Promoting Quality in Teacher
Education
A Registered Charity (No 275082)
SCOTTISH COLLEGE FOR EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
Observations from UCET
1. The team responsible for scoping the proposed Scottish College for Educational Leadership has an
important task to undertake and it is encouraging that the team is willing to engage with the educational
community in Scotland and beyond in order to ensure that its proposals are well grounded. UCET
welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the discussion.
2. In our view, the scoping exercise involves two major tasks: firstly, there is a need to articulate a
conception of educational leadership; secondly, in the light of that conception, it is essential to set out the
conditions and to clarify the mechanisms through which the leadership attributes and capabilities are to be
developed and supported. UCET offers some observations on both of these tasks.
3. With regard to the first of these, there is a tendency to regard leadership as uni-dimensional. Thus, for
example, the GTCS suite of professional standards, even in their graphic presentation, very strongly imply
a hierarchy that extends from the Standard for Provisional Registration to the Standard for Headship. The
message would appear to be that being a head is the pinnacle of leadership achievement. An alternative
approach, for example, one adopted in Singapore, envisages three leadership tracks that emerge after a
period spent as a classroom teacher: one leading to school leadership as a head, a second leading to
distinction as a leader of teaching and learning, and a third leading to high standing as an educational
specialist. Conceivably, those achieving distinction in one or other of these tracks would enjoy equivalent
standing and equivalent financial rewards. Is there anything about this approach to leadership that makes it
inappropriate in Scotland?
4. If such a multi-dimensional view of leadership is adopted, it will be necessary to identify those
capabilities that are specific to particular categories of leadership. At the same time, it is reasonable to
assume that there will be generic capabilities that characterise all forms of educational leadership. The
scoping team must attempt to identify these essential features of leadership. For our part, we believe that
educational leadership is preoccupied with the promotion of effective teaching and learning. Educational
leaders must therefore be able to articulate the personal and social purposes which underpin all
educational settings; they must be able to specify and establish the conditions necessary if educational
settings are to be effective; they need to be able to determine the criteria against which educational
effectiveness is to be measured; they require to understand and interpret the evidence that relates to
educational effectiveness; and they must be able to utilise that evidence to make the educational settings in
which they work even more effective as agencies of human learning and achievement.
5. Educational leadership, on that view, is therefore concerned with exerting an impact on the quality of
teaching and learning. Clearly, another matter for consideration relates to the scale of that impact, which
might range from effecting a change in the professional practice of a few colleagues to influencing the
direction of a whole school system or bringing about fundamental change in the teaching of a subject or
stage of schooling.
6. In the vast literature on educational leadership different perspectives have been adopted. We hope the
scoping team will avoid the tendency to regard leadership in education as a technocratic exercise which
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managerial skills relating to human relationships in the workplace, the allocation of resources, effective
communication, the demands of accountability and other matters. Such skills are undoubtedly important
but they need to be embedded in a coherent philosophy of educational leadership and can never be
regarded as a substitute for leadership.
7. We very much hope that in addressing this first of the two main tasks we have identified the scoping
team will offer a convincing portrayal of educational leadership, setting out its fundamental purposes,
identifying its defining characteristics, specifying what it means to exert impact on practices and
institutions, and detailing the constituent skills and other attributes that educational leadership requires in
different settings. What we require is a typology of educational leadership, one which demonstrates how
the various leadership roles in education are related. It may be appropriate, as the scoping team has
intimated, to begin with a discussion of leadership roles in schools and early years settings; but the
analysis of headship in schools needs to be located in a wider context that includes other leadership roles
in education, including the work of education authorities, teacher education faculties, and the inspectorate.
8. The second dimension to the scoping exercise involves an examination of how leadership qualities and
attributes are to be nurtured and supported. Here the scoping team will be concerned with the most
effective ways in which leadership development opportunities can be made available, and no doubt, given
the Donaldson Report’s preference for a virtual college, due account will be taken of how the extensive
resources of educational and digital technology can be exploited in the creation of a robust infrastructure
for training, support, and development in educational leadership.
9. That infrastrucure should include a framework of awards that are academically validated and
professionally endorsed, in exactly the same way as programmes of initial teacher education. Like
teaching itself, educational leadership is a form of professional activity that is informed by evidence.
Those who aspire to leadership roles, or who seek to extend their resourcefulness as educational leaders,
need to familiarise themselves with the knowledge base that underpins their professional work.
10. It is the distinctive function of universities to build, to extend, and to interrogate that knowledge base.
They attend to this function through research and through engaging educational leaders with that research,
enabling them to analyse, synthesise, critique, interpret, and, importantly, contextualise research findings
in ways that promote the kind of research-mindedness that should characterise all effective leadership. In
this way, educational leaders become researchers of their own practice and therefore better able to find
ways of improving that practice. One of the dangers in some current approaches to leadership
development, contrary to international best practice, is that they may cut themselves adrift from the
knowledge base which underpins leadership, thus restricting their vision of what is educationally valid and
appropriate to the collective experience of a single school or group of schools, denying themselves access
to research that may challenge their established practices, and limiting their awareness of what is possible
and even desirable.
11. It is acknowledged that leaders in post or in trainin respond positively to mentoring and coaching, to
the sharing of professional practice, and to opportunities to see effective practice modelled in their own
schools. Valuable as these CPD activities are, we consider that they need to be complemented by more
substantial award-bearing master’s level and doctoral level programmes that take educational leaders out
of their familiar settings, engage them with a wider range of colleagues and experience, and require them
to come to terms with the evidence that underpins effective educational leadership. Such CPD provision
can also take the form of short programmes which are organised within a framework of accredited
provision and which confer on participants the recognition of being members of a master’s profession.
12. There is considerable evidence that such award-bearing programmes confer numerous benefits: they
exert a positive impact on the retention of teachers, on their commitment, and their self-confidence; they
lead to improvements in pupils’ learning; they encourage leaders to interrogate their own practices and
those of others; they induce the disposition to innovate; they provide leaders with the skills to evaluate the
impact on classroom performance of different teaching strategies; they sustain a professional community
that is committed to improved practice; they develop leaders’ problem-solving and research skills; and
they promote partnership and collaboration in multi-professional settings.
13. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that such programmes, as well as achieving the necessary
university standards of rigour, have a strong professional orientation, as is to be expected when university
programmes are formally accredited by the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Master’s level and
doctoral level study is not a form of mere academic posturing. It bears directly on leaders’ educational
decision-making, on their engagement with learners, on relationship with colleagues, and on their
contribution to the educational effectiveness of the schools in which they work. Such programmes nurture
leaders’ capacity to evaluate their work more rigorously, to adjudicate between alternative lines of
professional action, to create and sustain a climate that is conducive to learning, and to use theoretical
frameworks and research findings to undertake more sophisticated appraisals of learners’ needs and how
educational provision can be improved. It is that very blend of rigour and relevance that advanced study
provides and which UCET maintains is essential to the enhancement of the quality of educational
leadership.
Gordon Kirk,
Academic Secretary.
4th July, 2013.