Abstract
Marlon, from Sullivan School, claims succinctly that ‘leadership comes from the principal’, while his colleague, Samuel, says that principals who ‘lead from the front’ have most impact and ‘that you can’t have an effective school without an effective principal’. While these confident assertions suggest a set of practices that are readily discernible as those of the leader, they are confounded somewhat by a strong tendency, amongst participants in my research, towards more nebulous descriptions of busyness and importance. The principalship was variously described as ‘quite a juggling act’ (Levon, Sullivan School Governing Council member), ‘where all the threads come together’ (Mac, Caldicott School), ‘the focal point for the school community’ (Clive, Heatherbank School Governing Council Member) and ‘where the buck stops in actual fact’ (Richard, McCullough School). More metaphorically Hillary, from Lawson School, claims:
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Notes
- 1.
I noted, in observation, a tendency amongst principals to differentiate their schools as unique and different from any other. In interactions with staff, this expression of uniqueness appeared to have extended use as a subtle form of individualisation and as a vehicle for making staff feel ‘special’.
- 2.
In support of a link between paradox and action, Derrida (1988), reflecting on his own work on undecidability, claims that ‘undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical – but also political, ethical, etc.). They are pragmatically determined … not at all some vague ‘indeterminacy’ (p. 148, italics in original).
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Dolan, C. (2020). Paradoxes of Managerialist Practice. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_8
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