Ollie Bray continues to share his thoughts on the third day of the international summer school

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The third day of the summer school was chaired by Gordon Mackenzie the Headteacher of Balwearie High School in Fife. Gordon skilfully introduced the day by picking up on the main themes from yesterday’s presentations and asking the important question and a recurring question from the conference, “How do we target leaders of the future?”

The first presentation of the day was from Mike McCabe, Director of Education, Culture and Lifelong Learning, South Ayrshire Council on Adaptive Leadership. I had heard Mike give this presentation before at the Deputes Together Seminar earlier in the year and I was glad that I had as I managed to take even more away the second time that I heard the talk. I liked Mike’s analogy to the difference between a broken heart (emotional difficulty) and a broken arm (technical difficulty). As leaders in schools we often offer a technical fix to problems but sometimes forget to go back to make sure that the problem has also been emotionally fixed.

Mike also tried this analogy into CPD. In schools we often spend a huge amount of time on technical CPD (ICT, risk assessment, health & safety) but how much time do we spend on CPD to do with attitudinal change? Do we in schools / authorities need to find more time to help develop emotional intelligence?

After Coffee the next speaker of the morning was Alma Harris, Director, Institute of Education at the University of Warwick. Alma gave an excellent presentation on Distributed Leadership and School Transformation. I took a huge amount from Alma’s presentation and I was pleased that she mentioned the work of Thomas Friedman and also relatively new corporations and organisations such as Google and how the “flattening” of the world will have a significant impact on education and school leadership. This part of the presentation linked nicely back to Keir Bloomers presentation on the first day of the conference.

Alma also talked about the four “D”s of Transformation:

• Diagnosis (what is the current situation like?)
• Development (what needs to take place?)
• Drive (how can this change be sustained?)
• Data (without data you can’t make informed decisions about school improvement).
• (could Derived Distributed Leadership be a 5^th “D”?)

Other key points from Alma’s presentation included:

Distributive leadership:

• is more than a theory
• is not delegation
• does not mean that everybody leads
• is mainly about building leadership capacity

“Teachers working conditions are students learning conditions”

Further information about Alma and her work can be found on her website http://go.warwick.ac.uk/distributed_leadership

After lunch the conference changed venue and moved to the Scottish Parliament. After a brief tour the conference was spoken to by Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. I was impressed when I heard Fiona speak at the Scottish Education Awards earlier in the year and was even more impressed with her presentation today. Personally, I felt that she spoke from the heart and I felt reassured by her vision for education in Scotland. I was interested to find out some of the ideas that seem to be high on her agenda and I was particularly pleased that some of these ideas feature early intervention and the development of professional development including coaching and mentoring.

The final presentation of the day was from Richard Holloway the former Bishop of Edinburgh and author of over 20 books. Richard spoke passionately about his own ideas and feeling on what makes a good leader and I feel quite sure that all of the conference went away with plenty to think about.

Categories: CPD Scotland, CPD guests, Leadership