What is System Leadership?

What if ..

• ...schools weren't organised in traditional ways?
• ...leadership was pooled across schools?
• ...schools agreed a town-wide timetable?
• ...primary and secondary schools merged?

Find out the answers to these questions and more in the Next Practice in System Leadership booklet which you can download here.

Next Practice in System Leadership

Across the country today, the landscape of school leadership is being transformed. One of the most striking and important trends is leadership beyond a single institution. This development is profoundly altering our long-standing models of school leadership.

Headteachers today are taking on the responsibility of leading more than one school; they are co-leading in partnerships and federations; they are leading schools in close collaboration with other agencies, or are providing a range of services themselves, giving children access to much more than education - healthcare, for example, and other services.

Most radically, perhaps, we are beginning to glimpse a future in which the whole idea of 'school' is re-imagined. Headteachers are already guiding education beyond school walls, as ICT opens up new possibilities for schooling that needs no 'school'.

Next Practice in System Leadership enables the system to:

• spread high quality leadership across several schools
• support a school or schools which are 'causing concern'
• deliver the 'five outcomes' of the Every Child Matters agenda
• deliver 'all-age' learning
• develop 14-19 curriculum provision
• develop 'whole town' services
• deliver shared services more efficiently; and
• resolve headteacher succession issues.

In the future, the drivers for Next Practice in System Leadership may look very different. They could include:

• globalisation - and the resulting requirement for universal proficiency
• the media's pervasive impact on our deep culture
• the Web, especially open source peer-to-peer systems/the ability to convene through the Internet
• an increasing emphasis on values (Who are you? What do you stand for?)
• a huge rise in local affiliation/focus on the local community's needs
• increasing need for security
• changing market opportunities and demands
• exponential growth in user demands for personalised services
• dissolving school boundaries
• new talents and skills.

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