The nature of an effective a senior leadership team (SLT) will be the topic of this essay. The idea of team work and various models of SLT will be covered linking their roles, strategy, values and pitfalls. I will interlace this essay with some personal experience and relevant literature Belbin and Fullan to conclude through an historical analogy, my personal understanding of what SL T represents.
The combination of words in the sentence “Effective Senior Leadership Team” brings together an amalgam of important and decisive words, which individually symbolise strong individual qualities. None the less, one word effectively links the whole sentence into one, “team”. According Belbin (1993), the word “team” stems from the idea of sport and play where individual players hold specific positions in a given task in sync with a sense of reliability and trust.
A School Leadership Team is usually constituted of the head teacher and deputy head. However, depending on the size of the school, the team vary in size, often, Assistant Head Teachers or Senior Teachers hold particular responsibilities such as leading a specific the key stages or assessment across the school. The team may also include the Special Needs Co-coordinator (SENCO) and increasingly the School Business Manager (SBM).
According to an independent study into school leadership (DfES, 2007) five essential “models” of SLT can be put in place (see diagram 1.1), so to hold a positive impact on the positive children’s attainment.
The report argues that in comparison with SLT models, leadership behaviours appear to be an essential aspect on the positive impact on pupils’ performance. However, via the progress and creation of new leadership models, the right leadership behaviour can be cultivated (DfES, 2007, see index page 8).
Figure 1.1 Five models of School Leadership
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It is interesting to note from this diagram, the overlapping of the
References: Fullan. M, 2009, Large-scale reform comes of age, Oise/university of Toronto, published online Springer Science + Business Media B.V. Fullan. M, 2010, The Big Ideas Behind whole system reform, Canada, Article Vol. 50, Canadian Education Association Fullan .M, Cuttress Davies. B, Davies .B.J, Ellison. L, 2005, Success and sustainability : developing the strategically focuses school, Extracts available www.ncsl.org.uk/media-75c-d2-success-and-sustainability.pdf ( accessed on web learn December 2010) Greene Models of different school Leadership Teams: The “Traditional model” includes specifically qualified teaching staff and typically the head teacher, deputy and/or assistant heads (DfES, 2007)