ABSTRACT
Welcome to ‘The Developing School’—your school. We would like to be able to invite you to climb aboard but, of course, you already are on board. Your school has developed, is developing and will develop. Whether you have any control over this process, however, is another matter. A key theme of this book is teacher empowerment, one aspect of which is having a sense of purchase on the change process. School development, therefore, is self-development. It is the development of your school by you and your colleagues. Much as we would like to invite you to sit back and watch the moving story, this is not what school development is about. You have to move the story; you have to make it happen. It is far more commonplace than any Magical Mystery Tour. All too often, perhaps, we have been tempted to look at school development as somewhat magical and rather mysterious. What we are offering here is an alternative scenario; one in which school development is demystified. Rather than being something which comes to you and is done to you by outsiders, the ‘experts’, we see it as something which is done by you and for you, the insiders, with appropriate outside help and in the light of external-imposed obligations. In this alternative scenario we are all experts-in different ways. We all have something important to offer. Having said this, we would also argue that school development-if it is to be successful and productive-has to become your way of life and pursued according to a particular style, your style, your ‘house style’. This book is all about this style-and how to generate it. It is vital that it becomes your style-that your school acquires what we refer to below as a development culture, which, in relation to other schools, embodies both similarity and difference and an internal capacity for moving forward.
