Sustainable Leadership
Leadership Effectiveness Reflection Tool
This Reflection Tool seeks to establish a common understanding of the roles of school leaders with reference to the Quality Framework for Leadership & Management (LAOS 2022). It is not envisaged that a job specification would emerge but rather that consensus might be reached as to what it is that school leaders should be focused on in order to render them as effective as possible in their leadership roles and also that those leadership roles would be more sustainable.
IPPN fully accepts that there are leadership and management dimensions to all school leadership roles and that their needs to be a balanced focus on both dimensions.
The list is not exhaustive and the tool is provided in Word format so it can be tailored to meet the needs of each individual school. Feedback is very welcome to project@ippn.ie.
In the tables below,
- the first column details the standards within each domain of the Quality Framework
- the second column details how that standard might be achieved and
- the third column details the tasks/actions that are undertaken in schools relating to those domains and standards
- the fourth column can be used to identify who is best placed to undertake task/actions detailed in column 3
When engaging with the document, the challenge is
- to reflect upon and determine what should be the responsibility of the principal, the deputy principal and those involved in the leadership & management of the school, as well as
- who or what structure might be required to address what should not be the responsibility of the principal, the deputy principal and those involved in the leadership & management of the school.
The list of tasks/actions in column 3 is not exhaustive. There is a range of other tasks/actions that take place on a daily basis in schools, including the management of communications, interactions with parent/guardians, etc. It is impossible to capture the totality of school life and the multiplicity of school contexts, so schools should feel free to add to the document to take account of their specific context.
