Exploring School Leadership in England and the Caribbean ─ New Insights from a Comparative Approach

· What drives school leaders?
· What do they do on a day to day basis?
· What helps or constrains their decision-making?
· What keeps them focused amidst challenges?
Rather than applying theory to practice, Exploring School Leadership in England and the Caribbean draws on how school leaders practice and experience their own leadership. Paul Miller draws on case studies from Jamaica and England to explore what it means to be a school leader and explores a wide-range of issues, including accountability, performativity, inclusion and multiculturalism, technology, staffing and resourcing decisions.
While no two school leaders will have identical experiences as a school leader, Paul Miller draws on the first-hand accounts of school leaders to show that regardless of school size, type and location there are a number of common experiences and themes. Miller acknowledges that the practice of school leadership is occurring in an uncertain economic environment, buoyed by a fast paced policy context where by targets linked to national economic development are the new normal. He concludes that school leadership is a continuous balancing act driven by and experienced through an “Economic-motor model” of schooling- which he proposes.

Paul Miller is Reader in Education at Brunel University, London, UK, and latterly Professor of Educational Leadership & Management at the University of Technology, Jamaica. He is a Member of the Board and Director of Strategy in the Institute for Educational Administration & Leadership-Jamaica (IEAL-J); a Member of the Board of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration Management (CCEAM); and a Member of Council of the British Educational Leadership Management Administration Society (BELMAS). Miller is also Co-Editor of the journal, Power and Education, Associate Editor of Educational Management Administration and Leadership, and Interim Editor of International Studies in Educational Administration.