The Challenges of Educational Leadership

Citation

Heron, C. (2005), "The Challenges of Educational Leadership", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 451-452. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513540510607789

There seem to be two distinct academic camps that write on leadership. The first camp seeks to support leaders in schools with current ideas and research to improve the quality of leadership and the learning of our students. The second camp seems to be writing for other academics about the how they can discuss the evils of globalisation and managerialism but make little attempt to improve practice. My initial concerns about this book were raised by a statement by the series editor about the book “It critiques educational leadership arguing that it is simultaneously and paradoxically about control and fragmentation. The dualism of centre versus periphery is explored in some depth along with the important but often sidelined issues of trust, meaning and identity within the current educational context and climate”. Clearly a book not reporting research to assist leaders in schools, but potentially a book for other academics.

The book starts with a chapter on the need for ecological leadership. It is not clear what this really means but the dangers of business ideas being “bad” while education is “good” are emphasised. This leads into a fairly predictable book. The next three chapters concentrate on: the global challenge; the impact of commodification and fragmentation (!) and the impact of standardisation and control. This is all standard left of centre stuff about the dire consequences of the current situation leading to the predictable conclusion of this section that we are “crippling the learning organisation”.

The impact of these forces is examined in the next part, which has three chapters bemoaning: the impact on trust, the impact on truth and meaning and the impact on identity. While this does not resonate with my experience of headship I dare say this type of view may be replicated on “education policy courses” in universities.

The final section, which offers a view of possible futures called “beginning a response”, ends with a chapter called “models of educational leadership”. Sadly, those proposed are simplistic models of leadership such as “the opportunist” and “the corporate leader” which are deemed bad and “the moral community leader” and the “ethical dialectician” (the book is full of such academic jargon) which are deemed good. Leadership is far too complex and multi‐levelled for such simplistic models to be drawn. Compared with research‐based books such as Leithwood et al.'s (1999) work on transformational leadership or Day et al.'s (2000) study of leadership, this book does not move beyond the polemic of academia.