ABSTRACT
Arnold Tomkins’ assumption that the school leader has to be ‘nimble of judgment’ is as true today as it was 100 years ago. What has changed, however, is the scale and scope of the areas in which those judgments are exercised. Only a decade and a half-ago, a Canadian study found that a minority of elementary school principals were involved in attempting to improve their schools’ ‘instructional effectiveness’. This was simply not the task they had been set, or set themselves. The job of the school principal in Canada, as in many other countries including the UK, was to maintain a smooth-running organization and harmonious staff relationships. Schools functioned in the belief that teachers were competent and needed to be left alone to teach (Leithwood and Montgomery, 1982).
