School leadership and management resources – Strategies, resources and advice for leading and managing highly functioning schools

This book aspires to provide most of what school leaders need to lead a successful school. It is all about ensuring that provisions for student learning are of the highest quality and that teacher efficacy and high morale for all pervade life at school.

The main text of this book distils the acquired knowledge and wisdom of many years into just 53 pages, with the rest of the book consisting of numerous (75) practical appendices, linked to the key strategies referred to in the main text.

Wherever you see the highlighted word, link, you can select that word to take you to the relevant appendix. At the end of each appendix, there is also a link that takes you back to where you were in the main text.

School leaders inspire the teachers and support staff in their care to articulate, examine and refine their practice in the light of an agreed understanding of what the most appropriate practice is. They support this growth by actively and visibly leading an adult learning process, brokering the team structures and providing the guidance, resources, professional forums and words of encouragement that are necessary for comfortable transitions.

The book leads users through all these facets of school leadership and more, including management practices, recent approaches to learning and teaching, and organising and managing student groups. The language is deliberately sparse and assumes that readers will use their own thinking and research resources to further explore topics of intrigue. There is, therefore, little elaboration of underlying assumptions, definitions or descriptions.

Perhaps most exciting of all, the book has a section on ‘Future-ready schools’, an exploration of how the learning needs of today’s students may be best met. It offers a new curriculum, modern approaches to learning and teaching, and a brief examination of entrepreneurship, sustainable futures and digital citizenship.

About the author

I created this book to support new or aspiring school leaders and those in countries where support is difficult to access.

Along with 18 years of teaching, my 32 years of experience as a head of schools, Principal, project manager, trainer, coach and consultant in seven different countries have provided many opportunities to try, fail, adapt, adjust, refine and succeed. Over that time, I have gathered quite a collection of approaches, policies, systems and procedures that have proved to work, and it makes sense to pass them on.

My hope is that these tools will empower school leaders to more quickly create, trial, adapt and share innovations that better serve the needs of today’s students.

Greg Flattley