Need for a school leadership policy

Malta needs a national policy that helps nurture the next generation of school leaders, while respecting the milestones achieved in the past.

Christopher Bezzina, from the Faculty of Education, who was recently invited by the European Commission to be one of the keynote speakers at a one-day seminar on School Leadership Policy, argued that policy makers, the education authorities, the Faculty of Education and other stakeholders should be involved.

Dr Bezzina is coordinator of the Master's programme in education leadership and runs the same component as visiting professor at the Alma Mater, University of Bologna. The session attracted government experts in the field of school leadership, representatives from the EU states and Commission staff. Dr Bezzina was invited to speak alongside Dr Beatriz Pont from the OECD and Prof. Michael Schratz from Innsbruck University, among others.

The sessions focused on a number of key questions, what is meant by school leadership in today's context, what key roles school leaders are playing, the conditions for successful school leadership, the key challenges governments are facing in respect of school leadership, and the policies which are needed to improve the effectiveness of current and future school leaders.

The paper that Dr Bezzina presented explored what the research is saying about the effective school leader and the major challenges for school leadership and the development of appropriate training programmes for school leaders. The paper was very well received and the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning within the European Commission will be publishing it as part of its own research series in the area.

Dr Bezzina said that a systems approach to school leadership development is currently lacking. Within a context of networking it makes sense to get together and develop policies that can help us address leadership at the pre-headship, induction and CPD phases. A similar argument, as Dr Bezzina has highlighted elsewhere, is desperately needed for teachers.

Dr Bezzina said that the position of headship has been slowly changing. Nowadays we see heads fulfilling a variety of roles. He said that we expect heads to be, among other things, visionaries, instructional and curriculum leaders, assessment experts, disciplinarians, community builders, mentors, public relations/communication experts, carers/ surrogate parents, budget analysts, building managers, guardians, implementers of various legal, contractual and policy mandates and initiatives. Hence, they are managers and leaders.

However, as Dr Bezzina asked whether all this is what we really want and expressed his concern that we may be expecting too much of one person. Within the context of educational reform we need to see what we want. This can be achieved by challenging the 'old' models of headship and embrace the 'new' model of the school leader as defined by the National Minimum Curriculum documents and the latest document For All Children To Succeed. As a result, we also need to review current training models.

Dr Bezzina said that in Malta we are slowly realising that school leaders are distinguished by vision, passion and a critical spirit, while at the same time focusing on performance and classroom practice. Successful school leaders influence student achievement through two important pathways: the support and development of effective teachers, and the implementation of effective organisational processes.

Through the Master's programme, Dr Bezzina aims to develop, among other things, three sets of leadership practice. These are: developing people, setting direction for the organisation, and redesigning the organisation. Leaders need to enable teachers and other staff to do their jobs effectively, offering intellectual support and stimulation to improve their work, and providing models of practice and support. They also need to learn how to distribute leadership across levels by developing shared goals, monitoring organisational performance, and promoting effective communication. For this to take place, heads need to create a productive school culture, modifying organisational structures that undermine the work, and building collaborative processes.

The challenge within the Maltese context needs to be addressed at least at three levels. On the one hand we have to place the CPD of teachers at the centre of the reform process currently underway. We still treat as separate stages the initial teacher education of teachers and their CPD. We have also practically ignored the induction phase. This is a serious misgiving and needs to be addressed.

Secondly, he said we have to review the current certification for headship as an activity separate from what teachers do throughout their career. We need to link the identification of potential school leaders as they engage in distributed forms of leadership as their career in teaching unfolds. In this way we link the CPD of teachers within a learning context (e.g. the school) with the attraction and selection of potential school leaders. Thirdly, we need to see that educators occupying positions that aim to support and monitor school practices (as defined by the two envisaged directorates) are provided with appropriate professional programmes that allows them to have the academic and professional acumen to support school development and improvement.

School leaders, as Dr Bezzina added, do not just emerge. We also need a plan. We need central authorities to work with teacher education institutions and other bodies to identify courses that can adequately prepare school leaders, introduce programmes that can slowly prepare them for headship.

We can attract, select and develop potential school leaders by institutionalising different forms of leadership in schools, by certifying the position of assistant heads and introducing various forms of learning such as shadowing, a mentoring scheme, creating problem-based learning, establishing cohort groups which help to build individual/group knowledge, creative thinking and restructuring problems from multiple perspectives.

We need programmes that are research based and therefore incorporate knowledge of various aspects including organisational development, change management, collaborative decision making strategies, focusing on teaching and learning, creating a community culture, and developing management/leadership competencies. At the same time we need a leadership which is ethical in nature and value based. Within the context we are living in, this remains one of the major challenges.

The programmes we need have to reflect what Dr Bezzina defines as "curriculum coherence". We need to focus on visions, purposes and goals which are coherent internally and externally. We need to link theory and practice that is framed round adult learning theory. Reflection and critical analysis need to form part of the growth process.

Within this debate, Dr Bezzina longs for the time when we establish standards or licensure criteria that educational leadership programmes need to adhere too. This is one of the challenges that policies for improving the effectiveness of school leaders needs to embrace. These are some of the concerns that the European Commission is addressing and the sharing of policies and practices is a potentially effective method of peer learning.