Educational Management Administration & Leadership

Notes towards the twenty-first century

For its fifteenth anniversary EMA invited contributors to consider the agendafor the next fifteen years.

Notes towards the twenty-first century

Notes towards the twenty-first century

This case-study of a secondary school trying-not wholly successfully-to expand its 16+ courses investigates how internal communications and external negotiations were managed. It suggests a participative process could have improved the school's policy-making.

Why do headsget irritated with management training courses? Is it the blurred transparencies? The lack of machismo? Here a trainer suggests how learning in schools and in training courses is different. He discusses how heads may see training as undermining their role in schools.

'An unrelenting pace' ... 'brevity, variety and fragmentation' - those are the characteristics ofa primary head's work according to this observation of four heads fulfilling their roles, days of talking, visiting, meeting and being interrupted.

'The wisest approach to leadership in education' is to be 'educative in intent and outcome'; from this precept a joint in-service training and postgraduate materials production programme is developed. It is shaped by an approach to organisations as cultures, involving negotiation about what is real and what is right.

Academic theorists often discount theories which teachers and administrators rely on in everyday practice. Common sense, experience and native wit are seen as poor guides for decision-making. This paper arguesfor theory to be developed from the practitioner's craft - theory that 'works'!