Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2008

IN FOCUS

Leadership for Changing Times

In 2007 Bruce Addison, Director of the Social and Environmental Studies Faculty, completed his doctoral studies. Undertaken in the area of educational leadership, the study utilised literature stemming from economics, political economy and educational sociology. Dr Addison shares some of his findings on the change forces impacting on the leadership of school principals:

in schools when I first commenced teaching. Schools are run very differently today from the way they were run twenty years ago. These changes had caused principalship to shift from a school-based view of the world to a more business-oriented view of the world. Such changes were much bigger than the worldview of any one principal or any one school. These were systemic changes and were not confined to any one school, state or nation—these changes were philosophic and they were global. They were causing a rethink in the way organisations were perceived and run. It became evident that the belief systems of the corporate world, belief systems I thought I had left behind in the confines of an earlier career in the banking industry, were now exercising an all-pervasive influence on the operating environment in which principals worked. The question I was constantly asking myself was, where did the traditional concepts of schooling and principalship lie with all of this? The study tended to raise more questions than it answered as is often the case with qualitative research. However, a

The concept for my doctoral research began to form back in 2001. I had become interested in the increasing exposure of schools to theories and practices emanating from the business sector and the extent of their impact on principal leadership. From my perspective as a teacher working in the classroom principalship seemed to have moved away from the familiar school-centric head-teacher approach. Principals working in large independent schools, such as Girls Grammar, were now very much styled as chief executive officers. Principals’ operating environments were being swept along by elements that were far from educational. They were confronting an array of challenges that were not in a direct sense linked to the familiar areas of teaching and learning. Much of the literature on change depicts schools as unchanging modernist relics in a world in which change is said to be one of the only givens. My direct experience of schools does not support such a contention. I have found my working life to be one in which change is an ever present reality. What occurs in schools in 2008 is very different from what occurred

number of findings were of particular relevance to the independent school sector. Principals working in independent secondary schools tended to have life and work experiences that went beyond the field of schools. This experience appears to have given them a breadth of insight when dealing with issues as diverse as corporate governance and enterprise bargaining. These issues originate from a world so very far removed from the process of teaching and learning yet today occupy a position of pre-eminence within the world view of principals. Interestingly the study concluded that a number of forces emanating from the economic field have done much to reinforce the development of student care programmes in independent schools. Principals consistently rated, with equal importance, the provision of both high-quality student care programmes and high-quality academic programmes. It was found that economic change had created this situation. It will be interesting to continue to observe the evolution of principalship and the interplay at work between economic change and socio-educational change.

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