Features
What’s so challenging about leading an international school? Barry Speirs, from RSAcademics, answers questions about its recent research into ‘the Art of International School Headship’ What did the research involve? The analysis of over 100 questionnaires from school leaders of international schools in Asia and the Gulf region. This included the views of 76 current heads, as well as board members and deputies. We asked them to describe their school context, the particular challenges of leading an international school and what they saw as the characteristics of the best leaders. We gained additional insights from follow-up conversations with a selection of participants. What’s different about leading an international school? As well as the usual challenges of school leadership, international schools are often seen as having far greater complexity and diversity. For example, take parents. Although managing parents’ expectations is nothing new for a school leader, many international schools will have 30+ nationalities of parents with significant differences in their expectations. What a typical Chinese parent sees as a good education might be very different to, say, the perspectives of a Dutch expatriate. International schools may also experience far
greater churn among staff, students and parents – often 20-30% per year. This puts much greater pressure on all systems and communications. If leadership is about bringing people together to make progress towards a common goal, then this is particularly challenging given the diverse and changing school community. Can you really talk about ‘an international school’ – aren’t all international schools different? Schools are indeed very diverse, and a key theme to emerge from our research is that a significant success factor is finding a good fit between the head and the type of school. Consider, for example, the difference between a start-up school in China which is run as a for-profit enterprise with a bilingual curriculum for Chinese students, and a well-established, oversubscribed not-for-profit school in Singapore with expatriate families and parent trustees. Many respondents talked about the importance of prospective heads and boards undertaking the necessary due diligence to ensure the right fit. Having said that, in responses from very different schools there were many common themes. Our report identifies these and illustrates
Although managing parents’ expectations is nothing new for a school leader, many international schools will have 30+ nationalities of parents with significant differences in their expectations. What a typical Chinese parent sees as a good education might be very different to, say, the perspectives of a Dutch expatriate.
Summer |
Winter
34
| 2017
