My two favourite leadership gurus are Viviane Robinson and W. Edwards Deming.
I use them in the same slide deck on the science of change. On this slide, the industrialist who was central to the emergence of Total Quality Management and the educational leadership guru collide (the quotation could easily have come from Robinson's book, but it is, of course, Deming's):
So, simply, the binary debate about leadership skills – generic leadership vs leadership rooted in domain knowledge – is not so simple. As with most things, there is a third way between the two extremes, where general leadership skills and domain-centric leadership complement each other to produce a rounded, multi-faceted, expert leader.
What I love about the NCE Senior Leadership Programme (Level 7 Senior Leader & MSc in School Leadership & Management) is how delegates have two days of leadership theory and then, a week later, on a Tuesday night, Stephen Tierney and I run our series of Turning Theory into Practice sessions, where we explain the leadership theory in terms of what we learnt in our 60+ years of teaching and leading schools.
The L7 Masters combined with Apprenticeship has been a qualification of unique genius, in that it combines course content full of relevant theory from both education and the business world, with the doing-it-for-real element of applying what is learnt to what is happening in the delegates’ schools right now.
The fact that the L7 Masters is fully funded by the Apprenticeship Levy is just an added bonus. The main thing is the high quality teaching and learning that is taking place, which is grounded in research evidence and delivered by some of the best practitioners in the country.
This is a highly regarded and increasingly influential two year programme for senior leaders, including headteachers, which also covers all the new National Professional Qualification for Headteachers (NPQH). The programme consists of five core modules:
- Foundation Module;
- Strategy;
- People Management and Development in Education;
- Innovation and Change;
- Finance, Governance and Risk in Education;
- Research Methods and Project.
More information is available in the PDF below.
Level 7 – Masters Senior Leadership Programme (Apprenticeship Levy Funded)
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