Principled Principals?

Abstract

In 2001 the Department for Education and Skills commissioned a major study of the leadership of English schools. The study made use of a wide variety of research methods in order to address a number of questions about school leaders and leadership. This article draws upon one of the many data sets of the research—the case studies of schools with ‘outstanding’ leaders—to discuss the values that leaders hold and to describe the various ways in which they are acted out. More specifically it offers a series of operational images of how the case-study principals translated their educational values into management and leadership practices. The school leaders in the case-study schools were clearly avoiding doing ‘bastard leadership’ by mediating government policy through their own values systems. The ways in which school leaders manage to promote and encourage shared values are explored and attention is given to how school leaders enact values-driven leadership specifically by: working with, managing and searching out change; paying careful attention to information management within the school; working very closely and sometimes seamlessly with theirleadership groups and management teams; and developing leadership capacityand responsibility throughout their schools.