Editorial: System leadership in English schools: The long goodbye to local authorities?

Abstract

Most of the discourse of educational leadership relates to schools, colleges and universities, and researchers often use these settings as units of analysis. They may be seen as ‘prime institutions’, central to the educational landscape, within their communities and beyond. However, these organisations may also be conceptualised as part of a wider system of schools, coordinated, and perhaps controlled, by a more senior level within the educational hierarchy. The ‘glue’ that holds such systems together, and provides a degree of coherence, is the district level. Collectively, despite their ubiquitous presence, the role of districts remains under-researched and weakly theorised. In England, local education authorities, later described just as local authorities, had a substantial role for much of the 20th century in leading educational provision. The 1944 Education Act described education as a national service, locally administered. Local education departments, headed by chief education officers, or directors of education, played major roles in defining and coordinating community education provision. Local authorities were also political entities and political values and ideologies were influential in determining the nature of schooling and further education within their boundaries. This ‘middle tier’ was an important arena for educational policy-making, with accountability to local communities through the electoral process. It is important not to romanticise this period as a ‘golden age’, because there were often political and/or bureaucratic weaknesses, but they were successful in providing a local centre for educational development. In the 21st century, as Steven Courtney and Ruth McGinity report in the first article in this issue, local authorities have become much less significant as schools were encouraged, or cajoled, to become academies, independent of local authorities. Subsequently, a new ‘middle tier’ emerged in the form of multi-academy trusts (MATs). These authors note that MATs are now the legal entity that provides educational services across numerous sites that may or may not have a geographical basis. They say that suchMATs now constitute educational ‘systems’, led by an executive headteacher or chief executive officer (CEO). They report on a case study of a MAT in a coastal community, comprising four schools. They conclude that system leadership, epitomised by MATs, is a mechanism for depoliticization, with power located within unaccountable, para-statal institutions. Further education in England has also experienced a substantial change in the new millennium, with significant impacts on college leadership. Stephen Corbett investigates the role of further education middle managers in a distinctive way, through the lens of human resource managers, addressing the question, what are the contemporary professional expectations of further education middle managers in England? The author surveyed one HR manager from each college with a 19% response rate. He comments that middle managers are responsible for translating the vision of Editorial