The Leadership Academy objectives were: • To develop an innovative approach for addressing school leaders’ needs through the use of participatory approaches, coaching and distributed leadership practices, as well as increasing their effectiveness for the benefit of the school community; • To support school leaders to be ready to integrate good practices and new methods into daily activities (incl. strategic planning of professional development for staff in line with individual needs and organisational objectives) and to be open to synergies with organisations active in different fields. • To improve school leaders management competences. • To contribute to a more modern, dynamic, committed and professional environment. To achieve these objectives we are developing the following core project results: - The Leadership Academy Handbook - The Leadership Academy Platform - The Leadership Academy Professional Circles Methodology
As one of the means to achieve the European Education Area by 2025, the EC highlights the pivotal role of education and training leadership, which should be taken into account when developing favorable environments and conditions for the development of competences and motivation of teachers, trainers and educational staff, thus ensuring that education and training institutions operate as learning organisations. In CEE countries, the management style applied in most schools is still clinging to an outdated and inflexible hierarchical leadership paradigm; the leader/follower binary model of leadership (Kezar & Holcombe, 2017). In addition, following from the results from a recent survey among school leaders in our partner countries, called for joining our forces to build a transnational cooperation partnership to involve as many key stakeholders as possible (associations and unions of school principals, training providers, coaches, technology partners and a leading provider of educational resources) to develop an innovative approach which will support principals in a relevant and meaningful manner.