Great to see edubuzz back up and online again.  I’ve missed you.

My new responsibilities require me to adopt a clear and consistent leadership approach. However, if I am going to add value I need to “learn to let go” and provide my leadership colleagues with the necessary space and support to allow them to drive and lead their respective services, teams, schools, etc.

I’m not just about talking here about letting go in terms of operational control but also moving away from the approach which is characterised by self-preservation of the organisation, which can often be to the detriment of the needs of the people whom we serve. I know that loyalty to a group, or an organisation is a powerful means of motivating and holding together potentially disparate individuals. However, the new world in which we live is not going to be dependent upon the power of the group, but on the capacity of the group to adapt, change and, above all, form strong partnerships with others who share the same purpose. Consequently the traditional leadership approach, which builds group allegiance, often represented by a “we’re better than others” mentality, does not fit with our new environment. (If in fact, it ever did.)

Learning to Lead: some building blocks

1. Know that I can do SOME things better than others, but that others can do MOST things better than me.

2. Have the confidence not to know the answer and the willingness to say “I got that wrong”.

3. Realise that my principle role is to keep our focus on the needs of the people whom we serve.

4. Recognise that modelling leadership behaviour isn’t enough on its own to lead to system improvement, but that it can have a significant influence upon others.

5. Encourage others to tell me to STOP doing things if it’s getting in the way of their goals.

6. Encourage others to use my role as necessary to remove barriers or challenge practice.

7. Focus my attention upon enabling others, encouraging innovation, championing our values, and ensuring that we get it right for every person.

8. Think before I act and ask myself if my taking action undermines or supports my colleagues.

9. Talk openly with my colleagues about our respective roles and how I can enable them to their jobs even more effectively.

10. Demand an “outward facing” perspective focused on meeting the needs of the people we serve which is not limited by personal, professional or organisational boundaries.

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I visited West Barns Primary School yesterday and was privileged to meet Kirsten Doherty who helps out in the school one day a week. Kirsten is an inspirational character who makes light of her own disability to help the children and staff in the school.

It’s quite obvious that her presence in the school adds so much to the children’s education and not just in terms of the support she offers in the classroom.

Kirsten – thanks.

I’ve been doing some work exploring the NOMIS Labour Market statistics website. It’s a fascinating resource which I was using in relation to employment rates for young people in East Lothian. However, as I began to dig into the site I became more and more intrigued by the data and how it can be manipulated.

This got me thinking about the relationship between socio-economic factors and school attainment.

Using an excel spreadsheet I explored the correlation between some of these factors and the % S5 students gaining 3+ highers in a Local Authority.

The spreadsheet can be accessed here: Correlations – SQA and NOMIS

So what did I find out?

I reckon it’s possible to predict the % of students in any authority using only three indicators. % of population in socio-economic groups 1-3; % of population with more than 2 Highers (NVQ level 3); and the % of population in receipt of benefits (strong negative correlation). It gets even more relaible if you also use the % of population who have a NVQ level 4 (HND or degree), and Gross pay. Interestingly employment rates do not have an impact.

There are one or two anomalies – mainly due to high levels of private school enrolment in some authorities – but in the main the predictors are reliable , with the exception of one island authority.

Please give it a go and get back to me with comments.  I’ll be doing further work on this over the break.

I have an admission to make. I joined Twitter 90 days ago today. There – it’s out in the open. I’d put it off for nearly three years as I thought it was either a vehicle for shadowing celebrities, or a mindless activity in which people spent their time telling each other what they had for breakfast.

How wrong I was!! In fact the title of this piece could just as easily have been (with apologies to the Ettrick Shepherd) ” Confessions of an unjustified sceptic”.

For in the intervening period I’ve come to realise that Twitter is actually a unique learning resource. By discovering others throughout the World who share a passion for education, tracking their thoughts, following their links, and engaging in productive conversations – I have been inspired, challenged and professionally invigorated.

I’m now following teachers, school principals, education managers, superintendents, and policy makers in Scotland, Finland, USA, Canada, Singapore, China, India, Australia, and many other countries around the globe. In no more an 140 characters these people are able to point to resources, places, research, articles and share something of their own challenges, ideas, solutions and successes.

I first started using social media in 1997 when I was part of an online research community. To find that there were others around the world struggling with the same issues made a huge difference to my work at that time. Since then I’ve continued to use social media networks, more particularly a blog as a secondary school head teacher, a learning log as a head education and then director, and most recently my Twitter account.

I think I’ve only come to realise how important such engagement is to me in my leadership role in the last year when I decided to take a year abstaining from social media of any kind.

So what did I find out from my year out? Firstly, I missed the opportunity to reflect upon my work and to be able to try to make sense of my world and to be able to share and check that meaning out with others. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly I missed the opportunity to learn from others.

On reflection my year out was a year without learning. I did my job, I solved problems, I led the service, but I’d go so far as to say that I didn’t learn – and without learning we are not professionals.

The underlying question which remains for me is that if such a discipline can make such a difference to me, in my role as an educational leader, then how might it benefit colleagues in similar roles – and I would include teachers in this?

The bottom line here is that the decision to engage in social media must always lie with the individual but ironically one of the safety valves that could make a difference to an over-worked and stressed profession is to begin to develop a routine which includes moments of public reflection and sharing one’s practice.

For such practice to extend beyond the technically passionate, the early adopters, and the professionally curious requires people in leadership positions to lead by example, yet all too often we conform to the old teachers’ adage – “don’t do as I do, do as I say”. It’s difficult to work out exactly why this is the case and it must be something to do with the fear that we may be perceived by our employees (and employers) to be wasting our time on something which perhaps appears to be peripheral to the “serious” business of management.

Consider the reaction from the press when it was “discovered” that Sir Peter Housden, Scotland’s top civil servant, kept a regular blog. One headline read “How to talk mandarin (even if it is drivel)”. Is it any wonder that leaders in any field are reticent about expressing their thoughts in public if the press appear to be waiting to pounce?

This may explain why it is that when educational leaders in Scotland have attempted to use social media it has all too often been in a secure space, where their collective thoughts are held within an “echo chamber”, where others, not of their ilk, are to be kept out.

The second obstacle is the legitimate concern that many leaders just don’t feel they have the time available to engage in anything new and possibly tangential to their central function. This concern will only be overcome if leaders are able to see that social media can actually allow them to achieve their goals in an even more effective and time efficient manner than their current practice – if it doesn’t, then it shouldn’t be used.

Nevertheless, for all that lack of confidence, and concerns about time are powerful disincentives to using social media, the most significant barrier is the way in which we think about communication itself. For most Scottish educational leaders have been brought up within a highly hierarchical system where communication is typically in the linear vertical plane and just as frequently controlled by others.

However, that world is changing as we move from a controlled linear view of communication to more distributed and dynamic networks, where the notion of control gives way to transparency, true engagement, and creative thought, regardless of position.

Perhaps the old teachers’ adage does need to change to “Don’t do as I say, do as I do”.

“If a goal requires a strategy, and a strategy requires tactics, then knowing which tactics to select lie at the heart of effective leadership.”

Listen to any conversation or presentation relating to educational leadership and you won’t have to wait long until a magical word is intoned and others sagely nod in agreement. That word, of course, is strategy.

Yet listen out for a reference to tactics and you’ll have a long wait.

As I reflect on the best educational leaders I’ve worked with and for, the most distinguishing factor in their success was that they could work out how to translate a goal into a reality. The reason they were successful was that they had learned – through experience – to select the most effective actions which will overcome the obstacles to achievement.

Such tactical thinking differs significantly from the accepted critical path analysis concept of project management – which tends to see achievement of a goal to be a linear deployment of a series of steps, often exemplified by comparing with how we go about making a cup of coffee.

The reality is that successful change needs a much more sophisticated application of inter-connected tactical actions.