LEADERSHIP MATTERS!

Strong learning leadership is still one of the keys to building brilliant learning and the RSA and the Innovation Unit have produced this report describing how school leaders can create the conditions for system-wide innovation.

They argue that this will require a new concept of public leadership which positions the state as an authorising, facilitative and supportive platform for system innovation. They set out the nine steps to achieve this, arguing that we need to:

• Build the case for change
• Desist from waves of centrally-driven short-term ‘reforms’
• Develop outward as well as upward accountability, to learners and localities
• Create and protect genuine space for local curriculum designs 
• Prioritise innovations that transform approaches to assessing students
• Place intentional, rigorous focus on the development of teachers’ innovation capabilities, throughout their careers
• Redirect some proportion of a jurisdiction’s education spending to an explicit incubator program, tasked with radically innovating on behalf of the system as a whole
• Build systems of collaborative peer learning to support the adaptive scaling of innovation
• Put system entrepreneurship at the heart of system leadership