Abstract
Drawing on the findings of a three-year, longitudinal study investigating early career teachers’ (ECTs) experiences and perceptions of leadership development in English secondary schools, this paper highlights, from the perspectives of ECTs, some of the factors that support and facilitate leadership development during the first few years of the teaching career. ECTs’ leadership dispositions and aspirations seemed to be formed within and in response to what they perceived to be the nature of their particular school contexts. They appeared to position themselves in relation to the perceived school leadership ethos at a range of points along what might be conceptualised as a continuum from resistance and alienation to amenability and identification with the perceived ethos. Amenability and identification with the school leadership ethos seemed to be associated with high levels of personal agency, such that ECTs gathered important developmental experience as leaders and were developing leadership skills, dispositions and aspirations. In a minority of contexts, ECTs experienced feelings of alienation, and positioned themselves as resistant to school leadership in contexts they perceived to be characterised by high accountability, blame and coercion. This resistance and alienation were associated with reduced agency, and restricted development as leaders.
Highlights
We report in this paper on a longitudinal study investigating early career teachers’ (ECTs) experiences and perceptions of leadership development in the context of secondary schools in the English Midlands
Whilst the primary purpose of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is to seek insights into individuals’ perceptions, experiences and the sense they make of these, certain key themes were identifiable across all cases in the sample or sections of the sample: The first was that the importance of trust was identified by all participants as crucial to their development
As the school context shifted from stability and support to precarity, the ECT adopted a pragmatic stance embracing the urgency of the need to meet Ofsted priorities without losing sight of her own principles
Summary
We report in this paper on a longitudinal study investigating early career teachers’ (ECTs) experiences and perceptions of leadership development in the context of secondary schools in the English Midlands. Whilst re-deploying experienced headteachers may plug some gaps, there is increasing awareness of the need to be strategic in growing new leaders (e.g., Rhodes and Brundrett 2012) This is important for schools in socio-economically disadvantaged areas, like those that the ‘Talented Leaders’ programme targets, which often employ high proportions of novice teachers (Allen, Burgess, and Mayo 2012), and which need to find ways to develop ECTs, harnessing their energies and potential, and providing them with opportunities that will enable them to develop leadership skills, dispositions and expertise (Muijs et al 2013). It needs to be inclusive, the aim being to create what Gu and Day (2013) term ‘learning communities’ (p. 40), within which novice teachers can thrive, and develop pedagogical expertise but leadership skills and knowledge that will benefit the school as well as facilitate their career development
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