The Impact of School Governance on School Leadership

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Defining school leadership and governance
Policy reforms on school governance in Australia
School governance and leadership in Australia
Conclusion
References

Introduction

School leadership is now a priority issue in all schools around the world. As focus shifts on schooling and school results, leadership is now a mandatory issue of concern not only in Australian schools, but in all schools around the world (Pont, Nusche & Moorman, 2008). Nevertheless, school leadership is influenced by the various educational policy reforms that have been initiated in the recent years.

Some of these policies include changes in school governance, standardized tests, school funding arrangements, use of ICT in schools, and equity and social justice. These policy reforms have, to a greater extent, influenced school leadership especially in Australian public schools. Over the recent years, there have been shifts on policy concerning school governance in Australia towards devolution.

But how has these governance changes impacted on school leadership? In this paper, I have tried to investigate the impact of school governance on school leadership. My paper presents an analysis of the various governance changes that have occurred in Australian schools since 1960s and culminates into a discussion on how the current school governance system have impacted or is likely to impact on school leadership.

Defining school leadership and governance

Before I engage deeper in this discussion, I will start by defining the two important concepts; leadership and governance. Leadership and governance are not new concepts. The terms have been used in institutions, organizations and even in schools. Leadership and governance are two closely related, but different concepts as will be seen shortly.

Leadership is a relative term with no clear definition. In this regard, Cuban (1988) stated that, despite there being more than 350 definitions of leadership, explicit understanding as to what distinguishes leaders from non-leaders is still lacking (p. 190). Cuban (1988) defines leadership in the context of schools to refer to people who bend the motivations and actions of others to achieving certain goals; it implies taking initiatives and risks (p. 193).

In simple terms, leadership is more concerned with influencing peoples attitudes and motivations towards achieving certain goals. I will thus define school leadership to involve influencing teachers and students motivations, behaviours and attitudes towards achieving high academic performance. As we have seen in our schools, leadership is primarily the responsibility of school principals/head teachers.

School principals thus have to play administrative and managerial in addition to their role as practicing teachers. In most cases, the word leadership is used interchangeably with management and administration in school context (Pont et al., 2008). However, these three words are different.

While leadership involves influencing other peoples attitudes and behaviours, management is more concerned with maintaining current processes (Pont et al., 2008). Nevertheless, school leadership encompasses both management and administration. School leaders often undertake managerial and administrative tasks in their leadership process.

Governance, on the other hand, involves decision-making and implementation process. School governance involves the use of power, authority and legitimacy to oversee expenditures on facilities and resources within the school (Obondoh, Nandago and Otiende, 2005). As stated in ACER (2008):

governance is concerned with notions of legitimacy, representativeness and accountability, and how educational institutions interact with civil society, described as: the network of mutually supporting relationships between government, business and industry, education and other public and private sector services, community, home and voluntary agencies and institutions (p. 27).

School governance as I have used in this paper involves the use of power and authority to influence decision making on such important issues as: the dos and donts; accountability and information sharing; policies, laws, plans and budgets; power relations; determination and enforcement of rules and guidelines; and allocation, utilization and generation of resources (Obondoh et al., 2005).

Policy reforms on school governance in Australia

There have been major reforms in school governance in our schools since the 1960s as I will discuss shortly. In the 1960s and 1970s, Australian public sector witnessed structural pressures driven by its rapid expansion and growth making it difficult to manage schools from the central government. There were also changes in attitudes and values towards greater involvement of teachers and students in school decision making (Ainley & McKenzie, 2000).

I attribute the policy changes in school governance in the 1960s to the growing number of non-government schools. The 1970s further witnessed intense devolution pressures triggered by the need to redress educational disadvantage while embracing community involvement in addressing learning needs as well as the need to update existing curricula to cover new curriculum areas (Ainley & McKenzie, 2000).

One such important move towards devolution and head teachers autonomy was witnessed in South Australia in 1970, when the then Director of Education Department sent the Freedom and Authority Memorandum to school heads. This memorandum gave school heads the legitimate power to make decisions on school rules, implementation of curriculum guidelines, and school ethos issues (Thomson, 2010).

In terms of devolution, the Freedom and Authority Memorandum led to the establishment of local School Councils and decentralization of non-salary budgets to individual schools. In the 1980s, school governance focused more on accountability. Curriculum development was also moved back to central authorities as pressures mounted for stronger curricula. Another school governance characteristic of the 1980s was the emergence of state-wide assessment programs.

The 1990s continued with the centralized curriculum control and tight accountability, but with some form of devolution of school governance as outlined by Ainley & McKenzie (2000). First, the control over personnel matters and operating budgets were decentralized to school principals and councils. Second, both the central authority and the local community demanded accountability from school leaders.

Third, leadership enhancement interventions were sort through equipping schools with proper management tools. Fourth, professional qualification of teachers were recognized beyond state borders, qualification tests standardized and tertiary entrance scores made fair across states (Ainley & McKenzie, 2000).

These governance elements of the 1990s are still present in todays school governance. The need to devolve school governance to school principals and elected or representative boards featured clearly in Schools of the Future, 2003 initiatives in Victoria (ACER, 2008).

These initiatives characteristic of Victorian schools aimed at decentralizing school governance to individual schools and embracing schools autonomy. Another important policy document to guide school leadership and governance in this millennium is the Melbourne Declaration of 2008, which seeks to promote equity and social justice in Australian schools and to ensure that young Australians get access to quality education.

While this document does not directly touch on school governance, it calls for strengthening of accountability and transparency; the most important components of school governance (MCEETYA, 2008).

In this regard, Melbourne Declaration states that parents, families and the community should have access to information about the performance of their school compared to schools with similar characteristics (MCEETYA, 2008, pp.16-17). This presents a devolved system of school governance where by accountability is not only provided to the central government, but also to the local community and school councils.

Having outlined the main changes in public school governance in Australia since 1960s let me now elaborate the discussion to present the main structural features in school governance in Australia. Just like in most countries around the world, education in Australia is considered a state and territory responsibility. However, there exist differences in the governance structure of both primary and secondary education across different states and territories.

The traditional school system in most states and territories took the form of the old public administration with school governance highly centralized in the Ministry of Education and the Education Department (ACER, 2008). This old trend has, however, changed mainly due to the rapid growth of non-government schools on one part and devolution of decisions on day-to-day school operations and staff appointments on the other part (ACER, 2008).

While government schools have some commonalities across states and territories, non-government schools differ across states and territories in terms of mode of funding, autonomy, school leadership, and governance (ACER, 2008). Catholic schools, for instance, are funded and governed by catholic authorities.

School leadership in such schools is guided by catholic values and guidelines on service. Nevertheless, there exist some similarities in both government and non-government schools concerning school curriculum. This is because the central authorities retain the powers to specify broad curriculum guidelines while individual schools retain the autonomy to fill in curriculum details.

Both government and non-government schools alike are also required to comply with the various state educational legislation, regulations, and guidelines. For instance, both school systems have to provide accountability on performance through the national standardized tests.

School governance and leadership in Australia

As I have already mentioned in the previous section, Australia consists of varied school governance structures. Each governance structure has an impact on leadership either in a positive or negative manner. Even so, the current school governance in Australia is characterized by devolution with strong elements of accountability, market forces and organizational learning.

In spite of the structure of governance in place, principals as school leaders are vested with the responsibility of management, accountability, and educational leadership (ACER, 2008).

However, effective school leadership requires the sharing and distribution of leadership responsibilities among other staff members with significant leadership roles (ACER, 2007). Distributing leadership responsibilities ensures broad leadership skills base, role interdependence, improved coordination and problem solution, and complementarity of skills (ACER, 2008, p. 27).

In the old public administration system, our school principals were charged with the responsibility of providing leadership in the operation of individual schools, but governance of schools remained the responsibility of the central bureaucracy. In such governance systems, school principals had clearly set roles while teachers operated in isolation (Pont et al., 2008).

The school heads were considered the bureaucratic administrator with the overall authority within the school. The school principals had to ensure that individual schools comply with the set state or territorial guidelines, regulations and legislation. The school heads also remained accountable to the central authority for resource utilization within the school. School leaders work was more of managerial with less teaching, while teachers were considered experts who needed not to be supervised in the classrooms.

This approach to governance has, however, changed as our public sector is now moving away from the traditional bureaucratic form of governance to a decentralized form of governance.

Our schools are now being run by autonomous head teachers who have legitimate powers to influence decisions on important day-to-day operations of the schools and who are held accountable both to the community and the central authority. Nevertheless, the implementation of a devolved system of governance has not been easy, especially in Australian public schools.

Devolution of school governance has been defined by its proponents as significant and consistent delegation to the school level the authority to make decisions related to allocation of resources (Thomson, 2010, p. 11). From a decentralist perspective, devolution means deregulation and local governance of schools (Eacott, 2011).

However, devolved decision making seems to be more rhetorical as major decisions on school reforms in our nation continue to be made by those holding high offices following the old bureaucratic education system. This is in congruent with the social theorists like Foucault (1977) and Bourdieu (1977) who both argued that the roles of local powers in devolved governance rarely feature when major decisions are being made from the central authority.

The state control over major decisions on education in Australia traces its roots to the constitution, which places education a responsibility of the state government. For this reason, the state government, despite rolling out school autonomy, still has to play its mandate of providing quality education to Australian citizens. This includes setting of guidelines, rules and regulations governing important aspects of schooling.

For instance, we have the national testing regime and the national school curriculum that schools have to adhere to while at the same time trying to roll out school autonomy. This only means that school leaders role is reduced to implementation of decisions made by those in high bureaucratic offices. School leaders have to use the curriculum guideline as decided, but can only add in a few details. This situation is also made worse by the standardized tests policy.

With the national testing regime, school leaders only have to influence the teachers and students alike into achieving the national required academic performance standards leaving schools with very little autonomy concerning governance of its academic performance.

These policies directly affect head teachers autonomy both in government and non-government schools thereby impacting on leadership. The situation for government schools is even worsened by the fact that they entirely rely on federal funding hence they remain accountable to the federal authority, despite their autonomy.

As our country move away from the old public administration to embrace the new public management approach to governance, elements such as market forces for quality control, performance measures, participation, global competitiveness, and accountability are becoming the cornerstone of education policy (Eacott, 2011).

These elements were captured in the Blue Print for Government Schools, 2003 and mirrored well in the Melbourne Declaration, 2008 and are now the driving force behind the development of a national education curriculum to go hand in hand with the national standardized test policy. Our education system is currently being viewed from an economic perspective as a vehicle for building a strong economic background for the nation.

In this regard, the market demands for highly skilled labour are being captured in schools strategic plans for quality and performance control. The increased need for performance outcome is not only presented in the Melbourne declaration, but also necessitated by the standardized testing program. School leadership thus has to be directed towards quality and performance improvement.

One important aspect of our current school governance system is head teachers autonomy. The devolved system of school governance has granted school principals the legitimate authority to make important decisions on the day-to-day operations of the schools.

However, as John Walker once warned in his speech to school principals at a dinner held in North Adelaide Hotel when he stated that: We are going to give you freedom-freedom till it hurts (Thomson, 2010, p. 7), head teachers autonomy can easily be abused to the detrimental of school leadership.

For instance, granting head teachers the powers to hire and fire school teaching staff may be a good move, but in my opinion head teachers can use such powers to fire teachers on the basis of personal differences and not performance outcome as should be the case.

Head teachers autonomy was viewed as a landmark move towards granting school principals the freedom to run schools without any interference authority, but some states were a bit hesitant to embrace the new autonomy, except for Victoria and South Australia that even introduced school councils. New South Wales, for instance clang to the command and control form of governance whereby the school principal remains the overall commander and controller.

As our schools shift to decentralized governance systems, community involvement as well as participation from both the teaching staff and students has become inevitable. But what impact does participatory governance under the devolved system of school governance has on school leadership? Under the traditional school governance system, schools were locked out of community participation in decision making.

However, devolution has opened schools to involvement of both parents and the wider community in the management process. Integration of the community into the school system and making schools accountable to the community in my view is a positive move towards ensuring democracy and accountability in schools.

Parents involvement in school management differs across states in Australia, but parent representation is often done through state-level bodies that are consolidated into the Australian Council of State School Organization (ACSSO) at the national level. ACSSO has the right to participate in the decision making process of educational policies with direct influence on schooling. The body also has the mandate to demand information on school performance.

This thus has a significant impact on school leadership in that our school principals now have to provide leadership beyond the school border to the community to ensure that parents are empowered enough to play active role in key decisions on schooling policies (Pont et al., 2008). Further, our school principals also have to engage more in information dissemination, co-operation and coalition building to ensure that the local community is well integrated into the school system.

As Pont et al. (2008) pointed out, decentralized school governance requires school leaders to develop strong networking and collaboration skills and to engage with their peers and with intermediate bodies throughout the local education system (p. 23).

Such a system ensures that teachers, students, parents and the wider community are all represented in the school decision-making process, but school leaders are left with the burden of integrating the top-down demands from bureaucratic offices, internal demands from students and the teaching staff, and external demands from the local community and parents in the final decision made (Pont et al., 2008).

As such, our school principals work has become more political in trying to integrate and influence forces from within and without the school borders. Such levels of participation in school governance may also make schools vulnerable to local political influence leading to decisions that only reflect the interests of the local community, but may impact negatively on performance outcome.

The fact that schools now have to be accountable not only to the central authority, but also to the parents and local community is changing leadership approaches in our schools towards a participatory form of leadership where leadership roles are distributed among those with professional leadership skills.

Schools are now moving away from the traditional form of leadership in which school heads retained all the leadership powers to a situation whereby leadership is being distributed among teachers and school councils. Take, for instance, the state of Victorias Schools of the Future program whereby schools are considered autonomous and school heads are required to develop and implement strategic plans for performance improvement with the help of teachers and school councils.

Leadership in Victorian schools is guided by the Learning to Lead Effective, 2006, which has been closely interlocked with the Blueprint for Government Schools, 2003 reform agenda for decentralized governance of Australian schools. In this regard, I consider Victoria State a successful case study in the rolling out of devolved governance in Australian schools.

The state has managed to decentralize school governance to the local municipalities and schools, while at the same time focusing on improved school leadership with such important issues as accountability, quality and performance control, and participation closely paid attention to.

Under devolved systems of school governance, aspects such as operational budgets, recruitment of personnel and instructional delivery are all decentralized to individual schools. However, school leaders remain accountable both to the local community and the central authority in terms of resource utilization and performance outcome.

It is for the sake of accountability that the Commonwealth government of Australia introduced the standardized testing policy and is currently working on a national curriculum. The demand for performance accountability is also spearheaded by parents and the local community as the Melbourne Declaration grants them the right to hold schools accountable for the performance outcome of their children.

Hence, school leaders have to yield to pressure from all levels and provide documented evidence of school performance whenever needed. School leaders thus have to motivate teachers and students alike to achieve the high performance standards required. In such a situation our school principals are now being forced to supervise teachers in the classroom contrary to the old public administration system where teachers were considered to be experts and school principals needed not to supervise their work.

The increased demand for accountability also requires that school principals maintain up-to-date records on resource utilization, performance outcome, and personnel recruitment. As OECD (2001) noted, the devolved system of school governance is slowly evolving the role of school principals from the practicing teacher, with added technical and administrative duties, to the full-time manager and developer of human, physical and financial resources (pp. 20 and 24).

Most Australian schools now recruit school leaders and the teaching staff through the school councils as a way of ensuring transparency and accountability of the recruitment process. Under the Schools of the Future program in Victoria, school leaders are expected to submit school annual reports the state education authority as a way of ensuring quality assurance, despite the schools autonomy in terms of management.

According to a study conducted by Caldwell (1998), the Schools of the Future program reveals close association with school curriculum and learning outcomes, but has very little association with improvements in school achievement. The findings of this study only proves that while such systems of school governance may be beneficial in ensuring learning outcomes, they may have a negative impact on school leadership hence hampering performance improvement.

Conclusion

I have managed to draw the link between school governance and school policy in this paper. From my discussion, school governance in Australia and most countries around the world have evolved over the years from a centralized bureaucratic form of governance where the state and territorial authorities retain all the powers to make all decisions concerning school governance to a decentralized system where the state and territorial authorities delegate some decision-making powers to the local authority and schools.

However, the devolved system of school governance has also come with increased demands for participation, accountability and performance improvement. As such, school leaders role has changed with the changing governance policies. School leadership in the current governance system has added more responsibilities to school heads than was the case in the old public administration form of governance.

References

ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) (2008). OECD improving school leadership activity. Australia: Country background report. Queensland: Commonwealth of Australia.

Ainley, J. & Mckenzie, P. (2000). School governance: Research on education and management issues. International Education Journal, 1(3), 139-151.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Caldwell, B. (1998). Self-managing schools and improved learning outcomes. Canberra: DETYA.

Cuban, L. (1988).The managerial imperative and the practice of leadership in schools. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Eacott, S. (2011). Liberating schools through devolution: The Trojan horse of the state. Leading and Managing, 17(1), 75-83.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. London, UK: Penguin.

MCEETYA (Ministerial Council for Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs) (2008). Melbourne declaration on educational goals for young Australians. Web.

Obondoh, A., Nandago, M. & Otiende, E. (2005). Managing our schools today: A practical guide on participatory school governance. A manual for training and advocacy work. Kampala: PAMOJA: Africa Reflect Network in collaboration with ANCEFA.

OECD. (2001). Report on Hungary/OECD seminar on managing education for lifelong learning, 6-7 December 2001, Budapest. Paris: OECD.

Pont, B., Nusche, D. & Moorman, H. (2008). Improving school leadership volume 1: Policy and practice. Paris: OECD.

Thomson, P. (2010). Headteacher autonomy: A sketch of Bourdieuian field analysis of position and practice. Critical Studies in Education, 51 (1), 5-20.

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