Achieving a ‘school-led’ system

So we are nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century and the challenge of leading schools has never been greater.

We are functioning in an age of scrupulous accountability where punitive responses to poor performance are commonplace; we are operating with reduced financial resources at a time when we are expected to do more; we are having to provide for and attend to individuals whose needs appear more than any previous generation.

Wrestling with these challenges places leaders and their staff in a seemingly impossible position.

If you chart back over the recent decades, the direction from governments (both national and local) was increasingly obvious. You could argue that the arrival of the national curriculum in 1988 heralded the commencement of the new era of governmental intrusion in education. This intensified in the 1990s with the arrival of Ofsted and performance tables and in the 2000s with the national strategies and Michael Barber’s “deliverology” (creating the notion of a science of delivery that saw education as one of its lead projects).