By Torben Clausen // Quarterly@remove-this.dpu.dk

Why has school leadership become such a big issue today? Is it part of a conscious attempt to change the way schools operate, or is it a necessary adjustment to changing facts on the ground, i.e. in schools and in the teaching profession?

"I think we're seeing a convergence of national level policy concerns and local conditions in schools and communities that are making the role of the school leader more intense, more complex, and broader in scope. National governments have recognized that school leadership is a linchpin to the kind of improvement in schooling needed to respond effectively to such conditions as the globalized marketplace, demographic shifts, and technological change, for example.

At the same time, more sophisticated approaches to teaching and learning, parental demands for more individualized and personalized curriculum and instruction, and added measures of autonomy and accountability on school heads and staff are creating challenges for which new forms of school leadership are needed. Parents, teachers, local and national governments, and social partners all have come to a keener appreciation of the critical role of school leaders in helping to improve student learning, in linking educational policy and practice, and in connecting schools to their environments.

By the same token, these groups recognize the corresponding need to renew the skills of today's leaders and take steps to prepare tomorrow's leaders through a combination of redefining school leaders' responsibilities, distributing the performance of leadership more effectively within the school, better training and selection, and improving the appeal and working conditions of the school leader's career.

Demographic developments are also reinforcing the focus on school leadership. In most OECD countries, the leadership workforce is ageing and large numbers of school leaders will retire over the next five to ten years. Across OECD countries, a large majority of principals are aged over 50, especially in Korea (99%), French Belgium (81%) and Denmark (76%).

This nearing "retirement boom" in the leadership workforce brings new challenges and opportunities to education systems. On the one hand, it means a major loss of experience that schools need to cope with. But on the other hand, it also gives countries an unprecedented opportunity to recruit and develop a new generation of school leaders suited to meet the current and future needs of education systems.

"Who or what is driving this focus on school leadership? Is it politicians, is it school leaders themselves, or is it teachers who demand better leadership?"

The focus on school leadership is motivated by a broad recognition that improved school leadership is a critical part of the goals held by many different segments of society. We have, you might say, the ideal conditions for change in that a broad consensus of the importance of school leadership is held across parents and community, teachers, school leaders themselves, municipalities and school authorities at different levels, social partners and business and industry, and national policymakers.

In the course of our Improving School Leadership study, we heard teachers asking for leaders who were more skilled at supporting and guiding instruction, at focusing the curriculum and evaluating teachers, at creating school conditions that supported excellent instruction.

School leaders too said they needed such skills and they called for the autonomy and responsibility they needed to make and carry through on pedagogically sound decisions in their schools. Governments at all levels see that effective school leadership is needed if government policies are to be implemented as intended and to achieve desired student learning outcomes.

For some time, and in some countries, the question has been whether and to what extent the multiple perspectives of various interests were compatible and could work in harmony. They have not always, but we think they can, and the thrust of the Improving School Leadership report is to identify a set of policy levers and practices that embrace and coordinate the mutual interests and purposes of various groups in society."

In a recent presentation, you said that the role of school leaders has changed dramatically in three areas. What do you mean by dramatically?

"I think I can illustrate the dramatic nature of the changes in the school leadership role in a couple of different ways. In the presentation you refer to, I identified school autonomy and decentralization, accountability for outcomes, and new approaches to teaching and learning as areas of change.

Think first of the dramatically different images of schooling embodied in these changes. For most of the 20th Century, schools looked and functioned a lot like the bureaucratic and industrial models that characterized most workplaces. Processes were organized for efficiency, school heads acted primarily as managers, and getting the right mix of such inputs as teachers and books was their chief concern.

But as concerns grew that our schools were not producing the outcomes we sought, this industrial orientation began to shift to something called the 'new public management, which placed the emphasis on decentralization, autonomy and local control, and accountability for results. School leaders then needed to learn entirely new skills in order to motivate and guide teachers, share decision-making with parents and boards, and meet the goals set by higher levels of the system.

More recently a third image, that of "distributed leadership" in a "learning organization" has come to complement the image of new public management. A learning organization shifts the initiative for leadership from the hierarchical leader to the many different actors in the school organization, makes communication of the goal and vision paramount, and calls for widespread capacity to work collaboratively and to share responsibility.

The industrial model, the new public management, and the learning organization represent strikingly different images of organizations, each calling for very different values, habits of mind, and skills on the part of both school leaders and teachers.

More concretely, the practice of leadership and the skills needed for effective practice are strikingly different from those that used to define the school head. In fact, the burden of the three conditions I mentioned has been to intensify the school leader's responsibilities, to make the role more complex, and to expand the scope of the leader's job. 

First, the school leader must take on a greater number of administrative and managerial tasks occasioned by autonomy under decentralized schools. More effort too must be invested in managing human and financial resources. The school leader is taking on responsibilities akin to those required to run a small business.

Second, the school leader's greater accountability for achieving specified outcomes entails a radical shift toward a capacity for strategic planning, assessment and monitoring, toward much greater emphasis on staff evaluation and development, and toward the use of data to measure achievement and inform continuous improvement.

And third, the leadership emphasis moves from managing work processes to leading instruction and new approaches to teaching and learning. School leaders now need to provide powerful instructional leadership, aligning the instructional resources with desired student outcomes, motivating teachers to adopt new practices, helping to teach them and to guide their development, substituting collaborative teaching practice for isolated classroom practice, personalizing and individualizing instruction to meet the diversity of student needs and abilities, and focusing constantly on the improvement of student achievement.

Some of the key words you use to describe the role of the school leader are 'running a small business' and 'strategic planning'. If you were to describe the situation of school leaders before, today and in the future, would this image of the small business be your preferred image?

"This goes to the heart of the paradox and challenge of improving school leadership. The fairly recent emphasis on decentralization and autonomy, along with accountability, have in fact introduced a range of elements into school leadership that are like those of running a small business.

Strategic planning is one of them, measurement of results and continuous improvement, personnel evaluation and development, financial management and budgeting are other dimensions. But these 'business-like' aspects of school leadership, if you will, are but one facet of a far richer organizational schema, and they are subordinate to the core mission of the schools to help improve the learning outcomes of an increasingly diverse body of students against increasingly challenging curriculum and standards.

So while business lends one image to the school leadership role, public accountability and collaborative decision-making provides another, the functions of a learning organization I have mentioned earlier yet another. We are moving from the image of bureaucratic management to an image of instructional leadership or of leadership of learning organizations. 

Imagine how Microsoft or Google might describe themselves. Their core business is learning and knowledge management, as well as making a profit. Business methods are essential, but new kinds of leadership and work practices are needed to maintain organizations that are flexible, adapt to change, help everyone to learn and improve, track and enhance standards of production, and satisfy demanding customers.

The mission and leadership practices of knowledge management organizations in both public and private sector may not be all that dissimilar, but they are a far cry from the routine practices of schools and business organizations of just a couple of decades ago."


Are concepts from private sector management like 'strategic planning' the most important concepts for school leaders today to take on board? Should future school leaders even have MBA's?

"The most important concepts for school leaders to take on board are embodied in the terms 'instructional leadership' and 'leadership for learning'. When these terms are unpacked, they reveal a rich world of school practice focusing on shared leadership with tasks and responsibilities widely distributed through a school, advanced understanding of student cognition and in-depth teaching for understanding, mastery of instruction in many different situations and leadership that assesses and develops excellent instruction, teacher professional practice that is open, developmental, and collaborative, and engagement of school and community, professionals and parents and boards.

Practices from the private sector like strategic planning and the skills and understanding engendered by business degrees can of course be powerful tools in leading that is oriented toward instruction and learning. For the most complex and largest schools, the need for such might be even greater than in smaller and less complex schools. Clearly, however, the emphasis in improving school leadership must be on equipping school leaders for their instructional mission."


How does the need for school leadership become evident?

"The need for improved school leadership becomes evident when school professionals, school authorities, communities, and governments have some template against which to assess their schools and the quality of their leadership and to find them in need of improvement.

Volumes 1 and 2 of our final report Improving School Leadership are filled with good examples of such templates and situations exemplifying the need for improvement. One important tool we have recommended, for example, is the adoption by countries of a profile or set of standards or framework that defines the contemporary school leader's role and provide measures for assessing and developing leadership competence.

Many countries are making great strides in working with such tools, among them Chile, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Victoria, Australia, and New Zealand.

There are also broader criteria according to which countries identify the need for improved school leadership. England, for example, as described in OECD's ISL case study 'The English approach to system leadership,' has determined that some of its schools are not meeting national performance standards against uniform national examinations.

Leaders of these schools can be provided with inservice training to improve their competence, they can be paired with more successful leaders in partnerships, they can participate in national reform networks, or they can be replaced by other exemplary leaders.

The case study 'Building leadership capacity for system improvement in Austria' illustrates another set of circumstances. Here, Austrian school authorities determined that the inculcation of new school leadership values and practices was needed to help support educational reforms that went counter to the hierarchical national school organization and traditional culture of centralized control.

The Austrian Leadership Academy is training thousands of school leaders at the school, inspectorate, regional, and national levels in a sophisticated leadership model geared to the needs of Austria's education reform agenda."

 Is school leadership in a bad state cf. the title of your project 'Improving school leadership'?

"Each of the 22 countries participating in the Improving School Leadership activity held a commitment to providing the best education program possible and recognized the importance of improving school leadership toward that end. The various reports each country commissioned of its own system indicates a great range of leadership policy and practice. Many countries have in place or are designing some very innovative and effective or promising policies and practices. Most countries have also identified ways in which they can and want to improve.

We in OECD believe that leadership policy and practice across the board will benefit considerably from four policy levers:

- Redefining school leadership responsibilities
- Distributing school leadership more broadly
- Developing the skills of school leaders, and
- Making school leadership a more attractive profession."

Is this situation common for all OECD-countries, are the challenges the same, or do some countries stand out?

"The country reports, our follow-up surveys, the experiences shared at several international workshops and conferences, and our final reports seem to show both that OECD countries share some common conditions and goals and that they differ in many significant ways.

International economic competition, global and internal demographic shifts, pervasive technological changes, among other conditions, are the common lot of OECD countries, and the need to make the best possible use of all human resources, to equip all citizens to succeed, leads OECD countries to share a common commitment with education that is more challenging, more responsive, more personalized and individualized, more efficient, and more flexible.

At the same time, each country has its own history, traditions, character, and values. These ensure that countries respond to relatively common conditions in unique or at least individualized ways.

The Anglo-Saxon countries, for example, have tended toward more nationally directed reforms; part of their challenge is to introduce grater flexibility and local variation. Some Scandinavian countries have traditions of strong local independence and shared leadership; one of their challenges is how to benefit from the potential of national education standards or accountability measures and to gear leadership to their demands.

Countries with very strong traditions of teacher autonomy have a bigger challenge or a longer road to travel in thinking through how best to strengthen the roles of school leaders. Our experience suggests that the collaboration in ISL across countries with so much in common and so many differences has been a very rich source of inspiration and support for all."

If you were asked to give a presentation to a group of newly appointed school leaders from OECD-countries and you were to give them some specific advice they could use to become successful in their job, what would you say to them?

"One hesitates to dispense advice cavalierly. The job of the school leader is immensely difficult. The context of each school is different. But one thing we can say with confidence is that the job of the school leader has been changing and it may no longer resemble the job most school leaders recall from their own or their children's school days or from their familiarity with many of the voguish leadership formulae.

We think our ISL reports give both an excellent conceptual overview of the redefined role of the school leader as well as some explicit depictions of excellent leadership at work.

If new school leaders can develop a firm conceptual understanding of the nature of excellent schooling and the leadership that guides them, and if they can observe and practice the kinds of skills we describe in our final reports, in the case studies in particular, they will be well on their way toward becoming top notch school leaders."


And what would you say to the politicians in the room next door having a discussion on how to reform school leadership to make them understand their own role in improving school leadership? For instance, do they need to get more involved in designing systems and revising school structures, or do they need to give more room for local decisions to be made?

"Let me correct any implication that there is necessarily a contradiction between what policymakers do to redesign systems and revise school structures, on the one hand, and latitude for local initiative and decision-making on the other. Both are necessary, and each can be compatible with the other.

One of the main, if implicit, messages of our Improving School Leadership reports is that both firm, informed central policymaking and well-supported, flexible local practice are needed if we are to get the schools and leadership we envision.

Our four policy levers define the critical areas where we believe national policymakers should take action. We also illustrate the necessity of school level autonomy, autonomy that is carefully designed and bolstered with administrative support and skill development.

It would be a mistake to use a slogan to characterize an implicit dichotomy between central authorities and school leaders. While some policies have hamstrung or overburdened local leaders, or while some leaders have been unwilling or unable adequately to implement policy, leaders at all levels - from national policymakers to school-level-leaders - must see themselves as system leaders, individuals united within the common frame of one system that calls for the best collaborative efforts of all."

Should we be pleased with this new focus on school leadership? Are there any drawbacks for school leaders, teachers, and pupils?

"I think we have reason to be very pleased. The new focus is providing the opportunity for much-needed improvement. The premise of OECD's Improving School Leadership activity has been that this improvement will be most efficient and effective if it is guided by the best of current research and informed thought we can marshal.

We think the findings and recommendations in our reports provide guidance to make the necessary improvements. It's important to keep in mind that improvement means that people and systems have to change, and changing can be hard.

Change involves loss and often generates resistance. When we ask people to change, we need to realize the cost change entails and be sure to give those undergoing the change a great deal of support, by making the case for the change, by involving them in the process, by giving them lots of information and feedback, and by providing as much training and technical assistance for adopting the new ways as possible.

What initiatives can we look forward to next that will further school leadership?
"Within the OECD Education Directorate, work is underway towards producing the initial report from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), scheduled for publication in mid-June 2009, one chapter of which will be devoted to the analysis of school leadership.

The chapter will use the recommendations from our Improving School Leadership report as a reference point for the analysis and will help countries to assess their position against the Improving School Leadership recommendations."