Rob Higham

System Leadership: Mapping the Landscape

System leaders are those headteachers who are willing to shoulder system-wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own. As such, system leadership is a new and emerging practice that embraces a variety of responsibilities that are developing either locally or within discrete national networks or programmes that, when taken together, have the potential to contribute to system transformation. Because this is an emerging practice, there has been no attempt to date to document how system leadership is being enacted and is evolving across the English education system. This article elaborates the concept of system leadership and illustrates its potential power as a catalyst for systemic reform in three ways. First, it not only provides an initial conceptualisation of system leadership based on the contemporary literature and recent policy announcements but also raises a series of concerns about the way the concept is being interpreted. Second, by drawing on responses provided by local authorities, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), a range of national agencies and professional associations as well local and national networks of headteachers and teachers, it maps the system leadership landscape in England current in 2006 by proposing a taxonomy of roles that system leaders are currently assuming. Third, and based on these analyses and research with leading headteachers, it locates system leadership within the literature on systems theory and leadership, proposes a potential model for system leadership and explores the tensions involved in developing the concept further.

Free schools in the Big Society: the motivations, aims and demography of free school proposers

Free school policy claims to partly decentralise to local proposers decisions over who provides a free school, where and for what reasons, within the constraints of a government approval process. This article analyses empirically the people and organisations doing the proposing and their interactions with the approval process. The article begins by locating free schools within Big Society and quasi-market policies. The emerging free school landscape is then mapped and the motivations, aims and demography of a sample of 50 proposers are explored. A key distinction emerges between two analytical clusters. First, proposers able to negotiate the approval process are shown to draw on a range of professional networks, to have strongly academic educational aims and to on average not seek to specifically serve disadvantaged communities. Second, and conversely, the majority of proposers located in highly disadvantaged areas have aims and expertise that do not fit well with what the government is willing to accept. This is not conceived as a simple dualism but highlights the significance of both a lack of critical engagement with inclusion among accepted proposers and the effects of an approval process that has prioritised an unequal distribution of particular forms of professional expertise and experience.

School autonomy and Government control : school leaders' views on a changing policy landscape in England.

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government elected in 2010 has argued contemporary reform will increase the autonomy of schools in England. Given the complexities that exist, however, in the balance between autonomy and control, we explore how school leaders view autonomy as it exists within the wider policy framework. The article develops, first, a historical and analytical perspective on school autonomy. Second, it analyses a survey of almost 2000 school leaders, as well as case study data, to explore their views on autonomy, accountability, external support and managing change. Third, it considers the implications. Drawing on Simkins’s concepts of operational and criteria power, school leaders are shown to commonly anticipate greater power over aspects of school management but not over the aims and purposes of schooling. A significant variation is also found between school leaders in their perceived capacity and freedom to act. This leads to a proposed typology of confident, cautious, concerned and constrained schools. A key implication, we conclude, is that increasing operational power for schools, declining Local Authority support and differentiated school autonomy have a very real potential to exacerbate existing local hierarchies between schools.

Who Owns Our Schools? an Analysis of the Governance of Free Schools in England.

The legal basis of free schools, provided for in the Academies Act 2010, allows the Secretary of State for Education ‘to enter into Academy arrangements with any person’. A range of debate has ensued over who will govern free schools. This article develops an analysis of the individuals and organizations that have had free school proposals accepted by government. The article progresses, first, by locating free schools in the existing policy trajectories towards privatization and self-governing schools. Second, it draws on a mapping exercise and interviews with a sample of 58 free school proposers, sponsors and suppliers to explore the processes through which free schools are established. The main categories of free school proposers are identified as: local civil society groups; sponsoring organizations; existing educational institutions. Third, the article considers the wider implications for school governance. It is argued free school policy allows governance to become an additional and direct lever through which those with the capacity to do so are able to mould state education in their own interests.

Conservative force or contradictory resource? : Education and Affirmative Action in Jharkhand, India

This article explores the combination of education and affirmative action in challenging historic inequalities faced by adivasis, or indigenous peoples, living in a remote region of Eastern India. We show how the combined effects of education and affirmative action can act as a ‘contradictory resource’. On the one hand, policies of affirmative action are enabling young educated adivasis – the children of subsistence farmers and manual labourers – to benefit from the creation of new, rural state jobs. We show how without affirmative action, such jobs may well have been monopolised by a local elite of higher castes. On the other hand, we argue several conservative processes have accompanied these changes. First, the reserved jobs secured by adivasis are relatively badly paid and insecure. Second, these jobs have not enabled relative progress for adivasis vis-à-vis traditional elites who are moving out of rural areas and diversifying their livelihoods. Third, young educated adivasis have begun to emulate the norms, values and ways of life of the local elite. This ‘culture of emulation’ is fostering new inequalities between educated adivasis and their poorer kin, who face increasing proletarianisation. The contradictory resource, we argue, concerns not only inequalities in accessing certain jobs, but also the creation of new forms of differentiation among historically marginalised people. We conclude by setting these findings within the wider complex relations emerging between caste, ethnicity and class in contemporary India.

Federations and System Leadership

Executive Headship refers to those head teachers in England who lead two or more schools that have entered into a Federation. A common federative model involves a lead school working to support and improve a partner school (or schools). The Executive Heads of these federations, and their wider leadership teams, constitute one of an emerging set of practices in England that has been termed System Leadership, or as working for the success and welfare of students in other schools as well as one’s own.