Commonwealth educationists explore ways to boost school leadership

Head teachers and school principals need new skills to adapt to a changing work environment that reflects the complex and changing world of education, according to a new Commonwealth study.

Improved relations with parents and the community and further training in leadership and human resource development were identified as the greatest needs for school leaders from Barbados, Botswana, Jamaica, Malaysia, Singapore, St Lucia, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Senior officials from Commonwealth countries who participated in the study met in London this week to share their experiences and discuss how to use the findings to improve school learning in their countries.

Virgilio Juvane, who leads on the project at the Secretariat, explains that despite increasing budgetary and resource allocations to schools over the past decades, performance had not improved significantly.

“This was an assessment study to gather solid information on the needs of school leaders. This week, we are bringing together the countries which participated and a group of professionals and experts on the subject to review the report and its findings.

“We hope this will help us to plan for the next phase: the development of training materials that reflect the needs of this generation of school leaders. We want to hear to what extent the results of the study are in line with their needs, which ultimately contribute to the quality of learning in schools.”

The importance of school leadership and its role in improving the quality of schooling has long been a priority of the Commonwealth Secretariat, which for several years has offered training materials for head teachers and inspectors.

But when Commonwealth Ministers of Education met in South Africa in 2006, they called for a fresh approach which accounted for the changing demands of policy makers and other stakeholders such as pressures to achieve higher academic results and raise standards of performance.

The ‘Co-Lead Project’, commissioned by the Education Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat was conducted by Prof Petros Pashiardis of the Open University of Cyprus and Dr Stefan Brauckmann, of the German Institute for International Educational Research.

The provisional results were presented to Ministers meeting in Malaysia last year. The Commonwealth Council for Education Administration and Management, a professional body with expertise in the area of school leadership is working in close collaboration with the Secretariat in this field.

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