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Education Reform and School Leadership

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The New Public Leadership Challenge

Abstract

The beginning of the 2008 autumn term in schools in England has been accompanied by newspaper headlines declaring ‘schools in crisis hunt for 1,000 new heads’ because schools are without a permanent headteacher in place for the start of the new school year:

Mike Stewart, headteacher of Westlands school in Torbay, Devon, and chair of the NAHT’s secondary committee, said staff who would once have wanted to become heads were choosing not to because of rising levels of stress. ‘Schools are now compared using 173 ranking methods — and if it is at the bottom on one of them the headteacher is sacked,’ said Stewart. ‘It’s crackpot.’ He argued that a lot of schools now had to advertise two or three times for a headteacher — something that would have been ‘unheard of’ five or six years ago (Lightfoot and Asthana 2008).

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Authors
  1. Helen Gunter
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  2. Gillian Forrester
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Manchester Business School, UK

    Stephen Brookes (Senior Fellow in Public Policy and Management) (Senior Fellow in Public Policy and Management)

  2. Institute of Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business School, UK

    Keith Grint (Professor of Public Leadership & Management) (Professor of Public Leadership & Management)

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© 2010 Helen Gunter and Gillian Forrester

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Gunter, H., Forrester, G. (2010). Education Reform and School Leadership. In: Brookes, S., Grint, K. (eds) The New Public Leadership Challenge. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277953_4

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