Strategic Leadership, North Bedfordshire Federation

The following spray diagram attempts to simplify the North Bedfordshire Federation film, it aims to identify the key themes and points worthy of further discussion within the context of strategic leadership.

The changes taking place within the federation amount to an amalgamation of expertise and a sharing of good practice, whilst also ensuring the schools create a common curriculum.

It was clear throughout that the main aim was to promote student learning and improve performance, Clemence believed quite strongly that schools should not work in isolation. The strategy was to get all three schools that fed into Sharnbrook to work with the same curriculum thereby maintaining the standards of all middle schools within the trust.

A 'powerful guiding coalition' (Kotter 1996) in the shape of John Clemence and Hugh Carr-Archer, were the main drivers steering the change forward and the formation of a working group of head teachers was key to the strategic planning. According to Lavell this created a good working environment in which to share ideas and harmonise key issues. This can be placed quite clearly within the 'Strategy as design' lens, (Johnson et al, 2008) as the working group was utilised to create the logical process and provide strategic direction. However considering how the team based their strategies on the adaption and adjustment of their combined experience there is also evidence of strategies being made based on experience.

Ideally this should have been an evolutionary change bringing about an incremental process instead it was rather rapid seeming more like a revolution. This led to the top down approach because there was insufficient time, although this could be considered a 'time of crisis' necessitating a top down approach (Session 9, Course notes).

It could be said to have failed to ensure that staff were ready and willing to take part in the change (Step 1 Kotter 1996) but this is now in the hands of the respective heads, as one task is to address complaints that the leadership is too top down.

References

Fullan, M. (2007) The New Meaning of Educational Change, 4^th edn, New York, Teachers College Press.

Johnson, G., Scholes, K. and Whittington, R. (2008) Exploring Corporate Strategy, 8^th edn, Harlow, Pearson Education.

Kotter, J. (1996) Leading Change, Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

The Open University (2008) E856 Educational leadership: context, strategy and collaboration, 'DVD 1: Introduction to the North Bedfordshire Federation', Milton Keynes, The Open University.

The Open University (2011) E856 Educational enquiry, Session 9.2, 'Bottom-up and top-down change' [online], The Open University, http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=617575&section=2 (Accessed 2 January 2012).