Sustainable Leadership Project
- Published: 12 May 2022
Member engagement
The focus of the project team over the past few months has been on engagement with members, to get your feedback on the draft Sustainable Leadership report. IPPN sincerely thanks the 350 members who registered for the six focus group discussions, one for each theme explored: Effective leadership and core purpose, Preparation for leadership, Recruitment of leaders, Time and space to lead and Governance. The focus groups were facilitated by almost 40 trained facilitators, each of whom took small groups of 5-10 members. The feedback is provided through the facilitators and this will be a key input to the final report.
Legislation and circulars
The team commissioned a detailed analysis of the legislation and departmental circulars that have a bearing on primary schools over the past ten years or so and the consequent impact on principals’ workload. Further work is being done to map this to LAOS domains and standards so IPPN can gauge the proportion of system change that relates to leading learning (the ‘core purpose’) vs governance and management and other domains. This is a critical piece of work that will provide clear evidence of what principals and IPPN have been saying for many years – that the pace and breadth of change is unsustainable.
Health and wellbeing
640 school leaders completed the Deakin University survey on occupational health and wellbeing commissioned by IPPN and NAPD. The research team is currently analysing the results and it is hoped to have preliminary headline results in the next few weeks. This will be another key input to the report and to future planning of supports, services and advocacy.
Next steps
The team is currently planning the next stage of consultation with external stakeholders. A member consultation survey will be drafted in the coming weeks to be issued to members early in the new school year. The resulting data will help to ensure that IPPN has data to substantiate and possibly, to challenge thinking on a number of aspects of the report for which there is limited data available.
