FESE HandBook v03c 15112023 MEV- COMPLETO - Flipbook - Página 25
TONY BUSH / SCHOOL LEADERSHIP FOR WHOLE CHILD DEVELOPMENT
THE DECISION PROCESS
The process of deciding on the vision is at the heart of school leadership.
In some settings, aims are decided by the principal, perhaps working
with senior colleagues, rather than the full school community. As Murphy and Torre (2015: 181) argue, aims 8are often developed in ways that
do not encourage ownership by school staff9. In some schools, however,
vision-building is a corporate activity undertaken by formal bodies or
informal groups, as noted by Sigurdardottir and Sigborsson (2016), in
their case study of an elementary school in Iceland.
School aims are inevitably innuenced by pressures external to the
school and lead to questions about the viability of school 8visions9, as
noted above. Many countries, including England, have a national curriculum, linked to national assessments and inspection systems, and such
government prescriptions leave little scope for schools to decide their
own educational aims. Schools may be required to implement external
imperatives rather than developing a vision based on the specioc needs
of the school. In England, school leaders aim to achieve positive outcomes in the inspections carried out by the national inspection body, the
Ofoce for Standards in Education (Ofsted), rather than developing their
own context-specioc aims (Bottery, 2007).
WHICH AIMS SHOULD BE PURSUED?
Governments and other national bodies often offer a narrow vision for
education, focused on measurable outcomes, such as public examination results, which may then be disseminated, perhaps as league tables.
The most powerful example of this process is the OECD9s Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares countries
in terms of student outcomes. This has a powerful impact on policy and
practice in many countries. For example, Malaysia9s Education Blueprint
(2013-2025) targets improvement from the bottom-third to the top-third
in the PISA rankings (Bush et al., 2021). Being ambitious about educational outcomes is understandable, but PISA has three main limitations.
First, it focuses on three subjects, language, mathematics, and science, a
narrow perspective that neglects other curricular and extra-curricular
activities. Second, it fails to cater for all children, whose talents may relate to music, drams, or sport, rather than the formal curriculum. Third,
it privileges examination and test results over student welfare. A focus
on whole child development requires attention to mental and physical
health, increasingly recognized as vital in the post-pandemic context,
not just exam scores.
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