Neil Colin Dempster

Student Leadership: Necessary Research

Interest in student leadership or leadership by young people has always existed in school and community settings and while there are many programs devoted to leadership development and training, we believe that there is a need for focused research into what young people conceive leadership to be and in what circumstances they would see it being important. This article is speculative in nature. We ask and discuss questions about why there seems to be an upsurge in interest in student leadership and what some of the available literature is saying about student leadership before putting forward suggestions for the kind of research we feel is necessary if our understanding of student leadership, particularly in secondary schools, is to be enhanced.

The Ethical Climate of Public Schooling under New Public Management.

The movement of public services into direct competition with their private enterprise counterparts is a common feature of public sector policy throughout the developed world. The publicly funded provision of school education has not been exempt from this trend. The creation of a competitive climate is placing public school leaders and teachers under pressure to improve performance in an environment where parents-as-consumers choose the schools to which they send their children. Drawing on data from two recent studies involving principals, a description is given of some of the difficult ethical situations encountered in schools and the professional values that are put under stress as a result of the new competitive climate. Some implications are outlined for the design of professional development programmes for school principals and teachers.

Guilty or not: the impact and effects of site‐based management on schools

This paper examines the impact and effects of site‐based management on schools using a framework developed by Canadian researchers, Sackney and Dibski. It draws on research literature from the UK, New Zealand and Australia and includes results from three studies in which the author has been engaged. The Sackney and Dibski framework is used to lay seven “charges” against site‐based management – that site‐based management leads to greater decision‐making flexibility, changes the work role and increases the workload of principals, improves student learning outcomes, increases innovation, increases competition, results in reduced funding and affects the standing of the public education system. The analysis of the literature selected suggests that site‐based management is guilty of some and not of others.

Pathways to formal and informal student leadership: the influence of peer and teacher–student relationships and level of school identification on students’ motivations

Leadership capacity‐building is a key factor in sustainable school improvement, and the leadership contribution of students is an integral part of an authentic distributed conception of school leadership. Thus it is important to understand the factors which influence high school students’ motivations to engage in formal and informal leadership in their school. A sample of 167 Australian public school Grade 11 students (average age 16.6 years) completed a self‐report survey of their perceptions and motivations. Students holding formal leadership roles reported more positive views of their school and peers. Girls not holding a formal leadership position reported higher levels of leadership motivation than boys. Students who were members of formal extracurricular clubs or teams did not report higher levels of school identification or leadership motivation. Students’ perceptions of the quality of relationships between their peers and between teachers and students predicted their sense of membership or identification with their school. In turn, students’ sense of identification, and not their level of achievement motivation, predicted their willingness to contribute and engage in leadership in their school. The implications of these findings for school leadership and culture and teachers’ behaviour are considered.

Personal agency in leadership learning using an Australian heuristic

The starting point for this article is the lack of a robust research base regarding details of what works and why for school leaders’ professional development. The article extends work undertaken for a recent commissioned literature review of selected international reports on supporting school leaders’ development strategies. The authors reveal that the leadership learning landscape seems to be one where system provision over-shadows individuals taking personal responsibility for their leadership learning. In an endeavour to create a balance between system and individual agendas, the authors have created an augmented version of a leadership learning heuristic tool originally developed by Clarke and Wildy. The tool is designed as a starting point only, intended to help leaders identify the state of their current knowledge about leadership as well as their future professional development needs using the tool’s five focal points – pedagogy, people, place, system and self. An example of the tool completed by a practising principal is used to show his current leadership knowledge profile and the knowledge fields on which he will need to focus his learning in the future. The authors conclude with suggestions for further research on personal agency in school leadership learning.

Judging the quality of school leadership learning programmes: an international search

How to best address the professional learning needs of those aspiring to leadership roles in schools is a crucial issue. Robust evaluation practices are needed to determine the quality of current provisions and to identify where improvements can be made. This paper considers the quality of professional learning programmes using a set of 10 criteria distilled from a synthesis of compelling international leadership learning research. We show the potential of the 10 criteria for judging the quality of professional learning programmes by applying them to examples of programmes drawn from five countries around the world. These examples provide a launching pad from which questions can be posed about the potential use and applicability of such criteria in making design decisions about the quality and value of professional learning programmes in a range of national and international contexts.

The Discursive (Re)construction of Parents in School Texts

This paper explores the familiar issue of parental (non-)involvement in schools. More specifically, it examines the language of selected texts in one school context and finds initially that the roles of parents are not discursively constructed in these texts as their being involved in the school. Rather, a close reading of the texts’ discourse displays parents as the deficit half of a contrastive pair (parents vs the school). The issue of parental involvement at this school, first highlighted in a survey analysis as significant, gains a complementary and extended interpretation through the application of discourse analysis to interviews with the school leaders and a section of the school’s web page. Further analysis of interview data referring to the implementation of activities designed to increase parental involvement highlights movement towards the discursive reconstruction of parents as standard relational pairs with school leaders. The findings highlight the importance of the use of discourse analysis as a tool for understanding and implementing change in school culture.

Leadership and Literacy

This book focuses on what school leaders need to know and understand about leadership for learning, and for learning to read in particular. It brings together theory, research and practice on leadership for literacy. The book reports on the findings from six studies that followed school principals from their involvement in a professional learning program consisting of five modules on leadership and the teaching of reading, to implementation action in their schools. It describes how they applied a range of strategies to create leadership partnerships with their teachers, pursuing eight related dimensions from a Leadership for Learning framework or blueprint. The early chapters of the book feature the use of practical tools as a focus for leadership activity. These chapters consider, for example, how principals and teachers can develop deeper understandings of their schools’ contexts; how professional discussions can be conducted with a process called ‘disciplined dialogue’; and how principals might encourage approaches to shared leadership with their teachers. The overall findings presented in this book emphasise five positive positions on leadership for learning to read: the importance of an agreed moral purpose; sharing leadership for improvement; understanding what learning to read involves; implementing and evaluating reading interventions; and recognising the need for support for leaders’ learning on-the-job.

Three Priorities for a Great Education

What makes for a great education for children and young people in Australia? Phil Hughes, a man whose career has been dedicated to seeking answers to this question has asked it again at a point in his life when retrospection dominates most people’s thoughts. Not so with Phil. It is a testament to his lifelong commitment to education that he has continued to search for better futures for Australia’s young and is doing so through this his last book.

The principals as literacy leaders with indigenous communities: professional learning and research

The vast proportion of Australia’s Indigenous students are represented persistently as well below the national benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. Recent national school-based research and development projects, funded by the Australian Government’s Closing the Gap strategy, have again targeted improving Indigenous students’ literacy and numeracy performance. This paper reports on the Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities project or PALLIC (2011–2013). The project agreement is between the State of Queensland, acting through the Department of Education and Training, and Griffith University and the Australian Primary Principals Association Incorporated (APPA). It targets new knowledge about what works for Indigenous students learning to read (Johnson and Dempster, in press) and involves research and development in 48 nominated schools with medium to high Indigenous student enrolments in Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia. Many of the schools are in very remote areas of Australia with Indigenous school cohorts for whom English is not a first language. The point of difference with the PALLIC project is its focus on impacting students’ early stages of reading by building strong knowledgeable partnerships, whereby primary school principals, Indigenous leadership partners (usually staff employed by the school) and members of the community, co-lead learning-to-read strategies between schools and homes: to help more children to read earlier and at higher levels. The partnerships are assisted by literacy leadership mentors, who are mid-career practising principals on secondment from their respective educational jurisdictions, with allocated caseloads from 3 schools up to 13 schools each. All members of the team have participated in the delivery of five professional learning modules over an 18-month period (2011–2012).