Leadership and Management

Progress, issues, and possible next steps for a self-improving school system

• Toby Greany

The DfE’s 2010 white paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ set out the Coalition’s aim to ‘create a school system which is self-improving’. In this inaugural lecture, Toby Greany assesses progress to date and the Coalition Government’s approach to developing a self-improving system.

Understanding valuable outcomes for children, families and communities

• Denis Mongon
• Charles Leadbeater

School Leadership for Public Value is a timely contribution to the debate about the purpose and structure of schooling in England. It describes how some schools enhance pupil attainment by creating strong alliances with their neighbourhood communities. Those alliances enable the neighbourhood community to help raise the academic attainment of pupils as well as to improve the much wider range of outcomes for children and young people. In turn, the school’s resources are deployed sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly to encourage community growth or regeneration. This book claims that schools working like these are writing a ‘new story’ for education which abandons institutional isolation and recreates powerful and positive relationships between communities and their schools. It is a story of disciplined educational and social innovation, led by headteachers and others with a mixture of passion and pragmatism, determination and ingenuity. It is a narrative which will help leaders from schools, local authorities and third sector services to understand the benefits which increasingly autonomous schools can both derive from and contribute to a strong engagement with local communities. At a time when national policy and financial constraints will tempt some schools into a siege mentality focussed internally and exclusively on classroom craft, this book offers an alternative, broader framework within which both higher attainment and improved well-being can be pursued.

• Raphael Wilkins

This book will make a timely contribution because of the rising level of interest both in school-based practitioner action research, and in the notion of ‘evidence informed’ policies and strategies, which is topical in the UK and in other parts of the English speaking world.

A learning theory for practice

• Susan Askew
• Eileen Carnell

While there are numerous books covering coaching tools and techniques, most share a common focus on goal-setting and goal achievement. This book offers a rare alternative perspective that focuses on reflective learning as the starting point for professional growth, and illustrates how coaches can apply this approach in coaching meetings.

• Carl Parsons

School exclusion damages pupils and is harmful to society. This revised edition updates the original research in three low excluding and five high excluding local authorities that shows how local authorities make permanent exclusions unnecessary. New chapters argue that they can still do so within the legislation of the new coalition government.

Fast tracking school leaders

• Peter Earley
• Jeff Jones

Accelerated Leadership Development captures and communicates the lessons learnt from successful fast-track leadership programmes in the private and public sector, and provides a model which schools can follow and customise as they plan their own leadership development strategies.

• Eileen Carnell
• Caroline Lodge

This book presents fourteen personal real life stories from people at various stages of retiring. These inspirational and illustrated stories will encourage readers to hold up these experiences to their own, learn from comparisons and similarities and extend their own thinking.

Lessons from schools

• Peter Earley
• Vivienne Porritt

This book presents case studies of schools’ journeys towards effective CPD practice, telling the story of the goals set and achieved, and the challenges and successes along the way.

Improving schools in challenging circumstances

• Alma Harris

This lecture considers the forms of leadership practice that can make a difference in improving equity and diversity in schools and colleges.

Complex Discourse and Psychological Perspectives

• Christopher Arnold
• Jane Yeomans
• Sarah Simpson
• Mike Solomon

Exclusion from school or college powerfully affects lives. In this book, three practising psychologists working with young people in inner cities explore the experiences of people who have been involved with exclusion from school: the child, the family, the excluding school, and the receiving unit.