Transforming Educational Leadership: A Historical Context

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is to provide a context for this Special Issue, which considers the transformation of school leadership over time, providing some background to the roots of where we are now. This article considers the roots of the term “leadership” and the more recent connected terms of “administration” and “management”, and how these might be linked to educational provision from ancient times until the emergence of the term “transformational leadership” in the 1970s, when Downton [1] first introduced the term as a form of leadership for the business sector. This term was later expanded by Burns [2] as a way to enable “leaders and followers make each other advance to a higher level of morality and motivation” [3]. This was further expanded and theorised by business researcher Bass [4] to explain how transformational leadership could be measured, as well as its impact on follower motivation and performance. The proposal that transformational leadership was a viable option in schools was later explained by Leithwood and Jantzi [5], and since that time it has become one of the main theories for educational leaders today.

This Special Issue will bring together the works of colleagues who were tasked with writing a paper within the somewhat ambiguous topic of transforming educational leadership. The subject is ambiguous because the words “transforming educational leadership” can be read in at least two ways: the first relates to leadership that transforms education (currently known as “transformational leadership”), but a second way is to consider how our understanding of educational leadership has changed (or transformed) over time and might do so further in the future. The first considers the specific form of educational leadership mentioned above, but the second enables us to look at a range of leadership approaches that have impacted educational (and particularly school) leadership over time. Both approaches have been adopted by various authors in the current Special Issue.

To frame this discussion, it might be of interest to the reader to consider the roots, both of leadership in general, and educational leadership in particular, and how these two concepts intertwined to lead us to where we are now. To achieve this, this article starts in ancient times, when issues related to education and the leadership of it were first considered, until around 1980, when the way in which education was structured and delivered really started to change. For this period, the connections between the terminology, practice of, and research into, “administration” and “management” and, more recently, “leadership”, in society and business on the one hand and education on the other, will be considered. The second period, which forms the bulk of this Special Issue, considers the period of time since the 1980s when the structural change suggestions leading to self-managing schools produced the opportunities for transformational leadership to be implemented in schools from the 1990s onwards. It is in this period, and looking into the future, where this Special Issue seeks to increase our understanding of both transformational leadership and possible further developments that will enhance school leadership into the increasingly complex and rapidly changing environment that is typified by the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Educational leadership can be considered from three perspectives, conceptually and theoretically (what is educational leadership?), practically (how are educational leaders developed and what do they do?), and methodologically (how do we study educational leadership?), and the papers in the current Issue consider each of these.

Education, especially school education, might be one of what Gaillie [6] identified as an “essentially contested concept”, one where most people agree on what the concept is but also dispute how it might be implemented. For whatever evidence might be provided to support one version, there will also be evidence to suggest that another version is equally applicable. The relationship between “leadership”, “management”, and “administration” might be another essentially contested concept, to the degree where in some languages, the word for “management” and the word for “leadership” is the same word.

This paper starts its story more than 2000 years ago and tries to track the major changes until around 40 years ago when our understanding of schools, and the leadership of them, changed dramatically; it is during this period that the leadership developments that the current Issue focuses upon took place. In that sense, this article provides the background to where we are now.

2. Educational Leadership: The Journey towards the 1980s

Administrators, Managers, and Leaders

The separation of a population into classes has been around at least since Ancient Greece. Plato’s Republic [7], written around 380 BC, considers a dialogue between Socrates and others about a just society. Plato argues that people were born with different souls, assigned by the Gods. The philosopher-kings (gold people) pursued an education that would give them the knowledge and wisdom to make fair and rational decisions in order to maintain (in other words, lead), a fair and just society. The silver people were responsible for maintaining order, and also needed a robust education to give them the skills they needed to do this. The bronze people were the merchants, the farmers, and those that produced goods. They did not need the same level of education but were expected to be hard-working and honest. Plato argued that the bronze people needed to be led by the gold and managed by the silver. Similar relationships, it could be argued, have happened ever since, where kings or emperors used armies to maintain order for the peasant class, those who produced the goods to keep societies moving. Not all of these societies would be included in Plato’s definition of a “fair and just” society.

The same sort of classification emerged when individual traders grew to become businesses and later grew even further to become corporations. However, the terminology changed from kings–soldiers–peasants to owners–managers–workers, but the relationships were much the same. The owners made the decisions, the managers implemented those decisions, and the workers were the ones that actually produced whatever the organisation was designed for. In the 1800s, Carlyle [8] and Galton [9] started to consider what it was that enabled some people to rise to power and positions of authority when others did not. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the trait theory of leadership or the “great man” theory, one that lasted almost a hundred years and became the underlying strategy for establishing order in large organisations. Those who had been with an organisation for a long time and had demonstrated their ability and loyalty gradually moved upwards to more important positions, ones that oversaw other employees. The trait theory suggested that the people that were leaders all had certain characteristics, or traits, that made them successful leaders. Historically, in Western society, and for many years, these leaders happened to be white men.

Just as Plato had argued that gold and silver people needed specialist education, so too was it considered that owners and managers might need specialist knowledge. Universities started to appear in Europe in the Middle Ages: the University of Bologna in Italy around 1180, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom around 1200, the University of Paris in 1208, Cambridge in 1209, and the University of Salamanca in Spain in 1218. The earliest universities taught law, medicine, the arts, and theology, and early leaders emerged from these disciplines. Education programs in “Administrative Science” have been around since the 1700s. The US model of educating business managers and administrators is probably the one most accepted worldwide, but it also has quite a long history from early attempts to establish “industrial education for farmers and mechanics” as far back as the 1850s [10]. After the civil war, public universities were established, some of which included departments of trade and commerce, which eventually became business schools. The Wharton School of Finance and Economics was the first of these, founded in 1881. By the early 1900s there were business schools across the country, including the first MBA at Harvard in 1908 [11]. In most other parts of the world, the “art of business management” was learned on the job. The conclusion of the Second World War saw a massive increase in both undergraduate and graduate programs and the MBA started to be offered in other countries, such as Canada, South Africa, India, and Europe [12].

3. A Focus on Education

Although the formation of schools for certain groups within a society can been traced back some thousands of years, and existed in many ancient civilizations, the type of education and who was able to access it has changed over time. Education, once it emerged, followed Plato’s approach. For the next nearly 2000 years, most had little or no education, some had enough to allow them to take a specific role in society, but only the rich and privileged had what we might call today “a quality education”. For many centuries, for much of a population, the only education received was that provided by parents or the community they lived in. For the wealthy and privileged, education was planned, supported, and used to maintain one’s position in society. In the Middle Ages, most European schools were associated with monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church, some of which later became universities. The oldest British school, King’s School, in Canterbury, was founded by St Augustine in 597 as a monastic school, to spread Christianity. The influence of the Catholic Church on the development of education was huge.

The notion of modern compulsory education is quite recent. Most early compulsory schooling was for religious purposes, to enable people to be able to read the Bible. In 1559, a German duchy made schooling compulsory for boys and in 1592 another made it compulsory for both boys and girls. By 1616, schools for “everyone” had been established in all Scottish parishes but it was in not until the 1800s, and particularly after 1850, that countries and states around the world made some elementary education compulsory for all. Now, it seems that only Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands have no law making education compulsory.

Educational Administrators, Managers, and Leaders

The gold, silver and bronze approach, described above, became a blueprint for education systems as well. Governments made the decisions, regional managers, district superintendents, and principals ensured these decisions were carried out, and teachers produced the goods (student outcomes) that the system was intended for. Successful teachers with years of experience became principals and gradually worked their way into more senior management positions, but the decisions were still made by ministers of education on behalf of governments. Most school systems were highly centralised, some nationally, some at the state or provincial level, and others at district or local authority level, with key policy decisions being made by the national or state ministers or secretaries of education. These policy decisions would be developed and introduced by centralised departments of education at the state, provincial, local authority, or district levels, and then implemented by school principals at the local level. To ensure fidelity between policy and implementation, superintendents or inspectors oversaw the work of schools and principals and reported back to the department whenever there was the need for change, which was not too often.

What we now call school leaders were originally seen as school administrators or school managers and were variously called principals or headteachers. The first school administrators in the USA came with the Massachusetts education law of 1647. “Selectmen were responsible for maintaining these schools, thus becoming the first lay representatives of school management” ([13], p. 7). Teachers were responsible for their own classes, but as schools grew in size, there was a need for a “principal teacher” who served as a liaison between the teachers and the board of education, whilst still undertaking a full teaching load. The first non-teaching elementary school principal seems to have occurred in 1847 in Boston (p. 8). It seemed that even after the turn of the 20th century, principals “were reluctant to become vigorous, dynamic leaders” (p. 8). Principals were “odd-job and clerical workers whose business it is to keep the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running while other people perform the higher professional functions” ([14], p. 10). It seemed that early principals were “an administrative convenience rather than positions of recognized leadership” ([15], p. 24) and it was argued that the “principalship is missing from both the political history of school administration and the social history of schools. It’s as if the principal did not exist at all” ([16], p. 4).

Specific programs to train school principals in the United States have existed since 1881. They were first developed at the University of Michigan. The first professors of educational administration were appointed in 1904 [17]. By the 1920s, there were multiple colleges in the US offering programs in educational administration as the demand for principals increased [18], but the knowledge base for educating school administrators mostly consisted of a focus on school management, teacher supervision, and field experiences, in many cases using “war stories” from past school administrators [18]. Prior to the Second World War, “training programs stressed the ‘practical’ and have concerned themselves more with techniques than with understanding”, but after “administrators have become increasingly aware of the role of theory and have come to recognize the contributions that social scientists can make to our understanding of educational administration” [18]. The connections across the disciplines were identified: “There is administration qua administration…. The characteristic ways in which administrators behave are essentially the same whether the administrator operates in industry, government, the military, or public education” ([15], p. 159).

4. Transforming Educational Leadership: Articles in this Special Issue

The papers within this Special Issue cover a wide range of concerns. Two of the papers in this Special Issue provide some understanding of some countries’ efforts to improve the quality of education since the 1980s. Yokota compares the standards identified by the Toda City SMR, with principal and headteacher standards from both the USA (Professional Standards for Educational Leaders-PSEL) and the UK (Headteachers’ Standards-HS), and concludes that on a “preliminary comparison, it is reasonable to argue that the Toda City SMR [School Management Rubric] has a relatively similar function to the PSEL and the HS in terms of its scope (to whom they apply) and usage (how to use them), with some minor differences” (p. 5), but cautioned that policymakers should be mindful not to just “import” promising practices from abroad and end up ignoring cultural and policy contexts unique to Japan (p. 18), while recognising that one limitation of the study was that it compared a “city policy with national policies”, making the comparisons tentative rather than definitive.

Wilson Heenan, Lafferty, and McNamara discuss recent developments in Ireland as a means of researching transformational leadership. They argue that “…transformational school leadership can reasonably be considered as an underpinning model that can support the sustaining of distributive leadership.” (p. 2) and conclude that although it was “discussed by school and system leaders as being feasible and realistic and is discussed by many as being inevitable… Practical day-to-day challenges of leadership positions in schools were regarded as hampering the feasibility of enactment given administration overload, with the importance of sharing leadership responsibility” (p. 18). They argued for a “hybrid model of transformational and distributed school leadership… that is affective and human-centred and that shares leadership roles and responsibilities among the staff, in tandem with increased administrative support to create space for whole-school community leadership” (p. 32).

This point of view brings into focus English and Ehrich’s argument that “the mythologies, battles, trials and triumphs of the heroes of ancient, medieval, and modern times… all bear a striking resemblance to current portraits of the transformational leader” (p. 1). English and Ehrich conclude “that exploring transformational leadership through an aesthetic lens, including through stories of leaders such as the legendary El Cid, and their followers, holds great potential for capturing subjective knowledge about leadership in a range of contexts, including educational leadership” (p. 11).

Other articles in this Special Issue focus more generally on what good school leaders must do. Cheng argues that leaders must lead and facilitate “multiple school functions (such as technological functions, economic functions, social functions, political functions, cultural functions and learning functions) … in a new era of multiplicities and complexities in education”(p. 1). He argues that a comprehensive typology of school leadership is necessary, for without it “the practice and conception of school leadership may be piecemeal, fragmented and ineffective” (p. 2). He argues that for “different school leaders in different contexts, the characteristics of school leadership styles in pursuing school development and effectiveness may be different” (p. 9) but recognises that “consensus among various stakeholders on choices of leadership models for leading school development and effectiveness is always a dilemma” (p. 11). This supports the notion that anything to do with education is “essentially contested” [1].

Three papers focus on what might be focused upon to improve the quality of school leadership. Caldwell discusses the important issue of how school systems support school leaders in challenging and rapidly changing circumstances. He considers how the work environment for school leaders in Australia has changed in recent times, how this has impacted on the role, and, how school systems might better support school leaders. He considers three connected themes: Intensification–Intimidation, Autonomy–Accountability, and System–Support, all related to changes in school leaders’ work environments. He suggests “what is often named as school autonomy is in fact an example of administrative decentralisation of some functions” (p. 7) and considers both the benefits and drawbacks of decentralisation. Caldwell provides six recommendations for future directions considering the work environment, reporting requirements, getting rid of old practices when new ones are introduced, the use of AI, involving leaders in thinking about the future of schools, and researching the impact of any changes.

Kenayathulla, Ghani, and Radzi echo Cheng’s argument that “school leaders are expected to embrace multiple school functions” (p. 1) and report on recent efforts by the Malaysian government to improve the quality of school leadership. The researchers identified the following: the introduction of a continuous professional development program; the introduction of the National Professional Qualification for Educational Leaders (NPQEL); and the introduction of the School Improvement Partners Plus (SIPartners+) mentoring program by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to enhance the leadership and management competencies of school leaders and recommend further steps be taken.

Huber and Pruitt argue “…neither top-down measures alone nor the exclusive use of bottom-up approaches have the effects desired” (p. 3). They conducted a study of interventions combining multiple approaches for the development of and support for school leadership. They conclude that to “transform education leadership … a professional, profound and persistent combination of multiple approaches for the development of and support for school leadership is needed” (p. 22) but argue that “further research is needed” (p. 23).

Bogotch focuses instead on researching leadership and argues that if we are to consider new ways of leading schools, we might also need to consider new ways of researching educational leadership as well. He argues that educational leadership research “has followed the rules of the game concerning research activities and methods” (p. 2) and argues that researchers need “to creatively develop specific methods tailored explicitly to our hypothesized theories” (p. 3). Bogotch argues for a “lever for radical changes in how and with whom we should conduct research publicly and democratically” (p. 5) and concludes “…the challenge involves remaking the enterprise of conducting research into a collective endeavor instead of a private and privileged practice” (p. 11).

Finally, Townsend considers what we have learned from both the history of educational leadership and the specific issues raised in this Special Issue. He identifies the 1980s as a major turning point for school leadership, as it became no longer effective under the old command and control imperative. This paper considers four educational theories that have impacted schools and were appropriate for their time. It then considers the impact of COVID-19 on school leadership and identifies this as another turning point for schools and school leadership. He proposes leadership for learning as being the most appropriate approach to consider the new and complex issues facing schools.

The papers of this Special Issue consider the specific practice called transformational leadership but situate that approach within a longer history of schools and school leadership, to establish how leadership has transformed itself over time, and may need to do so again to cope with the new challenges that arise. How we meet that challenge is yet to be determined.