Leadership Preparation and School Planning

Abstract

Schooling has long been viewed as a key institution in the (re)production of society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) and school leaders have historically been powerful definers of the culture, organisation and relative success of schooling and its relationship to wider society (Grace, 2000). However, there is little doubt that in recent times with the expansion of the managerialist project of the state reconfiguring the very nature of public administration, the field of education has weakened in its capacity to protect its boundaries from the fields of politics, journalism and economics (Blackmore, 2010; Thomson, 2010). On a global scale, change experts have found ways of entering school grounds and classrooms through reforms such as No Child Left Behind in the US and Every Child Matters in England.