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Professional Standards for School Leaders

Descriptions of school leaders’ professional standards are common in the English speaking countries. These standards, however, are rarely accompanied by adequate methods for making judgements about performance against the standards.

How to use this site

This site contains a set of 56 narrative accounts, or short case stories, describing a particular incident that a school leader has dealt with at a school. Each story has been classified against a set of eight attributes considered by school leaders to be most important to performing at a high level: fair, supportive, collaborative, decisive, flexible, tactful, innovative and persistent.

Each narrative account has also been situated within a particular context, for example, the school may be in a remote region and has been classified according to a set of competency statements.

You can search the narrative accounts by Attribute, Context or Competency.

In addition to these commented narratives there are a further 116 that are uncommented. These can also be searched.

Chief Investigators

Dr Helen Wildy
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership
School of Education
Murdoch University
South St
Murdoch 6150

Professor David Andrich
Dean, School of Education
Murdoch University
South St
Murdoch 6150

Professor Bill Louden
Pro Vice Chancellor (Research)
Executive Dean
Faculty of Community Service, Education and Social Sciences
Edith Cowan University
Bradford St
Mount Lawley 6050

Contact information

Coral Pepper
School of Education
Murdoch University
South St
Murdoch 6150
Telephone 9360 7559
Fax 9360 6280
coral.pepper@murdoch.edu.au

Stephen Breen
Government Schools Leadership Centre
Oxford St
Leederville 6903
Telephone 9242 6897
Fax 9242 6395
stephen.breen@det.wa.edu.au

The Leadership Framework is grounded in practitioners’ work and is recognised and owned by the profession. The Leadership Framework is a document based on a self-reflective model. It is a tool for school leaders to use to review their role and practice to enhance their continual development, and to assist in designing professional development based on individual needs.

This website enables you to learn about the standards on which the Leadership Framework is based. You are invited to explore the standards-that is, levels of performance-of each of the attributes and to reflect on your own practice as a leader in terms of the standards.

This research project is a collaborative venture conducted between the Department of Education and Training through the Leadership Centre, Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University. The consortium was successful in obtaining highly competitive Australian Research Council (ARC) funding, with additional financial support from the Leadership Centre to further develop the standards component of the Leadership Framework. Associate Professor Helen Wildy (Murdoch University), Professor Bill Louden (Edith Cowan University) and Professor David Andrich (Murdoch University) are joint chief investigators for this ARC Linkage grant.

Copyright © 2004. This material is held by the Department of Education and Training through the Leadership Centre, Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University.