ABSTRACT
For some years, as headteacher of a special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, I have tried to build a culture of trust and mutual understanding within which all teachers could exercise leadership. Being seen to be living these values in school is particularly important today because many educational values have been challenged and destroyed. I became concerned that the collegiate values of the school, which I believed gave the school its moral direction, were not visible in our daily management practices. I expected my senior management
staff to encourage active participation from all members of their teams. For example, the procedure for doing the timetable was that there was a consultation period when all staff gave their timetable preferences. These preferences were put together in a draft and finalised at a staff meeting. I was shocked when a senior colleague was given the task of drawing up the timetable and returned it completed the next day. When challenged, she said that colleagues were not interested in being consulted! I felt that it was the senior management team’s responsibility to ensure that others got interested and it was my responsibility to enable the senior staff to do this. I suspected that the values and practices of collegiality were not clear and my assumptions that they were shared were wrong. These concerns were brought to a head during a school inspection early in 1992 which highlighted the fact that some recently appointed staff were not clear about the collegiate management approach and their role in it. More seriously, the inspectors questioned the effectiveness of senior management in supporting a collegiate approach. The aim of my action research project became to clarify, share and document the values of a collegiate management practice and to improve its implementation by senior staff (including myself).
