ABSTRACT
The ascendancy of school leadership in England is linked to the UK government’s goals of raising educational standards and modernizing the education system. The primacy of leadership is part of a wider agenda of transformation across public services where leaders are the vehicle by which policy reforms can be implemented and change realized (Cabinet Office 1999; Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) 2006). School leadership has received greater attention by policy-makers and by academics both nationally and internationally where there has been a proliferation of research and writing (Mullen et al. 2002). Following Gunter (2005) we recognize that while research indicates the field to be pluralistic, New Labour policy-makers have shown a preference for functional organizational leadership with an emphasis on measuring the impact on student outcomes (e.g. Leithwood and Levin 2005). While the intention is for policy to directly impact on the practice of local leaders in the delivery of national reforms (Barber 2007) the issue for this chapter is whether and how headteachers respond and develop their own practice (Gunter 2001). We draw on Bowe and Ball (1992: 22), who argue that ‘practitioners do not confront policy texts as naïve readers, they come with histories, with experience, with values and purposes of their own, they have vested interests in the meaning of policy’. A study of practice enables an examination of leader and leadership dispositions, together with how ‘policy ensembles’ (Ball 1994: 22) such as performance audits and choice work in ways to constrain ‘the possibilities we have for thinking “otherwise”; thus it limits our responses to change, and leads us to misunderstand what policy is by misunderstanding what it does’ (Ball 1994: 23). In this chapter we explore these matters, and we present data from headteacher respondents in the Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) project (ESRC RES-000-23-1192) to show how headteachers as school leaders in England understand their role and the approaches they take to leadership.
