Educational Management

Administration & Leadership

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Leadership in Education : 'What Works' or 'What Makes Sense'?

Tim Simkins
Educational Management Administration & Leadership 2005 33: 9
DOI: 10.1177/1741143205048168

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A RT I C L E

Educational Management Administration & Leadership

ISSN 1741-1432 DOI: 10.1177/1741143205048168
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2005 BELMAS Vol 33(1) 9–26; 048168

Leadership in Education
‘What Works’ or ‘What Makes Sense’?

Tim Simkins

A B S T R ACT

This article explores some aspects of current thinking about leadership in education. It
argues that ideas about leadership which are predicated upon the assumption that ‘what
works’ can be identified, prescribed and replicated are at least an inadequate way of
conceiving the concept and often may be inappropriate and unhelpful. It also argues that
in the leadership world ‘making sense of things’ is at least as important as ‘seeking what
works’. The argument proceeds in four stages. First, the article outlines two approaches to
the conceptualization of leadership that it terms the ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’
approaches. Second, it considers the policy context within which leadership is today
located, both in education and more widely within the public sector. Third, it explores
some implications that these ideas about leadership and this policy context raise for
leadership and leadership development in education. Finally, it draws conclusions,
identifying six dimensions of a sense-making agenda for educational leaders.

K E Y WO R D S educational leadership, leadership, leadership development, managerialism,

sense-making

We now live in a world dominated by the idea that leadership is one of the major
factors—sometimes it seems the only factor—that will determine whether an
educational organization, be it a school, a college or a university, will succeed
or fail. Many millions of pounds are being invested in major initiatives such as
the National College for School Leadership and the newly established Centre
for Excellence in Leadership for the learning and skills sector. Alongside this,
books and articles on leadership in general and educational leadership in
particular appear at an ever increasing rate; indeed, the National College for
School Leadership has recently published two guides to ‘Good Reads’ on leader-
ship for the busy school leader (Abra et al., 2003; West et al., 2003).
This explosion of leadership literature can quite easily generate the impres-
sion that much that is written—and indeed much research—adds little to the
mainstream of key ideas about leadership. These key ideas are well expressed
in relation to school leadership, for example, in the nine propositions on

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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 33(1)

leadership outlined by the National College’s thinktank (NCSL, 2001) or in the

report to the American Educational Research Association’s Task Force on
research on educational leadership (Leithwood and Riehl, 2003). Yet despite the
fact that we seem to know so much, leadership in education remains a stubbornly
difficult activity. Not only do agencies such as Ofsted continue to press the need
for more and better leadership (Ofsted, 2003a, b), but there is some evidence that
those who work in education hold less than sanguine views about much of the
leadership they experience. For example, a recent study of leadership in the
public sector on behalf of the Chartered Management Institute found that 33
percent of those interviewed in education rated the quality of leadership shown
by their line managers as low (the figure for senior managers was 40 percent),
with large gaps between desired and experienced leadership qualities in areas
such as vision, integrity and sound judgement (Charlesworth et al., 2003).
Now we have to be careful about such findings. There are typically methodo-
logical limitations in studies of this kind. More significantly, experience
suggests that many professionals typically have deep ambiguities and uncer-
tainties about the role of leaders and leadership hard-wired into their make-up.
However, none of this alters the fact that the dominant discourse in the public
sector in general, and in education in particular, at the turn of the 21st century
echoes the view, well-articulated by Bolman and Deal more than 10 years ago:
‘An unquestioned, widely shared canon of common sense holds that leadership
is a very good thing and that we need more of it—at least, more of the right
kind’ (1991: 404). However, this view, while dominant, is not uncontested. For
example, Gemmill and Oakley, writing at approximately the same time, argued
that: ‘[Leadership] is a serious sign of social pathology . . . that induces massive
learned helplessness among members of a social system’ (1992: 113).
These two quotations, representing very different assumptions about the
purposes—and the consequences—of leadership should remind us that, despite
burgeoning discussion and debate, the nature of leadership remains elusive.
Some would have it otherwise: much of the current discourse implies either
that the holy grail of effective leadership practice is within our grasp or at least
that the search for it is not in vain. This view is embodied, for example, in the
development of standards for leadership and in the drawing of leadership into
the net of topics felt worthy of empirical review under the evidence-informed
policy and practice initiative (EPPI, 2002).
Yet such arguments imply particular ways of conceiving leadership. My
contention is that ideas about leadership which are predicated upon the
assumption that ‘what works’ can be identified, prescribed and replicated are
an inadequate way of conceiving the concept and often may be inappropriate
and unhelpful. My argument is that, in the leadership world, ‘making sense of
things’ is at least as important as ‘seeking what works’.1
The argument of this article proceeds in four stages. First, I shall outline
briefly two approaches to the conceptualization of leadership that I will call the
‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ approaches. Second, I shall consider the policy

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Simkins: Leadership in Education

context within which leadership is today located, both in education and more
widely within the public sector. Third, I shall explore some implications that
these ideas about leadership and this policy context raise for leadership and
leadership development in education. Finally I shall draw some conclusions.

Alternative Models of Leadership

The ocean of leadership literature—both general and educational—abounds
with models and theories of leadership. Some of these rise to the surface and
float on strong currents for years before eventually becoming beached and
replaced by other strong swimmers. Others bob briefly above the surface only
to sink again as quickly as they appeared. Making sense of these many models
and theories is not easy and many approaches to their classification are possible
(see e.g. Bush and Glover, 2003). Rather than producing yet another classifi-
cation, I should like to contrast two broad sets of ideas that reflect the evolution
of leadership thinking in recent years.
First, let us consider what I will call the ‘traditional’ conception of leadership.
Others have used more descriptive terms for similar ideas. For example, Gronn
(1999) writes about ‘naive realism’ and Ogawa and Bossert (1995) about the
‘technical-rational’ perspective on leadership. The key dimensions of this view
are as follows:

• that leadership resides in individuals

• that leadership is hierarchically based and linked to office
• that leadership occurs when leaders do things to followers
• that leadership is different from and more important than management
• that leaders are different
• that leaders make a crucial difference to organizational performance
• that effective leadership is generalizable.

It can be argued strongly that many, if not all, of these characteristics have been
embodied in many of the ways in which leadership has been constructed by
those who have been responsible for educational policy in this country over
recent years. However, while many of the assumptions implicit in this
traditional view continue to underpin thinking and practice at many levels in
the educational system, more recent research and writing has seen the emerg-
ence of a number of perspectives that can be set alongside this traditional view
to produce what might be called an emerging—and more complex—view. The
resulting picture is shown in Table 1.
This emerging view embodies a less coherent body of ideas than does the
traditional view. Different variables are emphasized by different writers in
different ways and in relation to different contexts. How do some of these ideas
relate to the current leadership challenge in education? Let us begin with the
last item on the list: the importance of context.

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Table 1 An emerging view of leadership

The traditional view An emerging view

Leadership resides in individuals Leadership is a property of social systems

Leadership is hierarchically based and linked Leadership can occur anywhere
to office
Leadership occurs when leaders do things Leadership is a complex process of mutual
to followers influence
Leadership is different from and more important The leadership/management distinction is
than management unhelpful
Leaders are different Anyone can be a leader
Leaders make a crucial difference to organizational Leadership is one of many factors that may
performance influence organizational performance
Effective leadership is generalisable The context of leadership is crucial

The Context
One of the most frequent assertions of the ‘new’ thinking about leadership is
that context is important. And for education, a crucial aspect of the current
context in the UK is that of public service reform that is built on four principles
(Office of Public Services Reform, 2002):

• Standards and accountability

• Devolution and delegation
• Flexibility and innovation
• Expanding choice

Within education, and in the schools sector in particular, the government has
rationalized its approach to reform in terms of stages. Thus in 2000 Michael
Barber suggested that the government’s strategies for change ‘are best seen as
forming two waves, the first relating to improvement of the existing system, the
second to its transformation’ (p. 10). The first, improvement wave was said to
include the promotion of standards-based reform, placing clear responsibility
on individual schools for improving themselves within a broad framework that
provides both pressure and support, and expanded provision for professional
development. The transformation wave, in contrast, emphasizes ‘new forms of
partnership and networking’ among schools and between schools and other
public and private sector partners, and transformation of the ‘leadership,
training, support and pay of the teaching profession’ (p. 12).
More recently the government has recognized the need to move from a policy
climate of ‘informed prescription’ to one of ‘informed professional judgement’.
The former, it is argued, ‘was crucial to achieving rapid advances that were
needed, not least in literacy and numeracy’. Now, however, ‘we need to restore
more autonomy and professional control to teachers, albeit within a national
system of accountability’ (DfES, 2002: 11).

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These quotes illustrate perfectly the ‘roller-coaster’ of educational reform—

the process through which governments attempt to shape and reshape patterns
of power and authority within the educational system in a continuous endeav-
our to achieve rapid changes in processes and performance (Simkins, 2000).
These examples relate to schools, but others could just as easily have been
chosen from elsewhere: for example the vicissitudes between policies to encour-
age competition and collaboration in the learning and skills sector, or the
tension between quality, access and equity in higher education that is bedev-
illing the debate on university finance.
The reality, of course, is that policy arenas are complex places in which a
range of desirable, and not always consistent, values and purposes are held in
tension. Nevertheless, there is much agreement in the literature that, within
the public sector reform movement of the past 15 years or so, one tension has
been central: that between, on the one hand, a philosophy built on ‘hands-off’
control systems of organizational autonomy and quasi-markets and, on the
other hand, a much more ‘hands-on’ model comprising centrally established
targets, mandatory planning, performance management and inspection (e.g.
Hoggett, 1996). The implications of this tension for schools have been well
captured recently by the metaphor of the circus rider:
Under her left foot the ‘white horse’ of educational enlightenment tosses her mane
to rejoice at Michael Fullan, reflective practice, teacher-led reform, evidence-
informed professionalism, creativity, networks and the lateral spread of innovation.
The rider’s right foot perches on the flare-nostrilled ‘black horse’ of competition and
managerialism, hierarchies of status, residual Woodheadism, central direction and
blame culture. Adrenaline pumps, the band plays. Can these fiery beasts be made to
dance together? (Wilkins, 2003)

Well, can they? We cannot go very far in exploring this question without address-
ing the themes of ‘new public management’ and ‘managerialism’. There is now
a long history of discussion and debate around these themes which has encom-
passed all parts of the public sector including education, and within education
all the major sectors including schools, colleges and universities (Deem and
Johnson, 2000; Gewirtz, 2002; Simkins, 2000; Simkins and Lumby, 2002). The
full richness of these debates is too complex to explore in detail here. In general,
however, the argument has typically set what are often termed ‘managerialist’
values and processes against pre-existing values which were embodied in what
Clarke and Newman (1997) termed the ‘bureau-professional’ settlement, within
which professionals are free to exercise power in the best interests of their
clients. The managerialist agenda has involved, it is argued:

• the replacement of public sector values by those of the private sector and
the market;
• the establishment of an impoverished conception of purpose within
education that reifies some outcomes—especially those that can be
measured—over others that are more elusive but more valuable;

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• the imposition of models of leadership and management that emphasize

individual—as opposed to collective or collegial—accountability and
which use rigid planning and target-setting regimes as the prime means
of organizational control;
• a redistribution of power, with the authority and autonomy of
professionals over their work being qualified or replaced by the power of
managers to establish agendas and determine modes of work.

If the managerialist thesis is accepted, there are indeed serious questions to be

raised about the role and potential of leadership in educational organizations.
Some contributors to this debate have argued that, whereas policy discourse
loudly and consistently reiterates the importance of leadership—and often
leadership of a particular transformational kind—the reality is that policy-
makers have created a centralist environment where it is increasingly difficult
to exercise such leadership effectively (Bishop and Mulford, 1999).
But how true is it that managerialist agendas have ‘colonized’ education?
Much has been written about this and the debate continues. However, setting
a model of a managerialist future against a bureau-professional past does not
seem particularly helpful. Rather, in this as in many other aspects of the
organizational world, things are much more complex. It is more helpful to see
our current public sector—and educational—world as one in which discourses
are in contention, different accommodations are being reached in different
contexts and these accommodations are changing over time in a very dynamic
way (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Simkins, 2000). At least four factors will affect
the degree to which managerialism impinges on particular educational
organizations:

• the detailed policy framework which affects the sector within which an
organization is located—for example, in the early days of post-incorpor-
ation, further education seemed to experience a step change towards
managerialist approaches which in many respects by-passed most
schools (Lumby, 2003c; Simkins, 2000;);
• the ‘relative positioning’ of the organization within the sector—for
example, the degree to which it is subject to serious competition and
therefore has to ‘look to its market’ for survival (Woods et al., 1998);
• the ‘cultural starting points’ of particular sectors and of individual
organizations within them—for example, the very different historical
antecedents of most general further education colleges and most sixth
form colleges seem to have led, in many cases, to quite significant differ-
ences in their responses to the post-school policy environment (Lumby,
2003a); and finally
• the values and style preferences of particular organizational leaders and
managers.

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Taken together, these variables suggest that the degree to which a particular
organization succumbs to managerialist pressures will be the product of a
particular set of objective and subjective variables that determine the ways in
which the constraints of structure and the possibilities of agency are framed and
acted upon. Leadership is a critical variable in determining how these
constraints and possibilities are conceived.

Implications for Leadership: New Roles, Behaviours and

Expectations
The policy environment that I have described places expectations on leader-
ship in the public sector that can seem almost intolerable both in their range
and complexity and in the internal tensions, and even contradictions, that they
often entail.
The first task of leadership, then, is to make sense of them. This can be
considered at a number of levels. First, leaders cannot avoid addressing and
interpreting the ambiguities and potential conflicts of the policy environment
I have described. The key strategic question for organizational leaders is: ‘What
kind of organization is this to be?’ Within the current policy context this is far
from an easy question. For example, should a school be conceived as:

• a branch office of the national educational system, delivering a specified

set of products to specified standards?
• a participatory community, responding to the expectations and demands
of key stakeholders as expressed through the governing body and other
mechanisms of involvement that might be developed?
• a competitive business, seeking to attract parent-consumers who wish to
purchase its product?
• or what?

The answer may be ‘all of these’; but this begs the question about potential
conflicts between the models both in terms of possibly differing demands
among parties to whom an account has to be rendered and in terms of their
underpinning values. The ‘what works’ answer—‘Establish a powerful and
engaging vision’—begs the ‘what makes sense’ question: ‘a vision of and for
what?’
If the first sense-making task for leaders concerns the positioning of the
organization in its environment, the second concerns internal organizational
arrangements. These two issues are, of course, inter-related. Different kinds of
organization need to be organized and led in different ways. For example, take
the three metaphors just outlined. The branch office model implies a leader-
ship approach focusing on output specification, effective planning of produc-
tion activities and quality assurance; the participatory community requires

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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 33(1)

leadership that empowers stakeholders to make wise decisions on behalf of the

community; while the competitive business requires the development of good
customer relations leading to the effective diagnosis of customer needs and
expectations and an ability to respond to these quickly as market conditions
change. Underlying each of these are fundamentally different assumptions
about what it means to provide a public service. These issues of sense-making
are not trivial and they are a key aspect of strategic leadership (Glatter, 2003;
Leithwood, 2001; Simkins, 2003).
What about the place of leadership in less exalted positions—in the ‘engine
room’ of educational change? The current policy environment presents many
challenges here also. It demands that some roles be redefined; that other roles
are played in new ways; and it is generating a wide variety of new roles within
which leadership is expected to be exercised. These developments help to
explain the current preoccupation with distributed leadership (Bennett et al.,
2003a; Gronn, 2000; Harris, 2004; Lumby, 2003b). Powerful cases have been
made for the importance of distributed leadership in schools and colleges.
However, it is important to be clear about what the term means. In some forms
it may indeed be a key component in the emerging model of leadership
described earlier; in others, however, it may just be the traditional model in a
new guise. In order to identify which is the case, we need to analyse the possi-
bilities further. At least three kinds of role appear to be emerging as significant
within the current policy environment:

• enhanced line roles: leading, managing and supervising others to ensure

their effective performance;
• project roles: orchestrating the use of resources to achieve specific ends,
often oriented to the achievement of clearly delineated, narrowly focused
short-term outcomes;
• networking roles: working with individuals and groups in other organiz-
ations to build partnerships for tackling common problems or pursuing
shared purposes.

Let us consider each of these in turn.

Leading in the ‘Line’

The first of these—line roles—might be viewed as traditional middle manage-

ment roles that have now been given a new leadership ‘spin’. They include
subject co-ordinators in primary schools, heads of subject department in
secondary schools, heads of division or department and deans in colleges and
universities. Such roles are predicated on an organizational structure where
accountability rests in the last resort with individuals located in formal positions
of delegated authority, and those individuals are expected to manage both
people (their ‘followers’) and, often, resources, in ways which ensure efficient

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and effective contributions to the performance of the organization as a whole.

For those holding these roles, performance management is increasingly the
name of the game. In many ways this emphasis represents the ‘traditional’
conception of leadership described earlier. However, in my view there are some
problems with this model—at least in its crudest form. These can be summar-
ized as follows:

• it gives undue emphasis to formal authority delegated from above on the

basis of position, whereas the authority in professional organizations typi-
cally depends on a much more complex range of factors, not least percep-
tions held by professional colleagues of the expertise and performance
exhibited by those holding these roles;
• it rests on an over-simplified hierarchical conception of organizational
structure, whereas in reality formal line structures rarely represent
adequately the complexity of organizational forms in schools, colleges
and universities.

These problems can be exemplified in many kinds of educational organiz-

ation. For example, in primary schools curriculum co-ordinators are now
increasingly described as middle leaders in a similar way to secondary heads of
department. Yet they can draw on few robust sources of authority for playing
such roles effectively. They have neither the clearly defined hierarchical auth-
ority nor the high level of subject expertise that we might expect, for example,
in secondary heads of department (Bennett et al., 2003b). In universities the
problem manifests itself in rather a different way. For example, one study of a
university describes senior middle managers as inhabiting a rather uncomfort-
able world between, on the one hand, senior managers who operate on the basis
of what Handy has called a ‘power culture’ with tight strings of control—
especially financial ones—holding them tightly to account and, on the other
hand, departmental colleagues and course teams below them who expect to
operate within more traditional assumptions associated with what Handy,
again, has characterized as ‘organisations of consent’, of which universities are
archetypal examples (Handy, 1977; 1999: ch. 7). The challenges to which these
conflicting pressures give rise are considerable (Hellawell and Hancock, 2001).
In neither of these cases can leading from the middle be simply equated with
exercising traditional ‘line’ authority.

Leading in Projects and Networks

The problem of leadership and authority within educational organizations does

not stop with line management roles, however. As indicated earlier, increasing
numbers of leadership roles lie outside the formal hierarchy. Their prime focus
may involve, for example, the management of projects or working within
networks that cross the boundaries between organizations or indeed between

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different professional arenas (Jackson and Stainsby, 2000). Such roles are
subject to particular problems of their own.
Consider, for example, the management of Education Action Zones and
similar project-type initiatives. Various studies suggest a range of tensions.
Some are expressed in the following quotation from an in-school co-ordinator
for an EAZ:

You are always in a state of relative agitation trying to get things done, increasingly
against a background of competing initiatives which have gradually taken over from
or impinged upon the original EAZ programme areas. You are trying to put forward
good ideas and methods, priming pumps for funding, getting in the additionality in
the hope that the initiatives will be embedded in the school curriculum and general
ethos. I mainly end up as a sort of well-intentioned go-between facilitator trying to
ensure the EAZ aims and objectives are put into practice and trying to ensure audit
trails and accountable spending exist to prove what we have done—a mister fix-it in
the nicest sense. (Aspinwall et al., 2003)

At a more senior level, for example that of EAZ manager, the tensions increase.
They include:

• addressing potential conflicts between the interests of individual schools

and the EAZ or community as a whole;
• balancing the line management of project staff against the need to relate
effectively to other senior professionals such as heads;
• balancing the time spent in meetings ensuring engagement of and co-
ordination between all stakeholders with that devoted to initiating and
implementing activities designed to impact directly on delivery;
• overcoming inter-professional barriers arising from differing cultures,
values and work practices.

Most fundamentally, however, those working in projects mention again and

again the difficulties involved in reconciling the need for innovative strategies
to engage communities and develop capacity with the pressure to achieve
centrally imposed short-term targets. Such short-termism can affect the
recruitment and retention of staff. It may also impede the ability to build trust
within teams and wider communities, since trust-building is a long-term
process requiring a greater emphasis, at least in the first instance, on support
rather than pressure (Power et al., 2002; Scottish Executive Education Depart-
ment, 2003).
Those charged with leading and managing in projects and networks, then,
will be presented with a whole gamut of new and challenging scenarios. They
may need to co-ordinate the work of many kinds of staff, the majority of whom
have formal line accountability to someone else. Increasingly boundaries will
have to be crossed. These may be boundaries between organizations—for
example within the context of collaborative inter-school ‘collegiate’ arrange-
ments pioneered by Tim Brighouse (Kelly, 2003); they may be boundaries

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between professions such as those envisaged by the government’s ambitious

proposals for the integration of services for children (DfES, 2003); or they may
be boundaries between professionals and support staff as the government’s
workforce reforms are implemented in schools or new learning technologies
are implemented in higher education (Ofsted, 2003b). Boundary crossing is
never easy: differences in cultural assumptions and practices as well as
concerns about the future distribution of power and influence require
extremely sensitive handling and are likely to affect significantly conceptions
of appropriate forms of leadership in future years. Frequently influence—
whether it arises from expertise, personal qualities or some other source—is
more important than formal power, and co-operation and collaboration are
more important than hierarchical control. This points clearly to many of the
characteristics of the emerging model of leadership described earlier.

Making Sense of ‘Leading from the Middle’

Middle leaders respond to the pressures placed upon them in different ways.
Research in further and higher education has given some rich insights into some
of these. For example, Trowler (1997) and Gleeson and Shain (1999) have
identified similar broad patterns of response of middle managers to the
changing policy environment in which they have to work. Two of these involve
developing a clear sense of agency in response to the changes: ‘willing compli-
ers’ or ‘swimmers’ who buy fully into the new discourse, its underlying values
and the corporate purpose and policies of the institution; and ‘strategic compli-
ers’ who, while uncomfortable with many of the changes, find ways of recon-
structing policy in their own areas of responsibility in ways which maintain
their core values despite the broader policy pressures placed upon them. Not
all middle leaders are able to respond in such ways however. Other responses
are much more reactive and involve less control: ‘unwilling compliers’, while
sceptical and disenchanted with the new ethos, can only develop a range of
coping strategies to survive; while some merely ‘sink’ under the pressure
through illness or withdrawal. The point here is that both willing and strategic
compliers succeed in making sense of the changing policy environment and use
this to maintain a sense of agency within a context where such agency is easily
threatened. Others fail to do so.
Whichever sector of education we look at, it would seem that those carrying
out roles ‘in the middle’ often find themselves subject to much more complex
pressures and conflicts than the traditional arguments about middle managers
might imply. What the studies referred to here suggest—and others could have
been chosen—is the importance for leadership of exploring the interaction
between structure and agency in particular contexts and how this is mediated
by individuals’ values, personality and personal history. This is much more
than a ‘what works’ question requiring essentially instrumental solutions. It
also raises fundamental issues about how power should be distributed in

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professional organizations, about the legitimacy of different forms of

authority, and about the values on which the exercise of such power should be
based.

Sense-Making and Leadership Development

If sense-making is a key aspect of effective leadership, what are the implications
for leadership development? A detailed discussion of these would need another
article. However, I would make a number of points.
First, we can gain insight from Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) work on
teacher learning. They distinguish between three types of knowledge about
practice. Although the authors are writing about teacher learning, their ideas
are just as applicable to learning about leadership. The types of knowledge they
identify are as follows.

Knowledge-for-practice

This refers to knowledge that is derived scientifically from research and then
applied to practice. In this sense, practitioners don’t create knowledge, but they
use it. It is the job of others—researchers—to determine what works and in what
circumstances. When this is known, standards of ‘best practice’ can be estab-
lished and leaders can be expected to follow them.

Knowledge-in-practice

This refers to knowledge that is embedded in the practice of successful prac-

titioners. It is much more than the effective application of ‘known’ solutions. It
involves a kind of artistry and it emerges primarily from practitioners reflect-
ing on and enquiring into their own actions. Since it is embodied in people
rather than in abstract prescriptions, it can, perhaps, be coached and facilitated,
but it cannot be formally taught.

Knowledge-of-practice

This refers to the process through which practitioners theorize about their work
and place it within a wider social, cultural and political context. This kind of
knowledge emerges through the problematization of the underlying values and
principles upon which practice is based. It challenges unquestioned assump-
tions, for example about the nature of leaders and leadership. To develop, it
requires the establishment of communities of enquiry committed to critical
analysis and reflection on practice.

Thinking about leadership development in these terms is in itself a sense-

making activity. It leads, for example, to the conclusion that what, on the

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surface, appear to be similar activities may, in fact, be very different depending

on their purpose and the detail of their practice. For example, leadership
coaching might be conceived as:

• instilling knowledge about ‘best practice’ (knowledge-for-practice)

• encouraging reflection on a leader’s own practice, perhaps through
discussions with an ‘effective’ leader (knowledge-in-practice)
• challenging the underlying bases on which practice is founded, in
relation, for example, to the assumptions about power and influence on
which it is based (knowledge-of-practice).

Some would argue the inherent superiority of one of these approaches over
others. For example, critical theorists would be suspicious of the first two,
believing that they merely serve the purpose of leaving unchallenged—or
indeed reinforcing—the inherent and unjust power inequalities around which
most educational organizations are built. Others—whom we might describe as
‘unreconstructed instrumentalists’—will be keen to see established the kind of
knowledge-for-practice base that will provide a valid and reliable basis for
training educational leaders. This would appear to be the vision of the evidence-
informed practice movement. I do not hold to either of these extreme positions.
In my view each of the three relationships between knowledge and practice
may contribute to the development of leadership. However, we need to be very
clear about the knowledge assumptions upon which each is based, and hence
about what they can and cannot do. Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s work—and that
of others more directly in the educational leadership domain such as Gunter
and Ribbins (2002, 2003)—helps us to do that.
My second point about leadership development is that it is crucial that leaders
are provided with the tools to explore problems from a variety of perspectives.
There are many good examples to draw on here. They include Bolman and
Deal’s (1997) ‘four frames’ model of organizations, through Morgan’s (1997)
eight ‘images of organization’ to Bush’s (2003) six models of educational leader-
ship and management. Each of these, in its own way, provides a rich resource
to enable educational leaders to clarify their own views about organizations and
their leadership, to gain greater insight into those of others, and to enrich their
repertoire of possible responses to the challenges that they face. As Morgan
states: ‘Metaphor’—and each of the models outlined by these authors might be
characterized as a metaphor—‘encourages us to think and act in new ways. It
extends horizons of insight and creates new possibilities’ (Morgan, 1997: 351).
We can move beyond metaphors, however. My third point is that ‘making
sense’ requires theorizing. Much of the pragmatic literature on leadership is—
almost by definition—largely atheoretical. In a sense the metaphors and frames
developed by Bolman and Deal, Morgan and others represent kinds of theories.
Indeed, one of their purposes is to provide some more explicit basis for explor-
ing leaders’ ‘theories-in-use’ (Argyris and Schon, 1974; Atkinson, 2000).

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However, it seems to me that we have almost completely lost sight of one of the
great contributions made by the founders of ‘educational administration’ (as it
was then called in this country and is still called in North America): namely,
using the social science disciplines and their key concepts as building blocks
for understanding leadership problems (Baron and Taylor, 1969). There are
various reasons for this loss. Some arise from critiques of the value of using
ideas drawn from discipline-based theories to enhance understanding of a
practice-centred field (Hughes, 1985). However, an important reason, I believe, is
the fact that many of those who go on to teach educational leadership and
management do not themselves have that kind of disciplinary grounding: they
are recruited from a teaching profession which is itself rapidly losing its disci-
plinary roots in response to the pragmatic and instrumental demands of the
worlds in which we all increasingly work. Yet the concepts and theories of soci-
ology, of psychology, of political science, of economics and—of course—of phil-
osophy should provide the basic tools of literacy on which the understandings
and practices of educational leaders are built.
Finally, frames can be challenged through exploring with understanding
different contexts as well as different ideas. It is perhaps to be regretted, there-
fore, that the substantial recent investment in national leadership programmes
has seen separate colleges set up for schools and for post-compulsory education
and now for higher education. Considerations of territory and turf are certainly
alive and well in these arenas! On the other hand, opportunities for leaders in
education to work with leaders from organizations in different environments
from their own are to be welcomed, whether this involves placements in, or
exchanges with, non-educational organizations or study visits to other national
educational systems. However, the choice of locations for comparative study
must itself be subject to critique. Thus I hope that in future at least as much
attention will be given to sharing of understanding and practice between
different parts of the public sector as has been given over recent years to
extolling the things that the public realm can learn from the private. Also, it
would be good to see international exchanges among educational leaders move
beyond well-trodden paths across an English-speaking world where assump-
tions about a particular kind of ‘educational reform’ go largely unquestioned, at
least in policy circles, to other countries and continents where conceptions of
the purposes of education and views about how it should be organized and
managed may be rather different from our own.

Leadership: What Makes Sense?

Now briefly to draw things together. There is increasing recognition that the
complexities and ambiguities of organizational life make any simple prescrip-
tions about leadership problematic, indeed dangerous (Glatter and Kydd, 2003).
Indeed, it can be argued that coping effectively with these complexities and
ambiguities, and helping others to do so, is the central task of leadership. The

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underlying basis of my argument is expressed in a quotation from Ronald

Heifetz’s stimulating book Leadership without Easy Answers:
Leadership is both active and reflective. One has to alternate between participating
and observing. Walt Whitman described it as being ‘both in and out of the game’ . . .
Although the principle is easy to grasp the practice is not. Rather than maintain
perspective on the events that surround and involve us we often get swept up by
them . . . To discern the larger patterns on the dance floor—to see who is dancing
with whom, in what groups, in what location, and who is sitting out what kind of
dance—we have to stop moving and get to the balcony. (Heifetz, 1994: 252–3)

But what should we be observing from the balcony? From the arguments above,
I would suggest a sense-making agenda comprising six areas. These are:

• making sense of the ways in which leadership itself is conceived;

• making sense of the role and purposes of the organization within a
dynamic and conflictual policy environment;
• making sense of the ways in which leadership roles are changing and
should change;
• making sense of the ways in which power and authority are and should
be constituted and distributed in educational organizations;
• making sense of ‘other worlds’ across inter-professional and organiz-
ational boundaries;
• using leadership development to understand sense-making itself.

Each of these areas addresses a key aspect of the leadership challenge. None of
them can be resolved simply by recourse to ideas about ‘what works’. Each
needs to be addressed through a complex process that draws on both the ethical
and the practical, on the individual’s personal values and the collegial wisdom
of the group. At their heart lies the greatest sense-making question of all: the
nature, potential of and limitations of agency in this complex and messy world.

Notes
This article is a revised version of a professorial lecture given at Sheffield Hallam
University in January 2004.

1. The arguments of this paper can be seen as contributing to a wider debate about the
‘what works’ approach to policy and practice in education leadership (Levac̆ić and
Glatter, 2001; Wallace, 2001) and more generally (Atkinson, 2000; Sanderson, 2003).

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Biographical note
T I M S I M K I N S is Professor of Education Management at Sheffield Hallam University. He
is particularly interested in the relationship between national policy and institutional
leadership, and in strategic and resource management in education.

Correspondence to:
Tim Simkins, School of Education, Sheffield Hallam University, Collegiate Crescent
Campus, Sheffield S10 2BP, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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