Audio Transcript: Mike Gibbons, NCSL
I think that leadership is now seen as a much bigger science and a much bigger ambition than it was when I was your age and I first started teaching. There was hardly any preparation at all for school leadership of a formal nature in the early days. You became a head of department, then a deputy head, you got good at doing timetables and bus duty rotas then you suddenly emerge blinking in the sunlight as a head. And we used to wonder why there wasn’t vision.
And what we have got in this country is the first purpose built national college of school leadership. We have taken that stand as a country to say this is something that isn’t going to happen by chance and there will be a formal path from A to B. We are only catching up with they way other industries and other parts of the economic world have trained and looked for the best managers that they can.
This is price and promise. We feel under such scrutiny as leaders and teachers in this world of modern accountability. That’s the price. The promise is that we get really intense thinking about what our leadership should look like, even though were sometimes in a world of chaos. My favourite moment of the Summer frankly – and i'm going off script here - was that private eye front cover In july when Ed Balls at his most avuncular, was looking over a little blonde girl as shes writing away. The caption of Ed says “Are you doing your Sats little girl?” and she says: “No I'm marking them.”
(LAUGHTER)
In a way, we have reached a stage where we need new types of leadership at every level to get ourselves into a situation where we are part of a global sustainable offer in our schools and elsewhere. Its never been more important When I was a young teacher, there was so much employment around that the same emphasis on skills and education was not as apparent as it is now. It was seen as a given good, not a moral duty and a global necessity as it is now.
