A test of integrity for the PALLIC Program 78
5.1 Comparison of different practice perspectives of leadership 89
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The ideas in this book owe much to the Cambridge University-led Carpe Vitam
Leadership for Learning Project which ran from 2002 to 2006. Planning for the
sharing of tasks to complete a co-authored work a decade later, with authors
from Australia and the United Kingdom, required support from the Cambridge
Leadership for Learning Network and the Griffith Institute for Educational
Research (GIER). Both agencies provided tangible assistance for initial face-to-face
and ongoing internet meetings to enable the project to proceed. Our appreciation
of these efforts is warmly acknowledged. In addition, we are grateful to Elizabeth
Stevens, a GIER Senior Research Assistant, for her editorial and proofing expertise
in helping to finalise the manuscript for publication. Her work, as always, brings
discipline to texts where multiple authors have been involved and for this we thank
her sincerely.
John MacBeath
Neil Dempster
David Frost
Greer Johnson
Sue Swaffield
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

This book is the result of more than a decade’s work on trying to better understand
the connections between leadership and learning. The starting point for the invest-
ment of a great amount of research time and effort in this task was the Cambridge
University-led Carpe Vitam Leadership for Learning (LfL) Project about which
more is said in the eight chapters which follow. What we found from the original
project has been confirmed, complemented, extended, and applied through supple-
mentary research and development activity in different international contexts. This
has given us the confidence to locate our understanding of LfL as the centrepiece of
a composite agenda which, as a combination, may help our profession to challenge
positions taken in contemporary educational policy which we believe pose prob-
lems for leaders, teachers, and learners – hence, the subtitle of the book, Challenges
to policy, school, and classroom practice.
We begin in Chapter 1 (“The policy challenge”) with a discussion of the direc-
tion and influence of education policy with a particular focus on the last decade.
Referring to eight salient policy agendas which are international in their reach, we
argue that these need to be subject to rigorous critique and challenge. Paradoxically,
as competitive globalised policy continues to narrow the curriculum and diminish
the discretion of teachers, policies on institutional autonomy increase the control
and authority of the individual headteacher or principal. This has the effect of
widening the “power distance” between senior leaders and their staff, intensifying
accountability pressure so that conformity and compliance become the default
positions for teachers. Quoting Michael Fullan, these are described as the “wrong
policy drivers”, creating conditions detrimental to learning and to student interests
while innovation and change in pedagogy become increasingly constricted. The
chapter concludes that such critiques should not be treated as reactive disagree-
ment but rather acknowledged as an architecture built on the solid foundations of
critical dissent.
2 Introduction

In Chapter 2 (“The backdrop to policy reform”), we follow on from the policy

consequences and issues raised in the preceding chapter, to examine the nature of
“dilemma space”, contrasting a cooperative commitment to educational principles
on the one hand, with competitive service provision, on the other. The impact of
New Public Management, New Public Governance, and the politics of “earned
autonomy” are examined with reference to Australia, Norway and Sweden, England,
and New Zealand.The rationale for the adoption of school self-management is dis-
cussed with implications for the changing priorities of governments, local authori-
ties, and schools in a competitive international policy environment. The themes
at the heart of the book, running as a continuous thread through it, focus on the
implications for “leadership”, how to hold on to key principles while taking up the
challenge to policymaking.The chapter shows that in a climate intolerant of dissent
or opposition to authority, it becomes all the more imperative to foster a culture
in which leadership at every level within a system is able to engage in constructive,
civilised, but semi-permanent disagreement when learning is affected.
Chapter 3 (“Leadership for learning”) gives us the opportunity to present a
“practical theory”, a “master key” which opens up a rich source of intelligence and
a narrative with which to challenge policy, school, and classroom practice. When
the term Leadership for Learning (LfL) was first coined in Cambridge in 2000,
it brought a freshness and originality to the leadership discourse and prompted a
number of international studies, exploring how we come to understand the con-
nections between leadership and learning in different country contexts. In the two
decades that have followed, the terminology has been widely employed but not
always with the meanings and intent of its original conception. Adopting the LfL
descriptor required, and still requires, a critical revisiting of what is widely under-
stood as “leadership”, what is commonly viewed as “learning”, and how the con-
nective “for” is critical in bringing these two big ideas together. That sometimes
contentious preposition opens up a plethora of questions as to how learning is pro-
moted, embedded, and reviewed in policy and practice. The five informing prin-
ciples of the LfL framework are revisited, showing that they are integrally related
and, when taken together, offer a practical theory which provides a platform for
constructive challenges to policy.
The discussion in Chapter 4 (“Professional integrity”) picks up and expands on
the framing values informing the Leadership for Learning (LfL) projects discussed
in Chapter 3, examining what these imply for commitments to social justice, chil-
dren’s rights, breadth in student learning, and the democratic principle of parity
of participation. These are identified as integrally important for everyone engaged
in the educational enterprise and as essential components of a modern profession
concerned to uphold its integrity. Case studies drawn from Australia and Ghana
are described, helping to unpick the complex skein of economic, political, and
cultural influences on the exercise of professional integrity. How school leaders and
teachers, with a commitment to professional integrity, are able to “swim upstream”
against the tide of prevailing policy is illustrated from a LfL stance.The chapter con-
cludes with a series of questions which challenge the professional integrity of school
 Introduction 3

leaders and teachers themselves, before suggesting how individuals, c­ ollectives, and
the profession at large can take the challenge up to politicians and policymakers.
This is of critical importance when reform mandates run counter to staunchly held
professional positions.
Chapter 5 (“Leadership as practice”) brings leadership as activity or practice
into the foreground. It is reaffirmed as one of the five essential leadership for learn-
ing (LfL) principles. This is particularly relevant as a counter to the strength of the
prevailing rhetoric on “heroic” leadership. In other words, the implementation of
leadership as practice challenges individualistic positional approaches which occupy
a pervasive presence in system and school hierarchies. The focus of the chapter is
on an alternative view in which leadership is enacted in practice, bringing peo-
ple together in collaborative dialogue. At the centre of leadership as practice is
the spontaneous pursuit of professional learning and pedagogical activity, focused
primarily on student needs. Drawing on Simpson’s (2016) analysis of the work of
Dewey and Bentley (1949) on self-action, inter-action, and trans-action, the discus-
sion examines human agency using Simpson’s three leadership perspectives – the
leader-practitioner, leadership as a set of practices often distributed, and leadership in the
flow of practice. While all three are evident in education systems, when a leadership
for learning stance is apparent, the latter two categories come into prominence,
encouraging open dialogue and increasingly frequent extemporaneous agency.
In Chapter 6 (“Thinking differently about learning and teaching”) we begin
with the questions “Why do we need to think differently about learning and teach-
ing? To what extent is it possible to think in new ways about leadership, about
learning and about the interrelationship of the two?” Discussing the second Carpe
Vitam principle – creating favourable conditions for learning – it is argued that the pro-
cess of learning is hugely susceptible to the environment in which it takes place.
From womb to classroom, evidence shows the powerful in-built capacity of human
beings to adapt to the constraining forces that shape their mental models of the
world. These include perceptions of relationships, of authority, of ourselves, our
capacities and hopes. The necessary complement to David Perkins’s characterisa-
tion of “learning in captivity” is “teaching in captivity” – teachers and taught bound
together by convention, curriculum, and “deliverology”. These insights carry far-
reaching implications with regard to language, the “labels” and the categories we
draw on to describe and differentiate students and the forms of assessment that we
rely on to make categorical judgements. Case studies of innovative approaches to
learning in the wild demonstrate a range of possibilities for thinking, and acting,
differently. In Robert Mackenzie’s (1965) Escape from the Classroom, the descrip-
tion of his pupils’ physical release from the constraints of the timetable was more
an escape from the conventions of the mind than from the rigours of routine. His
was not a de-schooling agenda but a way of expanding physical and intellectual
parameters so that return to the classroom was always invested with new insights
and new ways of seeing (as we advocated in Chapter 3). Dialogue comes into its
own here as an influential and authoritative strategy connecting people collegially
across institutional boundaries and without deference to hierarchies.
4 Introduction

In Chapter 7 (“Enhancing professionality”) we argue that nothing will provide

a better basis for a challenge to policy than an informed, confident, and capable
profession prepared to stand up for leadership for learning (LfL) values and the pro-
fessional integrity so necessary in enabling them to be realised. What is the warrant
for this claim? What does LfL research and practice tell us about the positive actions
that enable the profession to reassert its integrity and commitment to learning for
all? What does it take to enhance professionality? From a discussion of the early
work of Eraut (1994) calling for professionals to extend their repertoires, self-mon-
itor, and reflect on practice, we bring into sharper focus the contested relationship
between personal agency and policy-led professional development. Given the dom-
inance of policy restrictions on learning, what latitude remains for the expression
of personal and professional agency, both individual and conjoint? The answers lie
in teacher-led co-constructed professional knowledge, evidence-based “disciplined
dialogue”, networking, and exploring alternatives which challenge political ortho-
doxy. With reference to two case studies, this chapter explores and problematises
the relationship between professional development and policy mandate, between
individual and shared action for change as the route to enhanced professionality.
We commence Chapter 8 (“Challenging policy, school, and classroom prac-
tice”) with the notion of “repurposing”, finding a new purpose for practices or
ideas that have outlived their usefulness or relevance.The starting point is an under-
standing of the systemic constraints which bind school leaders and teachers to legis-
lated and legitimated practice.This requires a close reading of any policy document
with a definitive pause, to stop and consider the language, the choice of words,
phrases and metaphors infused with cultural assumptions, views, values, and ideolo-
gies. Without a serious challenge to the rhetoric, it is argued, the ideologies that
drive policy into practice soon become too commonplace, too invisible. This can
be countered, however, by maintaining an unshakeable focus on professional integ-
rity, seeing leadership as practice, thinking differently about learning and teaching,
and continuing to work on the issues that enhance professionality. This is what we
understand as “connoisseurship”, a high-level and complex skill equipping us to
challenge policy because it stems from a deep understanding of the way a student
learns and the way that learning changes over time. A grasp of the complex, devel-
opmental nature of learning, leads inexorably to a revisiting and transforming of
teachers’ own practice. This is the basis for professional advocacy at its best but at
the same time, it enables leaders and teachers to understand and embrace “critical
dissent” and challenge counterproductive policies.
1
THE POLICY CHALLENGE

Where would we be without policy? We can, perhaps, recall a golden age when
teachers didn’t have to worry about policy.Teachers taught and children learnt; “It’s
as simple as that”, as a previous chief inspector in England once wrote. Since that
putative golden age, we have, fortunately, come to understand that this is a more
complex and contested equation. We have benefited incalculably from social, psy-
chological, and pedagogical research. It has, to both our benefit and cost, given us
a deeper understanding of the complex and contradictory nature of what Perkins,
Tishman, Ritchart, Donis, and Andrade (2000) term “learning in the wild” and
“learning in captivity”. We have come to understand learning as deeply “nested”
within a policy environment in which the relationship between an individual
and his or her learning is contained by the classroom context and constrained
by the school context which is, in turn, nested within education authority and
national policies.
It is all too easy to fall into the familiar language in which policies are couched
and which refers almost reflexively to school leaders as the principal actors, and
so the term principal is widely used in North America, Australasia, Singapore, and
Hong Kong, for example. In countries where English is not the first language –
in Europe for example – the French proviseur is the provider; preside in Italian,
the one who presides. In the United Kingdom, the term headteacher carries differ-
ent connotations again – the master pedagogue who, in many circumstances, still
continues to teach. While headmaster and headmistress have travelled widely beyond
the United Kingdom these terms tend to be found now mainly in private schools.
These may be referred to in the United States as administrators but a visitor to the
United Kingdom who asked to meet an administrator would be guided to one of
the office staff.
From the 1970s onwards, the language of management and managers was becom-
ing widely adopted, giving rise to a whole new literature and lexicon as illustrated
6 The policy challenge

by recent publications such as Keating and Moorcroft’s Managing the Business of

Schools (2007), the emphasis on managing giving rise to “performance manage-
ment”. Imported from the business sector, this idea has been defined as managing
the relationship between the implementation of long-term strategic and short-
term operational goals so that they are in keeping with requirements placed on
employees’ performance.
In Gerald Grace’s classic 1995 text Beyond Education Management, he challenged
the language and ideology of management and the rise and rise of management
studies. He writes, “the language, assumptions and ideology of management has
begun to dominate the language, consciousness and action of many of those
working within the education sector” (p. 5). The issue at stake in this “Alice in
Linguisticsland” is whether language is, or is not, worth making a fuss over. There
are powerful arguments which illustrate the extent to which our perceptions, prac-
tices, and ways of understanding the world are shaped by the terminologies to
which we have recourse. Recent developments in the appointment of school man-
agers as a complement to headteachers may help to resolve some of the inherent
tensions. Indeed, it is likely that language tensions were contested in a London
school by the headteacher who changed the sign on her office door from head-
teacher to head learner.
If we are to suggest new ways of leading learning we have to recognise the
power of language and an embedded discourse of leading, positional authority, and
the nature of followership. We have to start with a more sophisticated understand-
ing of the policy–practice relationship and the nature of the “force field” which
may promote, but may also inhibit, a more radical agenda. In what follows, we
describe eight salient consequences of policy agendas which have had, and continue
to have, a powerful influence on schools and classrooms and, for that very reason,
need to be subject to rigorous critique and challenge.

Eight policy consequences

1 The seductive power of managerialism
Managerialism may be described as seductive because it has an easy appeal with
its endorsement of efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. Who could argue
against the need for a more stringent approach to an education system that has, for
too many children, been ineffective, that has too often fallen short in its steward-
ship of public money, and failed in its accountability to parents and their children?
This seductive argument has it that schools, and the organisations in which they
are embedded, need to be more tightly managed, more transparent, and thus more
easily held to account by their “stakeholders”. Accountability is tied to indicators or
measures of performance in the classroom, the board room, the senior management,
and in the local education authority.
It is argued that the effectiveness of this approach is that it may be evalu-
ated through a focus on outputs. A business that makes profits is self-evidently
 The policy challenge 7

more efficient than one that does not, or one that persists despite continued and
­obstinate losses. So, with the requisite tools and measures, it becomes easier to
identify those schools that succeed and those that fail, those that add value or fail
to add value. Unarguably, with evidence of schools that are selling children short,
it follows that there needs to be more stringent accountability, incentive, and per-
formance affirmation.
While leaders and managers clearly need to be held to account, and as it may be
the performance of their employees who are compromising the efficiency of the
school, this magnifies the argument for a more stringent regime of target setting
and benchmarking. Acknowledging that some of the blame may lie with parents, a
tighter set of contractual arrangements and sanctions then needs to be put in place,
including legal sanctions for absence and, in England for example, the prohibition
on parents taking children for holidays during school time.
These measures may be described as seductive because they are hard to oppose.
Who could argue against transparency and accountability? Who could dispute the
need for measures or “indicators” of how well schools are performing? The ques-
tions that need to be asked, however, are:

•• Accountability for what? And how is that accountability made transparent?

How may it be contested and open to dialogue?
•• What is measured, by whom, and in what way? And how do we guarantee the
value of what is measured and the means by which practice is then affected?
•• How do we disentangle the school effect from that of communities, social
agencies, private tutoring, tuition centres and, most importantly, the social and
educational capital residing in nuclear and extended families?
•• How and where can we begin to undo or unravel the tightly woven skein of
top-down strictures and accountabilities?

2 Control versus autonomy – successful and

failing schools – reputational damage
The notion of “successful” and “failing” schools is now so embedded in common
discourse that the rhetoric has become almost impossible to contest or reframe.
The more the latitude for parental choice, the greater the patronage of success-
ful schools and the less the attraction of so-called failing schools. The correlation
between the social mix and parental choice is now so well established in so many
different countries that policy initiatives have rarely been able to tackle the essential
dilemma. Redrawing zoning and school catchment and other forms of social and
demographic engineering have been attempted in order to mitigate the reputa-
tional effect. The policy of bussing in the United States (which has been in place
since the 1960s), like so many other equalisation policies, is now widely regarded as
a well-intentioned failure. While the adoption of community schools has enjoyed
mixed success, the attendant problem is that as schools become microcosms of their
local communities they are seen as bringing with them deprivations in language,
8 The policy challenge

motivation, learning difficulties, disaffection, violence, and challenges in home work

and home study. Assisted places schemes which operate in some countries, giving
some children entry to elite schools, further deprive low-status schools of social
and educational capital. These are all compounding factors which are reflected in
schools in which low attainment brings with it sanctions in different forms (e.g., in
some countries such as New Zealand, report cards which urge schools and school
leaders to “do better”; in England and Wales, schools categorised as in need of
“special measures”).
The issues are so historic, so systemic, and so international in character that it
is difficult to conceive of solutions. Rather than seeing these issues as a counsel of
despair, however, the educational community needs to engage strategically, with
new partnerships and in new ways of thinking which do not simply re-tread famil-
iar and tired programs.

3 The resilience of positional power and hierarchy in schools

Schools tend to be hierarchical places.That they could be otherwise seems unthink-
able. The assumption tends to be that adults know more than children and some
adults know more than others, while some professionals are not only better at
teaching but also better at managing. It is further assumed that schools also need
to be led and managed by those with high levels of expertise and insight. Position
brings with it discretionary and institutional power so that on occasions when hard
and uncomfortable decisions have to be made, teachers have to be reminded, as one
headteacher put it, that “this is not a democracy”. A common feature of schools
across the globe is a three- or four-fold power structure with government, some
form of local authority (perhaps regional plus district offices), and the front-end
“delivery” system – schools. Each layer of the system is upwardly accountable and
commonly held in place by some form of inspection or review.
The only escape from this policy and political hierarchy appears to be through
private organisations, sanctioned in most countries by way of foundations, dissent-
ing bodies, parental fees, and conditional government measures. At best, these pri-
vatised bodies loosen some of the hierarchical ties, allowing greater opportunity for
teachers and young people to enjoy greater influence and decision-making power.
The most radical alternatives, “free” schools, collectives (e.g., multi-academy trusts),
and learning communities have almost everywhere enjoyed a brief life span. Places
where democratic schools have been incorporated within the mainstream (Deans
Centre and Wester Hailes in Scotland, Countesthorpe and Risinghill in England,
for example) have all had to modify their ambitions and been progressively brought
back into a more conforming mould by successive governments.
“Power distance” between highest and lowest levels of the educational hierarchy
is one of the yardsticks used by Geert Hofstede (1983) in his comparative studies
of schools internationally. While in some cultures the differential has been decreas-
ing under the influence of international intelligence, in other historically more
democratic countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (e.g., Abrahams &
 The policy challenge 9

Aas, 2016; Møller, 1999) the differential is now increasing as the decision-making
independence of pupils, teachers, and heads has been curtailed.
Happily, there are headteachers and teachers resilient and professionally com-
mitted enough to work around the hierarchy, to diminish positional power, and to
develop a strong internal accountability which increases individual and collective
initiative. This requires an ability and willingness to “swim upstream” against the
current which is constantly pushing for stronger individual leadership.

4 The pressure for stronger individual leadership

There is a common understanding of leadership as something practised by indi-
viduals, often heroic people. Historically, they have rescued their countries from
tyranny, freed the oppressed, built new empires, and pioneered emergent democ-
racies. There is a general acknowledgement that we owe a debt to those leaders
because we couldn’t have done it ourselves and without their heroism our lives
would be very different.
Leaders are expected to be strong while weak leaders are deplored. We live
virtually daily with that dichotomy in politics, business, and education. We rely
on our elected, or self-elected, leaders to act fairly and in our interests, to tackle
discrimination, inequality, and oppression, and to make our worlds better, more
congenial places. At the same time under these conditions, we allow ourselves to be
disempowered individually and collectively.
It is not only educational governance that favours strong heads and principals.
Teachers have often suffered under weak headteachers and wished for tougher, less
compromising leadership. Ambiguity, vacillation, and inconsistency simply make
teachers’ lives harder and the uncertain space is easily exploited by children and
young people.There also may come a time, however, when teachers begin to regret
what they wished for.They discover that the loss of leeway for pupils’ behaviour has
suddenly applied to them too.
At the root of this dilemma is what we understand as “strong”. It is hard to see
it as anything other than an individual quality and residing in a repertoire of indi-
vidual behaviours. The problem is that when we settle for a quieter, less conflicted
life, the very purpose of education itself becomes distorted. Where there is conflict
we seek solutions in adult intervention, in appeal to hierarchy and institutional
authority, rather than seeking more enduring approaches amongst ourselves.
To what extent do “successful schools” owe their apparent success to power-
ful headteachers who stamp their imprint on the school, in some cases perhaps
reluctantly, driven by the external competitive climate by virtue of which their
reputation is judged? In England, a research team led by Cambridge’s Mary James
published a case study of the most improved school in England. The success of
the school was owed to its uncompromising headteacher who was not hesitant in
claiming ownership of policy and strategy and confessed to his personal addiction –
“control freakery”. He is quoted as saying, “This policy has got a lot of me in it.
It’s largely me”, and “that wasn’t from the staff. That was from myself.” Nor was the
10 The policy challenge

pressure disguised as collegiality or support: “It was quite brutal. It was tough. It was
me.” And the hand of steel in the velvet glove: “I think teachers have got to feel that
they’re making decisions but what I suppose I’m forcing them to do is make those
decisions.” Words like “tough”, “brutal”, and “forcing” are expressions of what is
widely referred to as strong leadership, raising the stakes, creating followership, will-
ing or otherwise. Peter Wilby, writing in The Guardian newspaper in 2008, captured
the essence of a larger-than-life personality whose school was created in his image.

You can imagine Sir Alan Steer, bearded, ample of figure, jolly in demeanour
(what he says is frequently drowned out by gales of laughter), as an old-
fashioned pub landlord, making convivial conversation over the bar as he
pulls the pints. You can imagine, too, a flash of steel as he ejects from the
premises an over-inebriated and troublesome customer. You could, I think,
have a very good time in Steer’s pub as long as you obeyed the rules.
(Wilby, 2008)

A telling measure of this kind of uncompromising autocratic regime is for young

people in their first year of university to return to the school to complain of the
inhibiting legacy of unquestioning compliance with authority which had robbed
them of initiative and ability to think for themselves.

5 Intolerance of dissent and challenge

What is it about our educational institutions from preschool to university that, in
theory, encourages a liberal tradition of dialogue and dissent, yet sees these precepts
rarely honoured in practice? The theory/practice divide has been stubborn and
resilient. While there are liberal schools and universities which encourage inde-
pendence of thought, more typically, children and young people experience an
orthodoxy which is not open to question, reinforced by tests and exams and a
commitment to right answers.
While universities, or university staff, are not always welcoming of dissenting
options, when they do invite challenge from undergraduates they find that many
young people lack the ability to inquire and critique, as described in the school
mentioned above, lauded as the most improved secondary school in England.
However, the ability to challenge what the great philosopher and educational
thinker, Alfred North Whitehead (1929), termed “inert ideas” and to nurture a
climate in which conflict is discussed, understood, and positively addressed, sees
conflict itself become a subject of study.

When young people are able to identify the elements of conflict, and with
a developing self-awareness, gain both the competence and confidence to
de-escalate, and so resolve conflicted situations, the liberal tradition referred
to above will be actualised. These skills of critique and dissent progressively
become valuable internal resources and capabilities which in turn enhance
 The policy challenge 11

young people’s ability to manage conflict successfully in differing contexts.

They then have access to a wider range of choices, which in turn leads to
better decision-making and more positive outcomes in their lives.
(MacBeath, 2016, p. 50)

Described as “an asset-based approach”, this not only provides a different and
­powerful set of principles for working with young people but can help to shape a
different mindset among school staff.

6 The deprofessionalising effects of policy and

practice on leaders and teachers
So powerful and so seductive are the accolades which fall to successful schools, and
by association to successful leaders, that the essential purposes of what it means to
lead are soon forgotten. Teachers may enjoy some of the prestige that comes with
national and inspectorial recognition, yet cannot easily put aside the compromises
that come with endorsement by authorities whose legitimacy teachers had previ-
ously questioned. At the heart of this issue is the extent to which the essential tenets
of professional integrity may be bartered for what Willard Waller once described as
“cheap praise” (1932).
Writing in The Guardian in 2010, Robin Alexander pointed out the extent to
which the compliance culture in England had impacted on schools and on teachers’
professional lives. He questioned the way governments, since the 1990s, had chosen
to tackle the task of raising primary school standards by using high-stakes tests,
league tables, prescriptive national teaching strategies, procedures for inspection,
initial teacher training, continuous professional development, and “school improve-
ment”, all requiring strict compliance with official accounts of what primary
education is about and how it should be undertaken. At the same time, teachers
professed to being “fed up with interference, mindless paper work, lurches in policy,
and daily announcements of gimmicky initiatives” (cited in MacBeath, 2010, p. 37).
Perhaps the most frequent and disturbing comment voiced by teachers at dis-
semination events, Alexander wrote, was this: “We’re impressed by the Cambridge
Review’s evidence.We like the ideas.We want to take them forward. But we daren’t
do so without permission from our Ofsted inspectors and local authority school
improvement partners” (Alexander, 2010, para 8).
Just as rewards and sanctions are used by teachers to “discipline” students, these
same measures are writ large in the disciplining of teachers. The reprofessionalising
of teachers would require, first, a reminder of the key elements of professionalism,
together with a recognition of the force field that either inhibits or promotes disci-
plined inquiry together with liberated, and liberating, pedagogy.
Over three decades ago, Eric Hoyle (1974) described professionalism as
lying on a spectrum from restricted to extended. At the more restricted end,
the teacher is essentially reliant on experience and intuition, guided by a nar-
row, classroom-based perspective, valuing that which is related to the day-to-day
12 The policy challenge

practicalities of teaching. At the other end of the continuum, in the model of

extended ­professionality, there is a much wider vision of what education involves,
valuing the theory underpinning pedagogy and the adoption of a generally intel-
lectual and rationally based approach to the job. Enhancing Hoyle’s definition,
Linda Evans (2008) casts this in the plural rather than the singular as an amalgam
of multiple “professionalities”.
If teachers and senior school leaders have allowed themselves to be deprofession-
alised, what does it tell us about the potency of national and international agencies?
What does it tell us about the power, focus, impact, and leadership of teacher unions
and professional bodies? What have we learnt from resistance and strong principled
practice that can offer a counterweight to sometimes ill-informed, but always pow-
erful, orthodoxy? Can we possibly believe what is held to be orthodox? In other
words, is it true what they say about Dixie?

7 The accountability imperative

To whom do schools owe their primary accountability? Each of the six preceding
policy imperatives places schools within a hierarchical self-reinforcing set of pres-
sures, in what has been described as a “vertical”, and deprofessionalising, accountabil-
ity. Teachers’ primary accountability is owed to their departmental heads, measured
by internal (subject or interdepartmental) competitiveness, and at school level,
with other comparable (or very often non-comparable) institutions. There are no
equivalent league tables for the quality of collaboration between home and school.
There are no equivalent league tables for provision and impact on communities and
community life. These would require a more sophisticated form of measurement,
providing a gauge of horizontal accountability. The Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2017) suggests the following contrast:

Vertical accountability is top-down and hierarchical. It enforces compli-

ance with laws and regulation and/or holds schools accountable for the
quality of education they provide. Horizontal accountability presupposes
non-hierarchical relationships. It is directed at how schools and teachers
conduct their profession and/or how schools and teachers provide multiple
stakeholders with insight into their educational processes, decision making,
implementation and results.
(p. 74)

Taking the argument further, multiple horizontal school accountability widens the
focus, “involving students, parents, communities and other stakeholders in formu-
lating strategies, decision making and evaluation” (p. 74).
It raises the question as to whether, and how, school leaders and teachers,
ensnared in the vertical accountability web, are able or enabled to step back from
the tyranny of the urgent to embrace a collegial moral form of horizontal steward-
ship to those to whom they owe the most. But what is the likely consequence?
 The policy challenge 13

8 The “rocks” and “whirlpools” dilemma

“The winds of other people’s demands have driven us on to a reef of frustration”,
wrote Charles Hummel in 1994 describing the “tyranny of the urgent”. Steve
Covey (1988) adapted this, devising a simple four-dimensional grid which senior
leaders and teachers could use as a practical decision-making tool to categorise the
important and urgent (critical), the important but not urgent (quality), the urgent
but not important (deception), and the neither important nor urgent (waste). In
their view, more than half of all demands on senior leaders fell into the deception
category of urgent but not important.
Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (1993) contrast what they term rock val-
ues and whirlpool values, the former placing emphasis on consistency, transpar-
ency, reliability, and comparison of performance, while the whirlpool values they
describe as choice, diversity, dynamism, spontaneity, and autonomy. There are, they
suggest, inevitable tensions between certainty and uncertainty, between individual-
ity and collectivity. The easy compromise in a punitive policy climate is to take the
line of least resistance, suppressing the tensions without addressing them.
Sustaining the whirlpool values requires a developmental approach, one which is
not impatient for immediate answers, is not afraid of challenge, and treats “failures”
as learning opportunities.

Productive failure
In Kapur’s recent study in Singapore (2015), he draws attention to “productive fail-
ure”, comparing this to “unproductive success”, echoing Hampden-Turner and
Trompenaars’s (1993) findings that wrong answers stimulate greater cognitive activity
than simply getting the answer right first time. In a 2017 paper, Zhao argues that since
educational research tends to focus only on proving the effectiveness of practices and
policies in pursuit of “what works”, it has generally ignored the potential harms that can
result. He writes, “damages caused by education may take a long time to be observed
or felt. ... It is thus rather difficult to study or find out about education’s side effects”
(pp. 3–4). Comparing medical research in which adverse effects of intervention lead
to withdrawal of the drug and then further trialling and development, Zhao remarks:

It is extremely rare to find a study that evaluates both the effectiveness and
adverse effects of a product, teaching method, or policy in education. I have
not yet found an educational product that comes with a warning label car-
rying information such as “this program works in raising your students’ test
scores in reading, but may make them hate reading forever”.
(p. 3)

Zhao illustrates this claim with some of the difficulties accompanying the United
States No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, such as widespread cheating before
and during tests. Dishonest practices involved disturbing numbers of principals
14 The policy challenge

and teachers, for example, in manipulating test rolls, authorising unapproved test
­preparation, and misrepresenting results (p. 57). Clearly, these matters compromise
the ethical behaviour of leaders and teachers.
Added to these practices, Zhao (2017, p. 12) argues, is the very serious and ero-
sive effect of high-stakes testing on the health of the overall school curriculum.The
narrowing of the general curriculum to a set of learning experiences dominated
by test preparation is of grave concern. When it is known that a broad education
leading to wide general knowledge is a critical factor in the learning of the young,
any policy which consciously or unconsciously interferes with this provision must
be challenged. This is particularly important in disadvantaged school communities
where learning breadth adds immeasurably to student growth and the satisfactions
both teachers and students feel as they teach and learn.
Yet, all “these damages” of a narrowing curriculum and high-stakes testing came
during the NCLB policy period without much benefit, writes Zhao (2017). “The
negative effects of educational products, when occasionally discovered, are not con-
sidered an inherent quality of the product or policy. Rather, they are often treated
as unintended or unanticipated consequences or results of poor implementation”
(p. 13). The fact that Campbell (1982) had much earlier highlighted difficulties
attending the kind of quantitative indicators endemic in high-stakes testing remains
instructive. Campbell’s Law, as it is now referred to colloquially, states: “The more
any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject
it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt
the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Zhao (2017) goes on to show that nowhere is the quantitative dominance
of educational policy so evident than in international assessment programs such
as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). He laments the influ-
ence that results from these tests have had on nation states’ education policies and
their debilitating effects on students’ confidence and attitudes to learning. At the
same time, he acknowledges that many countries participating in these tests (e.g.,
Korea, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Viet Nam, Shanghai-China, and Hong Kong-
China) have dramatically improved their test scores. In his own words: “It means
that these systems have somehow made a large number of students lose confidence
and interest in math, science, and reading, while helping them achieve excellence
in testing” (Zhao, 2017, p. 10).
Therefore, it is not unreasonable to hypothesise that these educational systems
may be effective in preparing students to achieve excellent scores AND effective in
lowering their confidence and interest. They help with improving test scores but
hinder the development of confidence and interest.

From dutiful compliance to rule breaking

Without a grasp of the eight deeply embedded and interlocking challenges
described above, and without a willingness to confront them, teachers, teacher
 The policy challenge 15

organisations, and senior leaders will continue to sell young people short. A study
of school leadership in Scotland (MacBeath et al., 2009) identified five forms of
response by senior leaders to external authority and policy mandate. These were
characterised as:

•• dutiful compliance;
•• cautious pragmatism;
•• quiet self-confidence;
•• bullish self-assertion; and
•• defiant risk-taking.

One third of all heads in the national sample claimed to have “very little” autonomy.
In these circumstances and with that perception of one’s role, being dutiful was per-
haps the most judicious option. These were headteachers who saw very little or no
leeway for their own initiative, who felt so oppressed by demands from government
and local authorities that preservation of their “sanity”, as one primary headteacher
put it, required simply keeping up to date, being ready for the “hit” and getting a
“star point” for simply achieving somewhat modest goals.

We described these head teachers as “mortgaging their energy and time to

their role demands”.The tendency not to experience autonomy nor to exer-
cise much personal discretion in decision-making left these heads “feeling
good” only in respect of clearing the desk, moving paper from the in to the
out box, being able to go home with a sense of job done although often at
the expense of a work-life imbalance.
(MacBeath, O’Brien, & Gronn, 2012, p. 10)

Yet, there were, at the opposite pole, the defiant risk takers,“flying below the radar”,
developing what Eric Hoyle called their “samizdat professionalism” (Hoyle, 2008).
The opportunity for subversion depended to some extent on a weighing up of
permission and sanction, and being “brave enough”, as one headteacher put it, to
navigate around the structures and bend, if not break, the rules. “I like to sail pretty
close to the wind” said one highly experienced primary head who confessed to
deploying a range of subversive strategies developed over a lifetime in headship.
However skilled these heads might be, there was, nonetheless, a common plea for
more “free space” and for a greater understanding of what it means to lead and
manage a school.

The policy dilemma space

In Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars’s “dilemma space” (1993), when faced with
persistent and difficult problems (in policy or practice, for example), we tend to
reach for compromise, what we might describe as a win–win outcome. But actu-
ally, this may result in a lose-lose situation as the essential challenge of addressing
16 The policy challenge

difficulty head on is lost.To achieve the synergy of a win–win requires a willingness

to listen, to be open to evidence, to suspend preconception, to accept risk, but it
also takes time and goodwill, commodities in short supply.
Bottery (2003) shares an equally pessimistic view of the latitude for reform in
the face of powerful national and international pressures.

Whilst it may be possible to conceptualise the leadership of a learning com-

munity, it may nevertheless be impossible to realise it because of a failure
to see and counter an ecology of the forces which surround leadership and
learning communities, forces global, national and local.These forces combine
to create a low-trust culture of unhappiness, which in turn generates crises of
teacher morale, recruitment, and retention.
(p. 187)

Elmore (2008) refers to this as the “default culture” in which practice is “atom-
ized”, so that there are few opportunities for collective work on common prob-
lems, few opportunities to use any kind of external knowledge or skill to improve
practice:“So the school lacks the basic organisational capacity to change” (Elmore,
2008, p. 47).
In this world of “detailed deliverology” (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009, p. 110) there is
no spare energy for teachers to contest the conditions and oppressive aspects of their
work. In addition to (or as a concomitant of) pressure from above, writes Ann Lieberman
(1992), strong teacher norms of egalitarianism can also be powerful inhibitors, dissuad-
ing anyone from presumptuous initiatives, from sticking their neck out too far, engen-
dering a reluctance to exercise leadership without formal invitation or approval.
As Robinson (2011) commented in his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to
be Creative, a combination of convention, timidity, and relentless pressure all too
often stifle the unorthodox, the divergent thinker, the playful, witty departure from
routine. Harnessing the creative energies that lie uninvited below the surface of
classroom life assumes the ability to recognise it, to suspend the pursuit of incessant
and unforgiving targets and to be surprised into new forms of interaction. In the
ideas, insights, experience, and hope of the combined school community popula-
tion, there is a creative energy to be released. A starting point, Robinson suggests,
is with a radical recasting of language with its powerful effects on relationships and
the static ideas which underpin them, adopting a new conception of human ecol-
ogy which captures the richness of human capacity.
The two key ideas contained here refer to ecology and capacity. They also offer
ideal parameters for a study of what inhibits a sense of human agency and how
much of this may be attributed to the conditions in which heads and teachers find
themselves. A dictionary definition of ecology describes it as “the study of interac-
tion of people with their environment”. As human beings, we create our environ-
ment and then in return it creates us, potentially increasing our capacity for action
or, alternatively, reducing the space for individual or collective initiative (we expand
on the positive side of this relationship in Chapter 4 in our discussion of leadership
 The policy challenge 17

as practice). David Perkins (2003) argues that learning is generally invisible because
“we are used to it being that way. As educators, our first task is perhaps to see the
absence, to hear the silence, to notice what is not there” (p. 6).
The American academic Eisner (1991) has written extensively about connois-
seurship, a high-level and complex skill which relies on knowing where to look and
how to see. But this is, however skilled, a singular viewpoint. We observe from one
perspective, constrained by where we sit, whom we observe, whom we talk to or
listen to, when and in what conditions such a process may take place. In a paper
entitled “How to Build Schools where Adults Learn”, Fahey and Ippolito (2014)
draw attention to the dynamic and complex nature of student learning:

Student learning is developmental, and educators know that effectively sup-

porting that learning should take into account the way a student learns, and
the way that learning changes over time.The complex, developmental nature
of learning is easily accepted when educators think about students, but this
same idea is often overlooked when they consider the learning needed to
improve their own practice. Adult learning is also developmental.
A useful lens for helping learning leaders understand the complex nature
of adult learning practice in schools is constructive-developmental theory
(Kegan, 1998). Constructive-developmental theory makes two broad claims:
Adults continually work to make sense of their experiences (constructive),
and the ways that adults make sense of their world can change and grow
more complex over time (developmental). One implication of these claims is
that in any school, each teacher will have her own learning practice – just as
she has her own teaching practice.
(p. 32)

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have discussed eight policy consequences and themes, issues,
and practices which emanate from governments intent on improved school perfor-
mance. In combination, they create a policy challenge for school leaders, teachers,
and others who have their sights set on furthering the interests of children and
young people through learning.Where are the chinks in this apparently impenetra-
ble policy armour? And why do we argue that there is a challenge waiting to be
taken up to politicians and school policymakers?
Like Michael Fullan (2011, p. 6), we believe that there is enough evidence to
show that the overall effect of educational policy is, at best, the protection of a status
quo unable to lead to long-term improvement, and at worst, the creation of condi-
tions detrimental to learning and student interests. Fullan attributes harmful policy
effects to what he calls the “wrong policy drivers”. He goes on to list and explain
four of these: (a) accountability: using test results, and teacher appraisal, to reward or
punish teachers and schools; (b) individual teacher and leadership quality: promot-
ing individual capacity; (c) technology: investing in and assuming that the wonders
18 The policy challenge

of the digital world will carry the day; and (d) fragmented strategies: u ­ naligned
between schools and systems. Two of these have been firmly lodged in our analysis
– accountability and individualism – though we have discussed both in the light of
policies which purport to enhance autonomy and accountability. So, what are the
policy challenges we have distilled? There are at least four.
First, the reduction of a considerable proportion of primary school learning to
the requirements of a narrow measurable curriculum has been exposed. But more
than this, what exacerbates the negativity is the deception that making schools
and nation states the units of performance comparisons will improve learning.
This is misleading and far from helpful. Diagnostic assessment is essential and it is
most influential when it applies to individual learners and their particular needs,
rather than in comparisons among institutions and countries.Why these aggregated
units of analysis and comparison persist may be found in the commercial world
with companies competing for big-dollar government test design and administra-
tion contracts. If and when governments want reassurance on the outcomes being
achieved by a nation’s children and young people, whole population testing is not
necessary. Reliable and valid results can be obtained from representative samples at a
much reduced cost and with fewer effects than those accompanying the high-stakes
testing now dominant in schooling.
Second, policies on institutional autonomy have increased the control and
authority of individual headteachers and principals, adding to the power distance
which already exists between themselves and their staff. This effectively reinforces
the resilience of positional power, status, and hierarchy, but also intensifies the
accountability pressure felt by individuals in leadership positions. What loses out
is the non-positional power of collectives, motivated by professional interest in
the issues arising in the workaday world. Compliance with the power invested in
authority figures continues uncontested so that conformity becomes the default
position for members, while thinking about innovation and change in pedagogy
becomes increasingly challenging.
Third, the deprofessionalisation of the teaching service persists. The reduction
in professional discretion already evident in a narrowing curriculum is further
promoted through government testing, performance standards, appraisal, and con-
tinuing registration processes. None of these are automatically in the hands of pro-
fessionals themselves or their associations. Professional development is largely under
the control of policymakers and system authorities with the personal agency of the
school leader or teacher taking a back seat. Value is placed on what the employer
wants, not what teachers, parents, or children themselves might value.
Fourth, we have argued that there is an intolerance of dissent and challenge alive
and well in the present-day policy environment. Words such as compliance, con-
formity, and docility and phrases such as “keeping your head down”, “not making
waves”, and “maintaining a low profile” have entered the professional discourse and
have become commonplace.The perception that sycophancy is expected by system
policymakers reduces disagreement, debate, difference, and innovation. Novelty in
 The policy challenge 19

practice is something neither welcomed nor encouraged without one eye on “what
the leadership hierarchy expects”.
The chinks in the policy armour referred to above are implicit in the issues we have
highlighted as indicative of a possible challenge to policy. Advocating and adopting the
principles and practices of leadership for learning can provide a powerful counterpoint
to much of what is disempowering in the modern educational policy environment.
Added to this is the need to push forward the key elements of professional integrity
with pride and purpose; to adopt and implement leadership as a collaborative prac-
tice in the everyday life of schools and their communities; to engage in the diver-
gent thinking about learning and teaching that is the constant companion of those
concerned with improving children’s educational experience in schools, in the com-
munity, and in society at large; and to enhance professionalism so that the great majority
of those employed as teachers continue to learn individually and collectively from
research, practice, and their interrelationship. For politicians and policymakers well fed
on a diet of compliance, this should not be dismissed as mere reactive disagreement but
rather acknowledged as an architecture built on the solid foundations of critical dissent.
In Chapter 2, we provide a description of the general backdrop to policy reform
in the education sector with added detail related to the school policy environ-
ment in the countries which participated in the original Carpe Vitam Leadership
for Learning Project.

Chapter 1
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Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/apr/27/
primary-education-cambridge-review-election
Bottery, M. (2003). The leadership of learning communities in a culture of unhappiness.
School Leadership and Management, 23(2), 187–207.
Campbell, C. (1982). A dubious distinction? An inquiry into the value and use of Merton’s
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Covey, S. R. (1988). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. New
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Evans, L. (2008). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals.
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Development, 35(2), 31–39.
Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. Melbourne, Victoria:
Centre for Strategic Education.
20 The policy challenge

Grace, G. (1995). Beyond education management. London: Routledge.

Hampden-Turner, C., & Trompenaars, L. (1993). The seven cultures of capitalism. New York:
Doubleday.
Hargreaves, A., & Shirley, D. (2009). The fourth way. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Hofstede, G. (1983). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values.
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Hoyle, E. (2008). Changing conceptions of teaching as a profession: Personal reflections. In
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MacBeath, J. (2010). Education and schooling: Myth, heresy and misconception. London: Routledge.
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Chapter 2
Ainley, J., & McKenzie, P. (2000). School governance: Research on educational and management
issues. International Education Journal, 1(3), 139–151.
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