2019 will mark my thirtieth year as a secondary school teacher, and in that time I’ve worked for ten different principals and had dealings with a great many more. Like all of us, principals come in all sorts of flavours, with their own strengths and weaknesses, but it strikes me that there is one test that will tell you a great deal about the quality of leadership within a school and I mention it now because it has become publicly pertinent.
Some principals are loyalists by nature, intent on making the school they lead the very best school it can be. They think primarily in terms of community, relative achievement and reputation. It is very clear whom they serve, it is the school itself, they believe in the identity of the school as a meaningful thing. They are ultimately tribal in their thinking. These are the principals who openly revel in their successes on the national stage, their sports team victories, scholarship pass rates, the triumph of their school choir, whatever.
The second type see themselves not as serving their school, but rather the education system more broadly. They seek to contribute to the wellbeing of all students, and take no joy in their school outperforming another, for that speaks simply of the loss of students elsewhere. They understand that education is a zero sum game in this regard, that for every champion there is a runner up, and a thousand also rans who also enjoyed the game. They understand that reputation building is a terrible waste of resource, and they instinctively get that a little kid running barefoot around a field is gaining just as much life affirming pleasure from their game as the member of a national champion squad. They understand that the very finest achievements of humanity are those which do not come at the cost of another. They eschew competition in favour of co-operation, and celebrate the quotidian. They see the function of the school as that of serving students, rather than seeing students as a means of enhancing the standing of the school.
Obviously, it is the second type I admire. I mention this because a taskforce led by Bali Haque has just reported back on the Tomorrow’s Schools experiment, and has argued that the competitive model has come with significant costs. The group have recommended that we do away with local community management of what are essentially bureaucratic functions (managing buildings, for example) and they have proposed a model whereby schools fundamentally re-imagine themselves as parts of broader educational communities. Of course, there will be all kinds of fish hooks in the nuts and bolts implementation, but the very fact the report has been written fills me with great heart. Our school system has been deeply compromised by the competitive model and every day I am saddened by the sheer stupidity of an educational model that seeks to celebrate the elite and in doing so misses the far more valuable qualities that can be nurtured in all. This is the system that oversaw large scale white flight out of schools, that has fostered an ugly rise in adolescent anxiety, has endorsed massive levels of over assessment and has gutted the curriculum of a genuine love for learning. It has created a system hugely vulnerable to lurches in fashion, and so generated unspeakable waste in the endless rush for the latest promise of educational revolution. Most crucially, it has underpinned the great rift between the haves and have nots, and has seen far too much of the resource base jealously guarded by those schools that need it least.
I can not speak adequately then, of my contempt for those school principals who are speaking so aggressively against the proposed reforms, talking of the destruction of our education system and threatening to march on parliament in defence of their right to put the interests of their privileged communities ahead of those of the nation’s children. If you are considering schools at the moment, and wondering how to judge the quality of its principal, asking what they think of the proposed reforms would be a good place to start.
And on that note, all power to the Minister Chris Hipkins, in standing strong against these little empire builders. There is huge potential for good here, and it is to be hoped he is not frightened from his course.
Bernard Beckett 
Can’t have that Benard, in a few years the old boy’s networks will collapse!
Glad to see you have the interests of the young and less advantaged as such a focus, definitely needs to be a far more focus on their future rather than what we have at present IMO.
I had to look up “quotidian” to by the way! had no idea what it meant.
Always fantastic to hear from you Andrew. I love the thought of these random connections over the years. I saw Alan Burt, I think last year, and he told me he’d bumped into Gray Williams. Who of us at eight years old would ever have imagined how our lives would play out?
All the best to you and yours.