Leaderhood: Lessons for educational governance

By Dame Ruth Silver  and Paul Stanistreet 

This IdeasLAB blog is part of a series leading up to the launch of a publication on the theme of “renewing the social contract for education.” The theme of the series is based on the call from the report Reimagining Our Futures Together: A new social contract for education. See the full article, and look for the full special issue in Prospects to be released in early 2024. 

A few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, Dr Paul Klotman, President of Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, made a powerful and lucid video message for his students. Rather than urging calm or advising caution, he praised them for their willingness to protest and encouraged them to ‘step up’ and ‘intervene’ on behalf of those who needed their support. He reminded them of their duty as human beings, particularly in difficult or unjust times, to challenge discrimination and racism, and as physicians, to use their influence as a group to speak out. 

It would have been easy for Dr Klotman, in a moment of crisis, to do as many leaders did and defer to his institution’s policy and statute on diversity and inclusion. Instead, he offered a clear message for his students, his community and his profession, as well as for wider society, setting out, embodying how he saw the role of leaders in such moments. He walked boldly towards the fullest implications of his role, locating his profession and his institution in the context of the wellbeing of the community and acknowledging the validity of people’s personal reactions and vulnerabilities, while engaging with the wider societal ramifications. This combination of sensitivity, civic mindedness, connectedness, and compassion is at the heart of what we term ‘leaderhood’.  

We coined the term ‘leaderhood’ in response to the collective, self-governing response to adversity we witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ordinary people, unaccustomed to leadership roles, demonstrated agency and joint purpose, acting with moral clarity that was often lacking in the response of their political leaders. We recognised in this a kind of leadership, or a dimension of it, that in an important way also went beyond it. 

Leaderhood - with its links to concepts such as ‘parenthood’ and ‘elderhood’ - is intended to convey a deep sense both of relatedness and of open-ended, future-focused concern. It is distinct from leadership in that it goes beyond the day-to-day work of managing an organisation and implementing policy, in a way that is sensitive to the here-and-now challenges faced by people and their communities. It will look different, therefore, in different contexts. Where leadership concerns an occupation or activity – managing a school or college, for example – leaderhood is more a state of being, recognisable not only in formal leadership situations but in every part of life, emerging not from policy or regulation but from a sense of fellowship and an awareness of our responsibilities to others and our community. 

Leaderhood is about how we position ourselves and our sector in relation both to our values and to the wider context of the community we serve. It is tempting, in difficult times, to retreat into authoritarianism, or to become introverted, risk-averse or conservative. However, in the end, such an approach is likely to be self-defeating since the challenges we face – from global pandemics to social and racial injustice, to the climate crisis – require trust, collaboration and solidarity, as well as new ideas. This is what we should look to develop now in education. We must rediscover the spirit of the enterprise. We need education leaders with a clear enough sense of the value and purpose of their own work to transcend institutional settings – the chapter and verse of organisational or government policy – and think and act in ways that express their care and concern for the future. 

Fostering leaderhood means creating an inclusive, collaborative space in which leaders can lead and education as a public good can be upheld. Governance should be about steering rather than rowing. It should be about strategic directions, norms, values, and so on, rather than mere management and implementation. It must be founded on trust and mutual respect. The world faces what the UN Secretary General describes as a ‘cascade of crises’. One response to this is to further restrict the freedom and independence of educators and education leaders by tightening the curriculum or introducing more demanding performance targets or tougher accountability. But such an approach generates insular, closed and myopic leadership, a culture of fear and anxiety, high-stakes testing and disaffected learners, a diminished curriculum closed to different forms of knowledge, and a depleted, demoralized workforce. New models of education require new models of governance. 

Governance for leaderhood should, in our view, embody four fundamental principles.  

• First, it requires clarity of function, particularly as regards where governance ends and leading begins. Governance is not about management. It is not about control. Instead, it must steer leaders in respect of a bigger good. It is an expression of a duty of care to the future. It should create a context in which leaders can act in service of their community, in the spirit of the enterprise of education, rather than in response to central diktat. Good governance needs a generative, learning mindset. 

• Second, it must embody a principled commitment to openness, transparency, truth, and accountability, especially with regard to setting aims and objectives and decision-making. Leaderhood implies trust. Leaders cannot lead with and for others unless they trust these others, are honest with them about the challenges faced and are willing to empower them to act. Trust is the basis of successful partnerships. These should be developed on the basis not of profit or short-term gain but of the common good. 

• Third, it should foster democratic dialogue among a wide range of stakeholders, including learners, and be based on the principles of inclusion and co-production. These principles should run like a golden thread through every part of the eco-system, from the community to the classroom to the local education authority and the ministry of education. Education needs leaders who can (and are allowed to) see beyond the next inspection, who step between contexts with ease and are confident in asserting their values and knowledge without fear or duress. Governance, therefore, should not constrain but instead be open to new forms of knowledge, including traditional and Indigenous knowledges, as well as alternative knowledges that challenge the status quo. Leaders, at every level, need active, engaged, and critical followers. 

• Fourth, governance should be intersectoral and take a whole-system perspective. It must not operate in silos but cohere across different sectors. It is most effective when it comprehends the entire meta-system, rather than being tied to one or other part of it. Too often, in education, problems in one sub-system are ‘solved’ by passing the problems to another sub-system. Good governance should recognise the importance and contribution of every part of the terrain to the common good and that, as in any complex system, these different parts are inter-dependent. 

Leaderhood calls for a different spirit of governance, one inspired by mutuality, fellowship, and inclusivity, with generativity its goal. Good governance expresses service to a community and its institutions and strives unselfishly to prepare for a future in which, ultimately, we will play no part. This is the bigger good it serves: its disinterested, impartial duty of care for education and the learners of the future. By caring for the future, we can, in the spirit of the International Commission for the Futures of Education, repair the wrongs of the past. 

As the International Commission’s report puts it, we are at a turning point. Politically, we are living through an age of ‘strongman’ leaders, populist demagogues contemptuous of democratic order and prepared to put the resources of the state at the service of their own personal advancement. In liberal democracies, democratic safeguards have been eroded while disinformation and ‘fake news’ have become commonplace. Political discourse veers between a fear of otherness and a mawkish sentimentality about the past. In a period of regression in political and social life, it is unsurprising that some leaders choose to focus on preserving what they have and to stifle debate as to what (else) might be. But it is an important obligation of leading to prepare for the future, especially in moments of change and insecurity. 

The concept of leaderhood acknowledges not only this but also that leaders cannot do it alone – the responsibility to prepare for the future must be widely shared and supported and collective action to that end fostered and encouraged. That is a key lesson for governance. Of course, we can continue along the road towards more closed, authoritarian forms of leading, more command and control, with the attendant losses to democracy, peace, rights, freedom and community cohesion. But we can also choose to embrace a more comradely, open, and collective model of leading, which is less tidy and predictable, less easy to control, but which is also fairer, more inclusive and more democratic.