Supporting learners and teachers with compassionate leadership

Book Review:
Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging
Kathryn Riley, UCL Press 2022

It is important to judge things against what they are intended to be.  It would be unfair to judge the quality of a lemon drizzle cake on the basis that personally one would have preferred a treacle tart.  So while this book may raise a number of tantalising and even frustrating questions, for many readers, particularly those who have been directly involved the author’s Leadership of Place project, this will be an interesting and affirming read.

An activist volume

This book is archetypal Riley and proud of it.  The book represents a reporting stage, possibly even a swansong, in relation to a sizeable sector of Riley’s professional endeavours over an extended period.  Her approach has aimed to improve practice and policy at school level, using methods that engage teachers and school students in investigating their situations, in pursuit of understanding, agency and beneficial action.  This is positioned work:  an activist approach underpinned by political values and strong personal credentials spanning practitioner, policy-making and academic roles.  Educationally its intentions cannot be faulted in that these projects focus on supporting learners towards conscious understanding of factors affecting their progress in school, promoting ownership and autonomy, and supporting teachers in devising positive strategies.

Accessible and engaging

The book is well written:  the text flows, with personal voice; it is accessible and engaging, and brightened by students’ drawings through which they express their perceptions.  Its focus is ‘school belonging’:  the extent to which school students find their school environment to have positive connotations, and the range of factors which inhibit or support that desirable state of affairs.

A sizeable fraction of the book is devoted to supporting the contention that a proportion of school students have experienced negative feelings towards their school context, and this has adversely affected their engagement in learning and their attitude to life in general.  This is supported by numerous examples, based on much fieldwork in several countries, many interactions and projects at school level, and is backed up by material drawn from secondary sources.  It is all presented quite interestingly and eloquently.  Yet, at the end of the day, the central contention is one that most professional educators would regard as fairly obvious, and the examples of alienation regrettable but predictable in the world as it currently is.  So the reader anticipates that the book’s real contribution will be some original insights and strategies for lessening the problem. 

The ingredients of Compassionate Leadership

As the title suggests, the book’s answer is ‘compassionate leadership’.  Examples are given from the school-based research projects of situations where things seem to be going well.   One strand of this is community engagement.  The book gives examples of schools which have developed good practice in relation to students who have recently arrived from other countries, and schools (in several countries) where the leadership have gone out of their way to foster good relations with the community, building up trust, and lessening the contrasts experienced by students between the cultures of school and home.  The book also gives examples of changes made to the physical environment of the school so that students feel more at home, and less threatened there.  Compassionate leadership involves staff development to ensure that teachers are fully on board with the culture of community engagement.  It also involves developments in curriculum and pedagogy to foster independent learning.

Collage of strategies

So what do headteachers need in order to be able to do all this?  Riley suggests that headteachers require strengths of four different kinds:  dealing with the physical realities of their context, understanding the social and political context, and having suitable attributes in the emotional, spiritual and ethical domains.  Riley offers a framework of ‘Three Cs:  compassion, connectivity and communication’, which may be an adaptation of Bryck and Schneider’s Four Cs:  consistency, compassion, communication and competency.  The book’s appendices explain a little more how these ideas were operationalised in the school-based research projects, for example through card-sort exercises and discussion groups.  Through these means, the book identifies a problem, offers a set of concepts, explains how the concepts were applied to the problem through school-based investigations, and gives examples of good practice.  But the precise connections, and the flow of the central line of argument, remain tantalising:  the book is more of a collage than a route-map.

Key questions raised

My guess is that a lot of headteachers in the UK, working in areas of social challenge, would consider that their own attitudes, values and professional practices were not dissimilar to those the book appears to be advocating.   Some of them might find that affirming; a few might feel patronised.   For readers within the academic community concerned with school leadership, the book poses intriguing questions.  How clear and coherent is the concept of compassionate leadership’?  How much does the book’s lens and terminology of ‘school belonging’ cast new light on the familiar issues of school-community relations?   Is the implication that developmental work underpinned by these concepts produces better practical solutions?

The book’s reference list of approximately 200 sources shows the breadth and depth of scholarship underpinning its line of argument.  Within this wide range of relevant sources, the only subject disciplines significantly represented are psychology and child development.  I spotted only one geographer (Cresswell), but the ideas central to Riley’s project include the spatial concepts of place, space, mobility and mooring, which have been developed and refined over a long period within the discipline of geography.  The sub-discipline of education geography has applied these concepts to many school contexts, and as with any discipline there is a specific language and set of meanings through which discourse advances cumulatively.  This book and the work it reports appear to have engaged with those concepts through a largely naturalistic, inductive process, which results in imprecise usage of ‘place’ and ‘space’ as technical terms, and re-inventing of wheels.

From the many thousands of sources available, any academic writer makes their own selection, and any reviewer cannot help but think of the different selection they would have made had they been addressing the same topic.  Which is irrelevant and no help to anyone, but the different point here is the extent to which this book feels disengaged from relevant fields.  It identifies school, family and community partnership as a central concern, without significantly drawing upon the rich research-based literature of that field.  It advocates compassionate school leadership without keying in the argument to other recent books covering related ground.  That may leave readers wondering whether the book purports to offer an incremental advance in understanding, or simply an alternative viewpoint, or even the same viewpoint expressed through new words.

Raising awareness

Perhaps ‘consciousness’ is the key to the positive heart of the book  People need to become aware of a problem before they will start searching for solutions.  That search will involve gaining a deeper understanding both of the nature of the problem, and of the range of practicable solutions.  The idea of developing consciousness seems a key strand of Riley’s school-based, activist approach, in which getting staff and school students to share their perceptions with each other is a massive step towards beneficial change.  Perhaps the precise terms and ideas which kick-start the process are less important than the process itself.

The book includes material from earlier stages of the project, and refers to previous publications which represented earlier reporting stages.  There are some videos which go with the book.  All of this gives it the feel of projecting an entity beyond the book:  an ongoing interest group or campaign, for whom this is ‘the book of the project’, a kind of souvenir celebratory volume.  It is certainly the case that a great many individuals and organisations have been involved in this project, including school communities in Britain, America and South Africa, and sponsoring organisations including the National Education Union.  Many of them are sure to take pleasure from this book as a tangible outcome of events in which they were involved.  Returning to my opening comment, it would be wrong to rain on their parade.

Raphael Wilkins is Formerly Pro Director, Institute of Education, University of London, and formerly President of the College of Teachers UK.