School improvement: A study of the roles of leaders and external consultants

Initiatives to bring about improvements in schools usually involve certain teachers taking on leadership roles. Indeed it can be argued that the tasks undertaken by such individuals are important to the success or otherwise of such developments. What is it, then, that such teachers do when school improvement is successful? Furthermore, how best can external consultants assist teachers in carrying out these leadership roles? These are the issues addressed in this article. Specifically, the article examines the experiences of a small group of teachers who have taken on leadership roles in schools that have been successful in bringing about improvements in their work. Our engagement with the experiences of these teachers leads us to examine some of the complexities involved in processes of school improvement. In particular their accounts point to the significant impact of workplace culture on teacher development. As a result we conclude that those involved in leading such developments need to be sensitive to the peculiarities of each school. In other words, what is needed is an ongoing search for what works locally rather than the adoption of what seems to work elsewhere. The schools referred to in the article are all involved in a school improvement project co-ordinated by a team of tutors at the University of Cambridge Institute of Education. Consequently, before examining the work of these teachers we provide a brief outline of the project.