Over the last decade and more, school boards and leaders approaching me, looking for support and advice have often had these in common: How effective is our board? What ensures a good relationship between board and head? How do we hold a head to account? What’s the difference between governing and managing? Can we just have a governance and leadership health check? How good is our safeguarding?
There’s now some good training on offer, often online. But the context has radically changed, and some fundamentals with it.
Challenges to school governance and leadership now come from shifting international markets and national demands, energy prices, new parental expectations, fiercer competition, competition for staff, concern for welfare (students, staff and leaders) and emotional resilience, online and hybrid schooling, AI and the impact of new technology.
Regional wars, and VAT in the UK were just wake-up calls. Former certainties about successful educational and economic models are being revisited. Closure, group collaboration, merger and acquisition are watched or considered. These are shocks to expectation and economics. For those who embrace them, they can offer new opportunities. But they certainly need new approaches: the old governance and leadership is not enough.
So the questions have changed. It was for that reason that four of us have come together, pooling an unusual blend and depth of experience in The Compass Room – offering advice and guidance (‘triage’) for schools seeking direction amid challenge, change and crisis.
Because the focus of governance, approaches to strategy, expectations of leadership, assumptions about economic models – these and dealing with the human impact of new challenges are what we’re now asked about. It’s a world of change.
Learn more about The Compass Room, here.
