Giving tribal leaders the boot
by John Craig
Some coverage in the Times Ed today for our work with NCSL looking at the new leadership of extended schools. Sadly, my own spin on the work crashed at the news desk. I argued that school leaders were increasingly having to move away from the Alex Ferguson model of leadership - a reliance on the co-ordinating power of a common enemy. As social workers and parents alike spend more time in schools, bitching in the stafffroom is no longer an option, so that teachers need to find new sources of shared professional identity. I hadn't realised Tony Blair had implied his own parallel with the Manchester United manager - so it turns out that was probably a bad move for both of us.