Leadership for improvement, leadership for collaborative professionalism, leadership for sustainability, change leadership, distributed leadership, evidence-informed leadership – the list goes on. In the search for a unifying leadership concept that can embody and embrace all of these is, for me, ‘Leadership for Learning’, which sits alongside all the others, yet has strong elements of learning-focused orientation or learning-centred leadership.1
The question is, what does learning-centredness mean in practice, and how does one set about ‘doing’ it as a leader?
Well, obviously there is an extensive body of literature and some well-known authors to add to, including John MacBeath, Neil Dempster, Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, Alma Harris and Louise Stoll, to name only a few. But it is possible to read quite a range of this literature and end up still asking the question above. One usually needs something practical to hang theory on.
So let’s turn the question around and ask instead what the kinds of actions are that school leaders take that make the biggest impact on pupil achievement. When we ask this question, we get into the realm, not of management and leadership literature, but of ‘meta studies’ – these are studies of studies. They frequently study ‘systematic reviews’, which themselves study individual research reports.
In educational research, it is only really in the last 25 years that systematic reviews have come into their own. This is partly because ‘education’ is a relative newcomer to research disciplines. Most universities have only recognised ‘education’ as a discipline in the past 50 years. So, for quite a while, there was not enough high-quality educational research to be systematically reviewed. The first systematic review of the research in this country to really hit the headlines was carried out in the mid 1990s by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam of Kings College, London. Known as ‘Inside the Black Box’, their research focused on the effect of formative assessment on pupil achievement and was based on a strong hunch both authors shared in the relationship between the two – but which neither had properly tested.2 They set stringent criteria about the age of the research, its quality and rigour and the effect that was measured. Using these and other criteria, they sifted the studies, working down from the thousands that initially appeared in their searches. Their findings were very clear and led to changes in educational policy and in classrooms across the world. The Evidence Informed Policy and Practice Centre was set up at UCL Institute of Education in response to this, and has since led a large of quantity of reviews – I worked on two myself.
John Hattie took this to a new level with his study of these reviews: a meta-study published in 2009 called Visible Learning, which has significantly influenced policy and practice in education and in education leadership across the world in the near decade since its publication.3