Category Archives: Research Papers

The future of education in Scotland?

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I still haven’t received my copy of the The OECD report of Quality and Equity of Education in Scotland but I accessed the read only version as advised by John Connell.

I’ve had to type up the following – as I couldn’t cut and paste – apologies for any errors.

As I suspected it’s much more positive than any of the newspaper reports I read and sets out some very exciting recommendations. I think we are moving in many of these directions within East Lothian and it was very gratifying the see that they mentioned the potential of Student Evaluation of Learning – which was developed in East Lothian.

I’ll be returning to this report over the next few weeks but I just wanted to capture its essence in one place for ease of reference.

The report was compliled by educators from  Australia, Finland, New Zealand and Belgium – a point worth noting when reflecting upon the recommendations.

Strengths:

Few Countries can be said with confidence to outperform Scotland in Maths, reading and science.

Scotland has one of the most equitable school systems in the OECD.

Headteachers are amongst the most positive of school principals in the OECD in judging the adequacy of staffing and teaching resources and students are generally positive of their schools.

On national tests many children are one or two years in advance of expected levels.

The OECD examiners were impressed by the capacity of Scottish primary schools to respond to public expectations of continuously improving standards and consistency of outcomes.

Indicators of improvement as well as high international standards also show that Scotland’s confidence in its comprehensive system is well placed.
It is through Scottish Local Authorities that an equitable distribution of resources is managed, and they are also responsible for ensuring that schools are responsive to community needs, adaptive, and effective. The community Assets represented by schools are in capable hands. The professionalism and commitment of the education departments of the local authorities makes a wider reliance on them a good strategy.

Scotland’s approach to teacher induction is world class and the Scottish qualification for Headship is an outstanding and demanding programme.

Challenges

One major challenge facing Scottish education is to reduce the achievement gap which opens up about Primary 5 and continues to widen throughout the junior years secondary years (S1 to S4)

Children from poorer communities and low socio-economic status homes are more likely than others to under achieve.

Inequalities in staying-on rates, participation at different academic levels of national courses and pass rates on these courses are a concern

Understanding the challenges
Who you are in Scotland is far more important than what school you attend so far as achievement differences on international tests are concerned.

Children from poorer homes are more likely to under-achieve, disengage from school work, leave school earlier than others, and – if they continue to study at lower academic levels and record lower pass rates.

Curriculum innovation is appears to be modest and schools only have limited flexibility in teaching resources. These are two key instruments of change and adaptation in schools. So lack of more freedom in them makes achieving g high standards for all groups of students more difficult.

Schools should be able to build the mix of staffing they need to tackle the particular challenges they face and offer programmes which best address these challenges.

There is concern about the lack of reliable data on student achievement and school performance throughout Scotland..

Recommendations

These strategies aim at greater flexibility for the agencies which exercise the most direct responsibility for how schools work. We have sought a balance between greater freedom of action on the one hand, and greater transparency and accountability on the other.

National priorities funding through local government compacts

Some of the recommendations include:

A national innovation plan to fund educational improvements and outcomes through agreements with local authorities; fundin g for schools of ambition is more selective and targeted; that the Scottish Survey of Achievement be extended to all children.

Greater school autonomy in a local government framework

Some of the recommendations include:

 each local authority develops a policy framework which defines the priority targets it seeks to make including improvements in student opportunities and outcomes; where a local authority provides additional resources for equity purposes it should do so within a the framework on the national innovation plan; local authorities should negotiate agreements with schools under which greater management autonomy in staffing and curriculum is established in return for an agreed platform of improvement in learning opportunities and outcomes

A comprehensive , structured and accessible curriculum

Some of the recommendations include:

Each local authority develop an explicit policy framework which contains a charter of learning opportunities – a commitment to provide a wide range of education and training places which best suits the needs of the community; vocational courses should be available to all young people from S3 and that sequences of courses be developed spanning the compulsory and post compulsory years; the \Scottish government should support school based provision of school-based courses; each local authority establish a curriculum planning and pathways network which links schools, colleges and employers groups; Standard Grade examinations should be phased out as the 3-18 curriculum is implemented; that Scottish Certificate of Education be developed to sanction completion of an approved programme of studies of training – this graduation certificate would have defined minimum requirements to reflect the new purposes of the new 3-18 curriculum; young people pre S5 should undertake programme of studies with specified minimum standards leading to the SC of E at the and of that year or S6; young people who choose to leave at the age of 16 negotiate an individual plan for further education and training;.

Continuous review of the curriculum and teaching:Some of the recommendations include:Education authorities in Scotland should examine current approach to gathering student feedback on the quality of teaching (e.g. Student Evaluation of Learning Software) and that they work with teachers to gain wider acceptance of the most promising approaches; rolling consultations should be undertaken with teachers from a cross-section of schools regarding their classroom experience in delivering courses.

 

Monitoring school leaver destinations

Some of the recommendations include:

Consideration should be given to extending the scope of the Scottish survey of school leavers to make contact with children before they leave school and to provide fuller information about school achievement and experience; Careers Scotland should investigate approaches to providing all schools and local authorities with comprehensive pint-in-time data.

OECD Report on Scottish Education

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Apologies if I seem to be obsessed by OECD reports at the mooment but the recently published OECD Review of National Policies for Education – Quality and Equity of Schooling in Scotland is too important to ignore.

It’s very disappointing that the actual report is not freely available.  I’ve sent off for a copy and will review its findings on receipt.  One of the things I have learned over the last few weeks is that the analysis you read and hear in the media often miss out on some of the key messages.

The summary would seem to suggest that there  are some imperatives for change and I would probably agree with most of them .

Nevertheless, we should not ignore the opening statment in the OECD press release:

Scotland’s schools receive high marks in the latest OECD Review of National Policies for Education, which notes that Scotland has one of the most equitable and best performing education systems in OECD countries. 

PIRLS – some observations

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It must be just the time of year but a plethora of international acheivement data is being made available in matter of a few weeks.

The most recent of these is the Progress in International Literacy Study 2006 PIRLS you can download the entire report from here but beware it’s 63mb and takes along time to download.

I’ve taken a look specifically at Scotland’s data and here are some of my observations. 

The PIRLS assessment tests children’s reading ability typically at the end of their fourth year of primary schooling, in  Scotland it’s the fifth as we tend to start one year earlier than most other countries.  The average age of Scottish pupils taking the test was 9.9 years of age which was actually younger than the age of children taking the test in most other countries.

The PIRLS average was 500 points and the Scottish score was 527 – 26th place out of 40.  The top three countries were Russia (565), Singapore (564) and Canada, Alberta (560). Scotland’s score was virtually identical to the last time the test was done in 2001 (528) – down 1 point, whereas some countries had changed their systems in response to the 2001 results and made significant progress, e.g  Russia + 37 and Singapore + 30, England had dropped -13 points.

Gender is a significant issue in terms of reading attainment across the world with girls scoring on average 17 points higher than boys, in Scotland girls scored 22 points higher than boys. Yet in Luxembourg the difference is only 3%, whilst a very large country such as the U.S it’s only 10%.  Scotland is also moving in the wrong diraction with the difference increasing by 3% in girls favour, whilst globally the gap has closed by 5%. 

The average class size was 24, Scotland’s was 26, Singapore was 38 and in Russia the average was 22.

There was some very fascinating data presented about the classroom organisation of students. Whole class reading was a feature of 35% of world classrooms whilst only a feature of 6% of Scottish classrooms; whereas only 8% of global classrooms used same- ability groupings, whilst it was a feature of 54% of Scottish classrooms, a figure only surpassed by New Zealand. In the top five countries only 5% of classrooms had same ability groupings.

Parents reading for enjoyment showed Scotland to be in the top 3 countries in the world at 63%.

Pupil’s positive attitude to reading Scotland has fallen  (- 5%) with only 42 % of children being very positive about reading against a global average of 49%.

Scottish pupils reading stories or novels outside school has also dropped – 5% to 35% just above the global average of 32%.

Only 33% of Scottish pupils said they read for fun outside school, the global average being 40% – there appeared quite a significant correlation between those countries who scored high for reading for fun outside school and teading attainmant.

25% of international classrooms have reading taught for more than 6 hours per week.  In Scotland the figure was 12% – a drop of -2% from 2001, whereas most other countries have seen an increase.

56% of international classrooms have reading featuring as a daily activity, in Scotland it’s 44%

Whole class teaching takes up 57% of the week in intenational classrooms – in Scotland it’s 44%

 13% of Scottish children were reported to need “remedial” (sic) instruction in reading, the international  figure was 17%.

Only 6% of Scottish teachers reported that gave the pupils a quiz about reading on a weekly basis, wheras the international figure was 26%.

I’ve picked out the main discrepancies between Scotland and international comparators – I’m convinced there are some important lessons to be taken from this research.

Children and parents as customers?

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I’ve been reading the Demos paper “Journey to the Interface” which I referred to in the recent leadership dilemma.  It’s a long document but a remarkably easy read and very thought provoking.

The paper’s focus is the development of “customer-centred services”. There a huge range of issues emerging from the paper which would be worthy of further extended discussion but the first and over-riding question is whether or not education is a service which has “customers”?

If you are reading this as a parent you might wonder what on earth I’m on about but in my experience, people involved in education have a real problem with being seen as the providers of a service to customers. So here’s my simplistic interpretation of the problem:

Most teachers see themselves as being involved – to a greater or lesser extent – in a moral activity, whereas customers are seen to be consumers of a commodity – and educators are not comfortable with the idea of education being a commodity.

However, the modern conceptualisation of a public service extends far beyond the notion of  service as a commodity but much more about “co-production”:

Many of the new priorities – ‘respect’, an end to ‘binge drinking’, ‘recycling’, ‘improved public health’ – cannot be achieved by a smart government delivery machine; they require changes in behaviour from the public. This means not simply reconsidering how to deliver using public or even private resources, but how to access the ‘free’ resources of public energy, engagement and action. So a child learning is both consuming an education and producing a cohort of lifelong learners. Someone attending a smoking cessation course is both consuming a health service and producing a healthy population. The idea of co-production demands that public servants and politicians focus not only on the internal workings and efficiencies of existing services, but also on how people engage with those services, and how they can be mobilised, coached and encouraged to participate in the ‘common enterprise’ of generating positive outcomes.  (Demos 2006)

It is this form of customer facing service that we need to develop in public service education, where we work to improve the outcomes for children by co-producing the service by engaging with children and parents as customers.

It’s in relation to this question that I came across this paper by Sockett 1997 who set out five key challenges facing education if it were to reconfigure itself as customer oriented service:

First, the notion of service. The traditional sense of the teacher is of a person who is legally in authority, but is also an authority, to some degree, on what he or she teaches. In opposition to that notion is that of the teacher as a caring individual, concerned more for the child than the subject. The notion of the child and the parent as customer subsumes those ideas but places both in a formal position of equality. The child and the parent are not there to be managed, but to be served.

Second the notion of the individual. Thinking of a customer obliterates the notion of a common curriculum and educational pathway as currently understood. Curriculum is customized for the child, with the parent. For the rationale of how children currently progress through education, in terms of grade-levels, of subjects to be covered, of assessment is not, I believe, conducive to either relationships of trust, or more importantly, to the child’s moral and educational welfare.

Third, a challenge to ingenuity. Seeing children and parents as customers tests our pedagogical ingenuity and our moral initiative. No longer can we regard Angela and John as interesting curiosities to be researched, or phenomena to be placed in statistical data on delinquency and dropout. It is just such a sense of the child and parent as customer that is creating such educational excitement.

Finally, relative equality. The fact that children and parents are customers does not mean that control is surrendered, any more than it does in any other customer-service provider relationship. Rather, it puts additional power into a moral partnership of teacher, child and parent which has been too long coming.

Sockett suggests that seeing children and parents as customers can serve to sharpen our relationships with them, and in that new relationship begin to create new and more appropriate ways of interacting all with a view to improving the outcomes of the service.

Perhaps Scotland has real opportunity to tie two separate developments together into a coherent and unifying point of focus through co-production of the service between users and professionals?  I’m referring here to the Parental Involvement Act and A Curriculum for Excellence where both give the users (children and parents) a key role in shaping the service in collaboration with the professionals.

So are children and parents customers?

Moving from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”.

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I came across this critical finding from the unesco research report I’ve been reviewing:

“One way to consider these results is that there is a critical transition from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”. For most students this happens at about age 8 or 9, typically by the end of the third grade. If children are not able to read  with ease and understand what they are reading when they enter fourth grade, they are less able to take advantage of the learning opportunities that lie ahead. A critical indicator for countries therefore is the percentage of children that are able to make this transition successfully.“

It’s evidence like this which we must use to develop policy. I think we focus too much on the primary to secondary transition point as being the critical point by which children should have mastered basics – when in actual fact it’s far too late by then.

Teacher Intentions – can we separate from context?

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Up until last week I’d been using teacher intention and learning intention as interchangable terms.

However, when I was took part in a discussion with our newly qualified teachers last week I began to wonder if they might actually be different – or at least one being a sub-set of the other?

Ann McLanachan made very useful contribution to this debate when she stressed the need to try to separate the learning intention from the context. Given some of the work we have been doing relating to the importance of disciplinary learning  I wondered if we can ever really separate learning intention from context – and that perhaps teacher intention is more related to an awareness of context and what the next step in learning might be.

Back in the the early 1990’s I undertook some research which explored the physical education curriculum by referring to the intentions of teachers and the functions of activities. For example – what were teachers intentions when they taught gymnastics and how might that differ from when they were teaching a team game or another form or activity?

At the time I surveyed half the schools in Scotland and interviewed a large number of teachers. What transpired was that the different activities fulfilled different functions, e.g:

  • gymnastics was seen to be primarily connected with the fulfillment of the following functions skill (discrete physical skills which formed part of the activity); aesthetic ( to develop an awareness and appreciation of phyiscal movement); and cognitive (to promote knowledge about the facts and principles associated with physical education);
  • whereas, the functions of a team game were primarily skill; social (using an activity to enhance children’s ability to interact, communicate and co-operate with other people in a socially acceptable manner); leisure (to develop children’s awareness of activities which can constitute adult leisure interests).

One of the conclusions of my research was that the activity – or the context – had a significant influence upon the the focus the teacher took when teaching that activity, i.e. a teacher wouldn’t try to use swimming to promote children’s understanding of “right” and “wrong” in a moral sense, whereas they might when teaching games.

My point here is that context does influence the intentions of the teacher and we must take account of the context when considering learning intentions.

However, I totally agree with Ann McLanachan when she stressed the importance of ensuring that the teacher and the learners share an understanding of the learning intention.  I came across an interesting piece of research relating to language teaching which backed this up:

Recent explorations in task-based pedagogy have pointed out that learning outcome is the result of a fairly unpredictable interaction between the learner, the task, and the task situation. From the teacher‘s perspective, then, achievement of success depends largely on the degree to which teacher intention and learner interpretation of a given task converge. The narrower the gap between teacher intention and learner interpretation, the greater are the chances of achieving desired learning outcomes.

I wonder then if learning intention might be the thing which the teacher and the learner work out as an agreed understanding of what it is they are going to be doing in that lesson – which would bring together the potentially divergent points of view as represented by the teacher’s intention and the learner’s interpretation?

Types of Intervention

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I’ve been reviewing a Research paper from UNESCO “Learning Divides: ten policy questions about the performance and equity of school and schooling systems”

The paper uses results from Wilms and Somers, 2001, which explored the relationship between results from Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and socioeconomic status.

Not surprisingly, in every country there is a gradient in student performance associated with family socioeconomic status: youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds  have weaker literacy skills on average than those from more advantaged backgrounds. The results revealed that the strength of this relationship varies considerably among countries, suggesting that some are more successful than others in reducing the disparities associated with socioeconomic status.

The focus of the paper is to establish a general framework for analysing educational data that are collected in international, national and local studies. This is accomplished by setting out ten key policy questions that provide a more explicit link between educational indicators and practice.

I’ll consider, some of these questions in a separate post, but I want to capture here some of the types of intervention which were identified by the authors.

The interventions are:

  1. UNIVERSAL INTERVENTIONS
  2. SOCIOECONOMIC (SES)- TARGETED INTERVENTIONS
  3. COMPENSATORY INTERVENTIONS
  4. PERFORMANCE INTERVENTIONS

What struck me was how well these definitions suit education policy in Scotland. It is interesting to explore the evidence from across the globe as to the efficacy of each of these interventions.

Universal interventions strive to increase the educational performance of all children through reforms that are applied equally across the schooling system. Generally they are aimed at altering the content and pace of the curriculum, improving instructional techniques or the learning environment in schools and classrooms. 

Some universal interventions strive to improve children’s learning environments by changing the structural features of schools. 

Most universal interventions, however, are directed at changing teacher practice. Teachers regularly receive in-service programmes pertaining to instructional approaches, assessment strategies and classroom management. 

 Perhaps the most prevalent universal intervention among OECD countries has been to increase the accountability of schools and schooling systems through the assessment of student performance. The underlying belief is that increased accountability will motivate administrators and teachers to improve the learning

SES-targeted interventions aim to improve the educational performance of students with low socioeconomic status by providing a specialised curriculum or additional instructional resources. The classic example is Head Start pre-school programmes for children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, but there is a wide range of programmes that target “at risk” children and youth.  The important distinction is that these programmes select children based on the family’s SES or some other factor correlated with SES rather than on the cognitive ability of the child.

Compensatory interventions provide additional economic resources to students from low SES backgrounds. These could be considered a subset of SES targeted interventions, as they target children from low SES families, rather than children with low cognitive performance. However, the emphasis is on improving the economic circumstances of children from poor families rather than providing a specialised curriculum or additional educational resources. The provision of transfer payments to poor families is a good example because it is one of the  primary policy levers at the national level in many countries.

Performance-targeted interventions provide a specialised curriculum or additional instructional resources for particular students based on their levels of academic performance. For example, in most schooling systems, students with special needs are provided with additional support through special education programmes. Some schooling systems provide early prevention programmes that target children who are deemed at risk of school failure when they enter kindergarten or the first grade, while other systems provide late prevention or recovery programmes for children who fail to progress at a normal rate during the first few years of elementary school. Some performance-targeted programmes aim to improve children’s capacity to learn by reducing maladaptive behaviour or improving self-esteem. These and other counselling and clinical programmes can also be placed in this category even though they are usually targeted towards children with certain behaviours rather than those with low academic performance. At the secondary school level, these programmes are often delivered in “alternative” schools. Some performance-targeted programmes aim to provide a modified curriculum for students with high academic performance or for gifted students. More generally, programmes that track or stream students into different types of programmes can be considered performance-targeted interventions, because they strive to match curriculum and instruction to students’ academic ability or performance. Grade repetition could be considered a performance-targeted intervention, because the decision to have a child repeat a grade is usually based mainly on school performance; however, in many cases grade repetition does not entail a modified curriculum or additional instructional resources and, therefore, would not fit the definition of a performance-targeted intervention.

Building Leadership Capacity

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One of the things I’m going to try to keep up over the next few months is to regularly review educational research papers. Hopefully the reviews will build up into a useful resource to inform my own practice. The research papers will be derived from resource links on my blogroll (not really too comfortable with that word but I don’t have any option).  It was in the Journal of Research for Education Leaders that I spotted this interesting paper on Building Leadership Capacity through Educational Leadership Programs (sic), Greenlee 2007.

We’ve recently been exploring how we might do this through the Leadership Development Network but it’s good to find some supporting evidence for the path we are looking to take. I’ve highlighted things which stand out for me in bold.

Greenlee’s starting premise is that:

For real school change to occur, both teachers and administrators must understand theoretically and practically “the nature of leadership and the complex systems in which leadership is exercised” (Bolman & Deal, 1994), however teacher leaders receive little or no preparation for leading.

The study set out to explore whether educational leadership training programmes have any impact on the leadership skills of teachers.

Greenlee provides a very useful literature review – some of which are worth repeating here:

Teacher leadership has been advanced as an essential component of successful school reform and the professionalization of teachers (Lieberman, Saxl & Miles, 2000).

Wasley (1991) provides that while teacher leaders benefit from collaborative arrangements they also have “the ability to encourage colleagues to change, to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily consider without the influence of the leader”.

Katzenmeyer and Moller (2001) assert that “teachers, who are leaders lead within and beyond the classroom, identify with and contribute to a community of teacher learners and leaders, and influence others towards improved educational practice”

John Gabriel (2005) describes teacher leaders as those who influence school culture, build and maintain a successful team, and equip other potential teacher leaders to improve student achievement.

Studies have found that teachers participating in decision-making and collaborative teacher-principal leadership contribute to school effectiveness, teaching quality, and improvement in student performance (Glover, Miller, Gambling, Gough & Johnson, 1999; Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2001; Marks & Louis, 1997; Ovando, 1996; Taylor & Bogotch, 1994).

Furthermore, when the collective capabilities of teachers are brought together to deal with complex problems, manage ambiguous tasks, and develop new courses of action then their commitment to the profession increases (Barth 2001; Smylie & Brownlee-Conyers, 1992).

However:

The technical rational side of school advocates a traditionally organized institution held together by fairly applied authority and accountability for achieving results (Deal & Peterson, 1994; Tyack & Cuban, 1995)

Teacher leadership emerges as an essential component of school improvement within this traditional environment of formal organizational roles that define competence (knowing about educational leading) and authority (formal leadership roles). However, teachers are “almost never provided with lenses to help them understand the nature of leadership and the complex systems in which leadership is exercised” (Bolman & Deal, 1994).

Teacher leadership is not about empowering teachers by merely decentralizing decision-making authority. Rather, it is about mobilizing the frontline forces by increasing teachers’ access to resources, information and expertise in order to positively affect school change (Hallinger & Richardson, 1988).

Linda Lambert (2005) noted that those schools had high leadership capacity, which she defines as “broad-based, skillful participation in the work of leadership” (p. 63).  She found that as schools build leadership capacity, principals and teacher leaders become more alike than different as teachers begin to initiate action, take more responsibility for school effectiveness, frame problems, and seek solutions.

This is consistent with Sergiovanni’s (2001) notion of leadership density. He argues that high leadership density means that many people work collaboratively, are trusted with information, participate in decision-making, and contribute to creation and transfer of knowledge. However, all too often, teachers lack the educational leadership knowledge and skills that will make them successful school leaders.

A distributive leadership model emphasizes a perspective on “how leadership practice is distributed among positional and informal leaders as well as their followers” (Spillane, Hallett, & Diamond, 2003, p.16). Accordingly, teacher leadership for schools thrives when leadership is distributed in democratic learning communities.

Sarason argues that “schools will remain intractable to desired reform as long as we avoid confronting these existing power relationships” (1990, p. 5). Still, the fact remains, that the principal holds a key position in the school hierarchy and teacher leadership capacity is dependent on the attitudes and abilities of school administrators to create conditions which are conducive towards an egalitarian model of leadership (Lambert, 1998).

Challenges/barriers to change:  

One cannot ignore the strong norms of isolation, conformity and autonomy operating in schools that make teacher leadership difficult to implement (Barth, 2001; Little, 1995; Lieberman, 1988.

Distributed leadership structures may place teachers with little or no formal power on a comparative standing with administrators who hold considerable positional power

It should not come as a surprise then that the extent to which leadership is distributed may be a function of the attitude and inclination of the school principal (Hallinger & Heck, 1999; Lambert, 1998).

In order for schools to be leadership rich, the traditional roles of principals and teachers must be renegotiated through knowledge. In essence, if teachers are to be empowered in democratic learning communities then formal preparation for leadership should include teachers.

Conclusions about the impact of Educational Leadership Programmes;

Teacher leadership is not about empowering teachers. Rather, it is about organizing the largely unused leadership capital in teachers to positively affect school change.

Unfortunately, as teacher participants learned and practiced their skills and knowledge, they experienced resistance from other faculty and feelings of alienation.

Activities in the Educational Leadership (EDL) program promoted increased contact with the principal which seemed to alienate EDL students from their peers. The principals’ behaviors toward EDL students may have been interpreted as favoritism.

Roland Barth (2001), sometimes teacher colleagues exhibit an “inhospitable” ethos to teacher leadership or believe that the teacher leader receives unmerited recognition from the administration. For many teachers (48%) in this study this was a barrier to teacher leadership.

In general, a critical condition for teacher leadership is the extent to which school principals arrange structures to make leadership opportunities available to teachers.

It seems obvious the potential of teacher leadership remains underdeveloped. Perhaps the problem here is the notion of “distributing” leadership roles and responsibilities without distributing the necessary knowledge and skills to influence real school improvement efforts.

While educational leadership preparation programs deal primarily with preparing school principals, the knowledge and skills that facilitate working in democratic learning environments offered in these programs are not provided to teachers in their formal preparation programs. School improvement efforts may be enhanced by breaking down the barriers between the two forms of leadership and preparing both teachers and administrators to lead in democratic learning communities

Personal reflections:

1. There is significant untapped leadership potential in all our schools

2. We need to develop leadership programmes for all staff

3. Whatever types of programmes we develop we should try to prevent participants from being seen as being different from their peers.

4. We should challenge the traditional hierachical view of leadership in schools.