Motivate: Relationships When my first son started primary school, if you wanted to see the headmaster you always knew where to find him. He would be in his office, door closed, seated behind his desk. A very tidy desk as I recall, bare of piles of papers, usually just one working paper in front of him. When my youngest son started at the same school ten years later there was a different head by now a headteacher rather than a master. And not — so easy to find him if you wanted a word. He would either be in a classroom talking to a teacher, or taking football practice, or meeting with Parent Teacher Association members to talk about their next fund-raising project. My sons are adults now and I haven't met the current head of the school But I've heard about her. She's well-known in the local community because of the activities she engages in. She joined the local Rotary Club for instance and secured a donation of reading for the school. I suppose this personal history is indicative of the changes in school leadership over the years: from a head being a distant figure of authority, working in isolation; to becoming more engaged in the work of teachers and drawing parents into involvement with the school; to extending the leadership role outside the school to the local context and wider. It's one illustration of how the main change in leadership has been to relationships. The other aspect of the changing relationships of course is that leadership is no longer seen to be vested in a single individual. A response to complexity, both of our modern world and of educational organizations, has been a movement to a notion of 'distributed' leadership: an acknowledgement that leadership needn't be restricted to one type of person in a particular management role, exhibiting a particular set of skills and attributes. This I book has been written for all teachers because all teachers are leaders: they may not hold a 'management' post but in their relationships with young people, parents, colleagues, they will be sharing leadership. Neil Dempster writes of this change from a concentration on leadership as individual action to leadership as collective activity, and believes it is a change in the
Motivate: Relationships When my first son started primary school, if you wanted to see the headmaster you always knew where to find him. He would be in his office, door closed, seated behind his desk. A very tidy desk as I recall, bare of piles of papers, usually just one working paper in front of him. When my youngest son started at the same school ten years later there was a different head — by now a headteacher rather than a master. And not so easy to find him if you wanted a word. He would either be in a classroom talking to a teacher, or taking football practice, or meeting with Parent Teacher Association members to talk about their next fund-raising project. My sons are adults now and I haven't met the current head of the school But I've heard about her. She's well-known in the local community because of the activities she engages in. She joined the local Rotary Club for instance and secured a donation of reading for the school. I suppose this personal history is indicative of the changes in school leadership over the years: from a head being a distant figure of authority, working in isolation; to becoming more engaged in the work of teachers and drawing parents into involvement with the school; to extending the leadership role outside the school to the local context and wider. It's one illustration of how the main change in leadership has been to relationships. The other aspect of the changing relationships of course is that leadership is no longer seen to be vested in a single individual. A response to complexity, both of our modern world and of educational organizations, has been a movement to a notion of 'distributed' leadership: an acknowledgement that leadership needn't be restricted to one type of person in a particular management role, exhibiting a particular set of skills and attributes. This I book has been written for all teachers because all teachers are leaders: they may not hold a 'management' post but in their relationships with young people, parents, colleagues, they will be sharing leadership. Neil Dempster writes of this change from a concentration on leadership as individual action to leadership as collective activity, and believes it is a change in the
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