Happy New Year 2012

New year, new thinking about education? I doubt it, but am still enough of an optimist to hope that amongst the many threads that make up educational policy, the good ideas will come out over time, and the poor, ill thought ideas will perish, or perhaps in some cases, implode gently in on themselves. I am writing an article at the moment on solo and distributed leadership, most of which is taken up with the many academic thoughts in these two areas. Some see leadership, and even distributed leadership, as being primarily about agency of the leader. So the argument goes that you can only really distribute if you, as leader, have put the right structures in place so that trust, good relationships, focus on learning etc can flourish. On the other hand, Spillane and others have concentrated on distributed leadership as practice in terms of how the interactions happen, whether they are systemic or spontaneous, and how viewing practice in this way can make the context clearer for the leader. Of course, some have argued that there is just too much hype on leadership- more and more adjectives have been coined to describe it over the last ten years, some helpful in examining what leaders do, some not really advancing our understanding of leadership. For me, I still find Ogawa and Bossert's (1997) distinction of leadership as a quality of the organisation most helpful because it takes our eyes away from leaders per se, and focuses us on the stage in which they work, and how leadership in a creative organisation can flow in manner that does not deny agency but allows the conditions to happen in which leadership flourishes. If there is one thing I want to do in 2012, it is to look more closely at the organisation and not just at leaders.

Currently we have the rhetoric of autonomy for schools, within an increasingly centrally driven system- see forced academies as one example perhaps. What happens over these primary schools will shape local autonomy in new ways. At the same time, the incoming Head of OFSTED has floated the idea of superintendents as they have in the USA, to add a layer of more local accountability. Many questions run through my mind. Who runs what, and how seems to have taken over completely from 'what do our young people need from schools for the future?'. We await the new National Curriculum too.  Will that make its way into Academies and Free schools? What will happen to the NPQH now that it is not mandatory, and will Scotland change its approach to the SQH? Will Michael Gove still be an Education this time next year? Given the average tenancy of Education Secretaries, I am taking a small bet on not but I could be well sort of the mark.

What do I wish for in 2012? A return to professionalism in education, with teachers empowered to teach, and with politicians inspired to really listen to professionals to make informed judgements. I also remind myself that we don't have just one chance at education, as some would have it. We may have one chance at schooling, and that is important, but we do have myriad chances to succeed at education, as the OU has proved over the years. The saddest thing for me about the last decade or so in schools is that many young people, despite having a clutch of 'good' GCSES have left school without a love of learning. If we could bring that back, or even create the conditions for it to flourish, then I think our schools would be improved. So, I will bend my mind to professionalism, relationships and the creative organisation, but in the meanwhile back to that article on solo and distributed leadership!