Thread by @TomRees_77

1. *School Leadership Research Thread*

11 years ago, an influential article was published making '7 strong claims about successful school leadership' (Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Harris & Hopkins, 2008). This was a significant paper & has been heavily cited in the years since.

2. In the paper, the authors...

(wait for it)

Yep. They make 7 strong claims about successful school leadership.

👇

3. The paper was published by NCSL and you can read it here. Interestingly, this was published in 2008 (the year I started Headship). It contains one of my favourite quotes:

'Those in leadership roles have a tremendous responsibility to get it right.'

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

4. Earlier this month, 3 of the authors have published a follow up paper revisiting their original claims, testing their validity & offering new insights based on research in the last decade.

As leadership research papers go, this is pretty exciting. 🤓

tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…

5. Claim 1 is altered to:

'School leadership has a significant effect on features of the school organization which positively influences the quality of teaching & learning. While moderate in size, this leadership effect is vital to the success of most school improvement efforts'

6. 👆This alteration takes into account the many other factors that impact on children's learning including socio-economic, features of the home and relationships between home and school.

7. Claim 2 is retained as:

'Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of basic leadership practices'. They organise these into 4 domains:

🛣️ Setting directions
👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Relationships/people
🏫 Develop the org to support desired practices
👩‍🏫 Instructional programme

8. Claim 3 is also retained as:

'The ways in which leaders apply these basic leadership practices – not the practices themselves – demonstrate responsiveness to, rather than dictation by, the contexts in which they work'.

9. The nuance here is that context doesn't just mean the socio-economic or geography, but also the stage of school development (turnaround, stabilising, declining etc.).

Links to the work of @Carter6D '4 stages of improving a school': tauntonteachingalliance.co.uk/wp-content/upl…

10. Claim 4 is where it gets interesting. What was previously a claim around generic influence, motivation etc., is amended to seeing leadership through the lens of effective classroom practice; I'm pleased to see teaching more central in the conception of school leadership.

11. I have been making an argument recently that we have over-egged some of the generic and transformational leadership language suggested previously. I wonder whether it's a factor in the heroic (often macho) narrative that is common around headship.

tes.com/news/warning-s…

12. Claim 5 & 6 are related and to do with distributed leadership. Distributing leadership has an 'especially positive' effect if it's done in the right way. I particularly like the following references to expertise; it reminds me of the arguments @Counsell_C makes so eloquently.

13. 'Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond (2001) & Harris (2013) consistently show patterns of leadership distribution (are) based on patterns of expertise within an organisation & that new roles/responsibilities will inevitably emerge from an authentic distributed leadership model.'

14. 'DeFlaminis (2013) similarly found that open patterns of leadership distribution were established by flattening the hierarchy and creating new opportunities for those at school and district levels to lead based on their expertise rather than their position.'

15. Developing expertise in school leaders is key and a big part of the work we're undertaking at @Ambition_Inst. But unless those with the right knowledge/expertise are empowered to lead and make decisions within their fields of expertise, this resource will remain untapped.

16. Last but not least, Claim 7 is revised significantly. Previously, this made a big claim about the role of personal traits by stating 'A small handful of personal traits explains a high proportion of the variation in leadership effectiveness'.

17. The authors have revised this original claim and state the following:

'The claim that personal leadership traits, by themselves, explain a high proportion of variation in school leadership effectiveness cannot be justified...'

18. I'm please that the importance of traits is challenged. Not least because traits are not malleable - we need things we can improve if we're going to develop programmes that help leaders to keep getting better.

19. Claim 7 is therefore revised to the following:

'While further research is required, a well-defined set of cognitive, social & psychological ‘personal leadership resources’ show promise of explaining a high proportion of variation in the practices enacted by school leaders.'

20. Couched in 'further research required', these are the proposed 'Personal Leadership Resources'. They're organised into 3 domains:

• Cognitive resources
• Social resources
• Pyschological resources

Would like to think about these more. 🤔

21. That's all folks. Overall, it feels like 10 years on, this research suggests school leadership could be less about traits, generic practices/influence and more about expertise, the core business of teaching and with a greater emphasis on domain-specific knowledge.

21. Although I've been arguing the above recently so this may be confirmation bias.

I'd love to know what you think?

ambition.org.uk/blog/helping-l…