This project brings together six partners from five countries to address the professional development and changed roles and pressures facing school leaders identified in the OECD and European Network on School Leadership reports. It explores what makes successful entrepreneurs in business, shares practice in leading organisations working with school leaders and identifies the synergies between business and education in order to create a set of training resources to enable current and future leaders to lead effectively in challenging circumstances. The project addresses the Erasmus+ Priorities of improving the leadership and management of schools and developing new training resources through the methodology of in-school ‘professional enquiry’. The project will assess developments in business and school leadership and the current training materials used for school and business leaders. It will draw up a set of key competencies for entrepreneurial school leadership and identify current skills gaps. Schools in both the Primary and Secondary sectors will support the development of a set of training modules through a professional enquiry approach which will produce materials for existing and aspiring school leaders and for bespoke or centralised training. In parallel with the practical resources to be developed, research into the impact and the methodologies used, including case studies, will be undertaken and published. A feasibility study into the potential for accrediting the resources through a joint Masters qualification will be undertaken. Although the lingua franca will be English, resources will also be developed in Slovenian, Romanian, and Finnish. The impact will be to provide an integrated set of resources at a European level which develop skills to equip leaders to manage at a time of greater workload, school autonomy and increased accountability, whilst continuing to deliver improved school performance in a time of austerity. By building confidence in aspiring school leaders, it will address the recruitment crisis. The initial target groups will be 96 school leaders in four countries. Dissemination will take place through the network of the European Schools Heads Association, which has 85,000 members and the European Policy Network on School Leadership. The outcomes of the longitudinal research and a set of policy recommendations will be shared with decision makers. In the longer term we aim to improve the quality of School Leadership training through increasing the numbers undertaking this CPD and the number of institutions across Europe offering the training package.
This project brought together six partners from five countries to address the professional development and changing roles and pressures facing school leaders as identified in OECD and European Network on School Leadership (EPNoSL) reports. It explored what makes successful entrepreneurs in business, shared practice in leading organisations working with school leaders and identified the synergies between business and education in order to create firstly a generic set of entrepreneurial competences and then a set of training resources to enable current and future leaders to lead effectively in challenging circumstances. The project addressed the Erasmus+ Priorities of improving the leadership and management of schools and developing new training resources. Throughout the project there was a focus on the methodology of in-school ‘professional enquiry’, so that the outcomes of any training were specific to the needs of individual schools. The overall objectives of the project were to: • develop new and innovative approaches to the training of school leaders and supporting the dissemination of best practice • enhance the professional development of school leaders by increasing the quality and range of initial and continuing training, including new pedagogies. • improve the capacities of schools in the areas of strategic development, organisational management and leadership. • promote entrepreneurship in education • support future learning and career paths for current and future school leaders in line with their personal and professional development • explore the possibility of accrediting the modules through a joint Masters programme The partnership consisted of six partners from five countries. Four were University education departments, with responsibility for the training of school leaders, one was a consultancy and the other was a European network. P1 was the North Leadership Centre, (NLC) of Newcastle University in the UK, which has been delivering Leadership and Management training to organisations including business, the public sector and schools for over 12 years. P2, edEUcation is a consultancy on European education programmes. This partner has expertise as an assessor of LLP and Erasmus+ programmes. Additionally P2 has expertise of successful school leadership and teacher and leadership training. P3, University of Jyväskylä – Institute of Educational Leadership is a member of EPNoSL and has been at the forefront of developing research and university-based training in educational administration and leadership in Finland for ten years. P4 . The Faculty of Education, University of Primorska, Slovenia is responsible for Teacher Training and Education Science and is a member of EPNoSL. The faculty offers quality study programmes and research work on teaching and international education. P5. Bucharest University of Economic Studies (BUES) is one of the top economic and administrative sciences universities in Central and Eastern Europe. It has participated strategic projects in the field of entrepreneurship and runs training courses for business and school leaders. P6 ESHA, the European School Heads Association, is the leading network for European school leaders. Members of ESHA are national associations for school heads and deputy school heads within primary, secondary and vocational education and represent 85,000 school leaders in Europe. ESHA is a member of EPNoSL. The main activities were: • undertaking an analysis of existing practice in leadership training and a literature review • identifying common entrepreneurial competences in business and education • developing and trialing a draft set of training modules • finalizing the modules • running formal leadership training sessions using the modules • undertaking a research strand • disseminating locally and internationally • undertaking a feasibility study into a joint masters module • providing policy feedback to EPNOSL All of the intended intellectual outputs were achieved and the training modules are now freely available on the project website, http://www.ec4slt.com The impact in the trials was evaluated as significant by the schools involved, with the professional enquiry strategy linking into their individual needs. Given that this strategy is aimed at longer term improvements, it is too early to collect data on pupil achievement or improvements in quality, but the objective of empowering schools to use this strategy to improve themselves has been achieved. The project modules will continue to be promoted through the ESHA networks and will be shared at the next major ESHA conference. The policy recommendations have been shared with the EPNoSL network and are an exemplification of the practical implementation of their earlier policy recommendations. The outcomes of the project research strand will be shared at future education and academic conferences.