Leadership In England Research Articles

Integrated care system leadership: a rapid realist review

PurposeGiven the complex nature of integrated care systems (ICSs), the geographical spread and the large number of organisations involved in partnership delivery, the importance of leadership cannot be overstated. This paper aims to present novel findings from a rapid realist review of ICS leadership in England. The overall review question was: how does leadership in ICSs work, for whom and in what circumstances?Design/methodology/approachDevelopment of initial programme theories and associated context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs) were supported by the theory-gleaning activities of a review of ICS strategies and guidance documents, a scoping review of the literature and interviews with key informants. A refined programme theory was then developed by testing these CMOCs against empirical data published in academic literature. Following screening and testing, six CMOCs were extracted from 18 documents. The study design, conduct and reporting were informed by the Realist And Metanarrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) training materials (Wong et al., 2013).FindingsThe review informed four programme theories explaining that leadership in ICSs works when ICS leaders hold themselves and others to account for improving population health, a sense of purpose is fostered through a clear vision, partners across the system are engaged in problem ownership and relationships are built at all levels of the system.Research limitations/implicationsDespite being a rigorous and comprehensive investigation, stakeholder input was limited to one ICS, potentially restricting insights from varied geographical contexts. In addition, the recent establishment of ICSs meant limited literature availability, with few empirical studies conducted. Although this emphasises the importance and originality of the research, this scarcity posed challenges in extracting and applying certain programme theory elements, particularly context.Originality/valueThis review will be of relevance to academics and health-care leaders within ICSs in England, offering critical insights into ICS leadership, integrating diverse evidence to develop new evidence-based recommendations, filling a gap in the current literature and informing leadership practice and health-care systems.

Lessons from Two Decades of Research about Successful School Leadership in England: A Humanistic Approach

This paper reviews the research on successful school principalship carried out in England over the last 20 years. Drawing on evidence synthesized from the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) and related English school leadership research conducted by ISSPP scholars, this review aims to answer a conceptual research question: How do the principalship’s moral purposes and contextual understanding shape the time-sensitive, informed adoption of combinations and accumulations of strategies that lead to sustained school success? This paper identifies five research insights derived from case studies in England and elaborates on the complex, values-led layered web of interactions between the school principal and key stakeholders within and outside the school in the context of frequent social changes and policy interventions in England. Whilst the pace has been greater and more intense than in many other countries, the direction has been, and remains, similar. The body of scholarship here reviewed engages with national policies as filtered and then enacted by successful principals. While ‘effective’ principals lead to students’ success as measured by performance on national tests and examinations, our focus is upon an empirically founded definition of ‘successful’ school leadership that is located in complexity theory and encompasses the enactment of the core purposes of education that include but go beyond the functional. In doing so, it avoids ‘what to do’ formulae and the limitations of certain theoretical ‘leadership’ models, finding that successful school leaders’ work embodies a broader humanistic view of student learning and achievement, which implies the preordinance of the personal over the functional. Taken together, these research insights contribute to the ISSPP’s continued effort to refine and advance the knowledge base of successful school leadership within and across different countries.

System leadership in England: Changing the landscape, for better or worse?

System leadership in England: Changing the landscape, for better or worse?

A comparative study on the perceptions of Dutch and British Muslim leadership regarding social-political challenges

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze and compare attitudes and perceptions of Muslim leadership toward society and politics based on their personal experiences in England and the Netherlands.Design/methodology/approachThis study provides valuable insights into how Muslim leadership experiences socio-political realities from own perspectives. The comparative analysis of Muslim leadership in England and the Netherlands highlights the unique qualities of each community, while also demonstrating shared communal awareness regarding political participation and concerns regarding the rise of Islamophobia and populism.FindingsThe study reveals significant differences between Dutch and British Muslim leadership regarding attitudes toward politics. While the Dutch political system enables minorities to have political parties, British leaders prefer peaceful resistance, internal cooperation and voting power for influence. Muslim communities in both countries face similar challenges, such as access to politics, rising Islamophobia and populism. However, there are variations in leadership maturity and attitudes toward communal unification and political participation.Research limitations/implicationsEspecially Dutch Muslims were much more open toward cooperation once approached. The biggest challenge was to get into the Muslim communities in England. Even though British Muslims showed a much greater aptitude toward their civic duties, British Muslims were much more careful and wished that interviews were written down instead of being recorded. But once the author was part of the community, community leaders were more accepting and tolerant towards the author's presence. From that point on, to be recommended (snowballing) became easier.Practical implicationsThis research shows clearly how different ethnic Muslim communities differ across two different countries. Even though both countries have their own advantages and disadvantages, understanding how civic responsibilities and the progressive development of minority attitudes can be best approached is important to policymakers.Social implicationsOne major social implication is the way minorities perceive social and political equality and how these minority expectations can be met. Research shows that there is much fear and anxiety to growing sentiments of populism and right-wing appraisals. For a better integration and inclusion, a sound assessment of social and religious expectations is crucial.Originality/valueAs far as the author knows, there are no qualitative research studies that compare Muslim minority conditions in the Netherlands and England. This research makes this even more interesting for how to create policy that contributes to a European understanding of Muslim existence in Europe and a common European identity. This is crucial for a more stable and stronger European future.

An Investigation About the Challenges of Adopting Performance Management in Educational Leadership in England

Since the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) introduced the performance management system in general education in September 2000, it has become an important component in education reform in England. The goal of this study is to explore the challenges that teachers and principals may encounter in adopting performance management in educational leadership in England. This study finds that performance management provides a single, unfair mechanism for teacher evaluation, and within this framework, teachers’ personal development is largely ignored. And for leaders, performance management results in a lack of leadership responsibility. This study argues that performance management is not conducive to the development of schools in England.

System Leadership in England and Consultant Supervisors in Taiwan: The Exotic Development under the Trend of the Contemporary Educational Governance

System Leadership in England and Consultant Supervisors in Taiwan: The Exotic Development under the Trend of the Contemporary Educational Governance

Too many cooks or cannot follow the recipe? A critical consideration of conceptualising the professional leadership of social work in England as a collective endeavour

In 2018, the official requirement for social workers in England to demonstrate ‘professional leadership’ was refreshed and extended to now include needing to be part of the ‘collective leadership’ of the profession. This development raises several issues, not the least of which is whether there is a clearly identifiable ‘collective leadership’ in English social work to be a part of. The article discusses how professional leadership has come to be placed on the social work agenda in England. It then examines various definitional and practical issues associated with putting collective models of leadership into practice, noting that collective leadership is made more challenging in hierarchical organisations and where there is the lack of a shared vision. A survey of sources of social work leadership in England reveals a picture that is crowded and fragmented, and where leadership is as likely to come from private accountancy firms as it is from social work professionals. The discussion concludes with suggestions for making progress if the idea of collective leadership is to be a realistic aim. This includes building leadership capacity at all levels of the profession, starting at the qualification stage.

Roles and behaviours of diligent and dynamic healthcare boards.

Variation persists in the quality of board-level leadership of hospitals. The consequences of poor leadership can be catastrophic for patients. The year 2019 marks 50 years of public inquiries into healthcare failures in the UK. The aim of this article is to enhance our understanding of context-specific effectiveness of healthcare board practices, drawing on an empirical study of changes in hospital board leadership in England. The study suggests leadership behaviours that lay the conditions for better organisation performance. We locate our findings within the wider theoretical debates about corporate governance, responding to calls for theoretical pluralism and insights into the effects of discretionary effort on the part of board members. We conclude by proposing a framework for the ‘restless’ board from a multi-theoretic standpoint, and suggest a repertoire specifically for healthcare boards. This comprises a suite of board roles as conscience of the organisation, sensor, shock absorber, diplomat and coach, with accompanying dyadic behaviours to match particular organisation aims and priorities. The repertoire indicates the importance of a cluster of leadership practices to fulfil the purposes of healthcare boards in differing, complex and challenging contexts.

The profile of professional midwifery leadership in England

Background The past decade has seen significant, system-wide changes to the midwifery profession as a result of major reports. A recurring theme throughout is the importance of professional midwifery leadership at a local, regional and national level. Aims To explore the profile of professional midwifery leadership in England following significant and system-wide changes to the midwifery profession over the past 10 years. Methods Access to an online survey was forwarded to Directors of Midwifery and Heads of Midwifery in England to gain understanding of the profile of midwifery leadership at a local, provider level. One-to-one meetings were conducted with senior, executive NHS professionals and chief executives from the Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Midwives, politicians and members of the House of Lords. Findings Further recognition of midwifery as a separate profession is needed with due regard and formal authority afforded the profession at local, regional and national levels. Maternity services will benefit from employing a Director of Midwifery with direct access to the Trust Board. Conclusion There is a need for the national, regional and local senior midwifery structures to be reviewed with consideration given to a Chief Midwife nationally; Directors of Midwifery regionally and in every provider Trust in England.

The micropolitics of posthuman early years leadership assemblages: Exploring more-than-human relationality

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership. However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing, quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.

Developing E-cigarette friendly smoking cessation services in England: staff perspectives

BackgroundPublic health leadership in England has taken a distinctive international stance by identifying the potential public health benefit of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. This includes the development of a ground-breaking set of national guidelines for developing e-cigarette friendly stop smoking services. However, little is known about the views of staff engaged within these services and whether or how such services are becoming e-cigarette friendly. This study aimed to investigate the uptake and usage of e-cigarette guidance, from the perspective of those enacting tobacco cessation interventions ‘on the ground’.MethodsQualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 cessation service staff, including advisors (n = 15), managers (n = 5) and commissioners (n = 5) from eight different services in the South-West of England, UK. A thematic analysis of the transcripts was conducted using NVivo software.ResultsAlthough some stop smoking services labelled themselves e-cigarette friendly, there was no consensus over what this should entail. For some, this meant active engagement, such as working with local vape shops, and in the case of one service, offering e-cigarettes through a voucher scheme to disadvantaged groups. For others, an e-cigarette friendly service was conceptualized in a passive sense, as one which welcomed service users using e-cigarettes. Many services did not use the ‘e-cigarette friendly’ claim in their branding or promotional material. Several discursive themes underlay differing staff attitudes. Those more reluctant to engage framed this in terms of their ‘duty of care’, with concerns focusing on the addictiveness of nicotine, lack of medically licensed product and ongoing scientific controversy. Those motivated to engage drew on a discourse of social justice goals and ‘doing things differently’ in relation to lower socio-economic status smokers, those with mental health issues and other vulnerable groups. Strong public health leadership was also identified as a key factor in changing staff attitudes towards e-cigarettes.ConclusionsOn-the-ground enactment of e-cigarette friendly services is varied as well as reflective of the wider policy and regulatory environment. Although the context of English stop smoking services is one of austerity and change, there are opportunities for active engagement with e-cigarettes to achieve overall cessation goals. For this to occur, training, policy consistency and sharing best practice are needed.

Developing Specialist Leaders of Education: a research engagement approach

ABSTRACTThere has been little research to date on the continuing professional development needs of the several thousand Specialist Leaders of Education (SLE) now designated by the National College for Teaching and Leadership in England to work across schools as consultants on school-to-school support. This case study reports on the second and third stages of a four-stage research process designed to address these needs. The first stage reported on the creation of a professional development framework for SLE’s using consultancy research. These middle stages test out this framework with a stakeholder group of SLEs, headteachers and broker in a Teaching Schools Alliance. The fourth stage will track the implementation of professional development activities arising from these findings. Apart from the specific needs of SLE, this study will have wider relevance for all practitioners and researchers working in and with schools on leadership development using Research Engagement strategies and Joint Practice Development approaches in a so-called ‘self- improving’ school system.Abbreviation: NCTL: National College for Teaching and Leadership; HEI: Higher Education Institution; SAT: is Standard Assessment Task; CPD: Continuing Professional Development.

Reshaping common sense: management, power and the allure of medical leadership in England's NHS

Reshaping common sense: management, power and the allure of medical leadership in England's NHS

Service integration through medical leadership in England’s NHS

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the current interest in leadership within the National Health Service (NHS), especially within medicine, as a solution to the slow rate of integration of health and social care services.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a conceptual analysis of policy documents and professional statements about leadership.FindingsLeadership is a new common sense, promoted despite the limited evidence that it actually delivers. Leaders take risks, develop organisational vision and involve others in change using influence rather than hierarchic authority. They work together in ad hoc local networks, and, because leaders experience the work first hand, they are trusted by fellow professionals and bring to the organisation of work a flexible, immediate, policy-oriented dynamism and pragmatic adaptability.Practical implicationsThis paper argues that the leadership movement represents a historic compromise between professionals (mostly medical) who want to shape decision making about service reconfiguration, and managers and politicians seeking ways to integrate health and social care services.Originality/valueTo the authors’ knowledge this conceptual analysis is the first to be applied to leadership within the NHS.

Paul Miller, Exploring school leadership in England and the Caribbean: New insights from a comparative approach

Paul Miller, <i>Exploring school leadership in England and the Caribbean: New insights from a comparative approach</i>

School leadership and Black and minority ethnic career prospects in England: The choice between being a group prototype or deviant head teacher

The body of research on the career prospects of Black and minority ethnic (BME) teachers cites racism as one of the reasons for BME underrepresentation in positions of school leadership in England. Understanding the nature of such discriminatory practices is needed in order to find solutions. It has also been reported that pioneer BME leaders are perceived as role models. Such a claim is mainly based on their appointment rather than their action or inaction in facilitating the career progression of other members of BME staff. To address these gaps, this study draws on electronic survey data of eight respondents out of ten, two of whom provided rich written and interview narratives. The data were analysed under the group-based identity formation framework to suggest that the underrepresentation of BME staff due to racism can be explained by head teachers’ prototypicality of group/team values and their failure to deviate from these. That a BME senior leader acted in the same way highlights the following: the dominance of the role of head as a group prototype; the need to challenge deep-seated discrimination; and the view that increased representation needs to be matched with modified school-wide attitude.

イギリスにおけるスクールリーダーシップ開発の動向 : 校長の専門職基準・資格を中心に(海外の教育経営事情)

イギリスにおけるスクールリーダーシップ開発の動向 : 校長の専門職基準・資格を中心に(海外の教育経営事情)

Primary school leadership in England: performativity and matters of professionalism

This article presents interview data from a study involving nine primary school leaders. Five are leaders of local authority schools while four are leaders of schools within a large academy chain. The article examines their perspectives about the current regimes of performativity in the English education context and, in particular, the accountability demands of Ofsted. Mindful of contemporary concerns about the tensions between performativity and professionalism in education, the analysis highlights the different ways in which each group responds to external accountability demands. The article illustrates how investments in traditional and entrepreneurial professionalism continue to impact on how the current demands of performativity are understood. It highlights the significance of conceptualising educator professionalism beyond dichotomies that idealise the former at the expense of the latter and the importance of an ongoing critical focus on the ways in which professionalism is currently being articulated in schools.

School leadership preparation in Malaysia

This paper examines the preparation of school principals in Malaysia, and the aspiration of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013–2025 to ensure high-performing school leaders in every school. It reports on the principal preparatory programme, the National Professional Qualification for Educational Leaders, which is mandatory to those who aspire to be school principals. Documentary analysis was undertaken on materials used for leadership training programmes by the National Institute of Educational Management and Leadership or Institut Aminuddin Baki (IAB), which is the country’s main leadership training and development centre, equivalent to the National College for Teaching and Leadership in England. Eight primary and secondary schools, chosen by stratified purposive sampling, were selected for the study. Interviews were conducted with principals and assistant principals of the eight schools, to establish how they were selected and prepared for their leadership roles. Interviews with Ministry of Education and IAB officials offered a provider perspective while an interview with an education minister clarified the policy and political contexts of the study. The findings of the study draw attention to the need to refine the selection criteria, with a focus on higher entry standards to ensure excellent leadership in schools, an emphasis on instructional leadership to improve student learning in schools, the conflict between central direction and the importance of situational leadership, and the political imperative for programme outcomes.

Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) school leaders may understand these sexual identities as essentialist categories and present lived experiences resistant to the identity category-troubling tenets of queer theory, whose application in queer empirical research can nonetheless provide important insights into leaders’ identity, practices and power. In this article, I focus on reconciling this conceptual tension to produce an empirical account of inadvertently queer school leadership in England. The article uses queer theory to re-interpret findings from a study of five LGB school leaders to show that despite perceiving sexual identity in an essentialist way, these LGB school leaders sexually embody inadvertently queer school leadership. They trouble gender norms and conceptualizations of ‘leader’ through non-normative sexual embodiment; suggest queer identities for others; and challenge heteronormativity’s institutional foundations and other processes of normalization.