Leadership in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Leadership in early childhood education is greatly under-represented in academic literature. Derek Glover’s review of the contents of EMAL, for the 40th Anniversary Issue in September 2012 (Bush and Crawford, 2012), showed that only 15 papers have focused on primary education in the past decade, compared to 41 on secondary schools, and most of those do not address early childhood settings. This issue of the journal begins to address this inequity with two papers on this sector. It is now well established that student outcomes are strongly influenced by children’s early learning experiences and leadership is a key factor in making early childhood education successful. The first article, by Carol Aubrey, Ray Godfrey and Alma Harris, explores what leadership means for participants in 12 diverse early childhood settings in a large Midlands city. They surveyed almost 200 staff and governors, interviewed 12 early childhood leaders, conducted group interviews with other staff, and produced vignettes of leaders, based on diaries and video observations of their practice. They draw on all these data sets to show that leadership was distributed across the wide range of children, families, communities, professionals and agencies involved in early childhood education. They caution that one leadership approach cannot be appropriate for such a diverse sector and conclude that ‘flexible leadership is the way forward’. In the next article, Manjula Waniganayake, Johanna Heikka and Eeva Hujala link distributed leadership to early childhood education, drawing on the work of Alma Harris and other leading writers, in a systematic literature review. They confirm that published work on this sector is ‘sparse and difficult to locate’. They comment that, within early childhood education, research has been focused on relationships between leaders and followers. More recently, distributed leadership has been applied to the sector, as Aubrey et al.’s paper also suggests. They conclude by claiming that distributed leadership can bring about better interconnection, consistency and coherence in service delivery amongst the diverse stakeholders involved in early childhood education. Achievement for All (AfA) is a major initiative which has transformed provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England. Sonia Blandford has been centrally involved with AfA since the pilot in 2009 and the next article presents her assessment of its impact on school leadership. Drawing on focus group interviews with heads and local authority project leaders in ten local authorities, she identifies 54 different leadership issues arising from the implementation of AfA. Unsurprisingly, the most frequently cited ‘leadership lesson’ was to ‘communicate vision to all stakeholders’. Second was the need to distribute leadership, to achieve ‘ownership’, connecting with the points made in the first two articles in this issue. The author concludes that AfA has produced clear evidence of impact on SEND leadership practice. The next two articles both relate to countries under-represented in the educational leadership literature. Jamila Razzaq and Christine Forde examine the impact of curricular change on secondary school leaders in Pakistan. Drawing on interviews with the heads of 20 schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the authors note several disadvantages of the change process; limited engagement Educational Management Administration & Leadership 41(1) 3–4 a The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1741143212462968 emal.sagepub.com