Governance and educational leadership: Studies in education policy and politics

In this chapter we describe and critically analyse the relationship between governance and educational leadership. The aim of making explicit such a relationship is to show the application and value of governance to the study of educational leadership. Taken in its widest sense, governance can be loosely characterized as a political and economic strategy aimed at perfecting the design of accountability relations and structures. Decreased government involvement in the running and monitoring of education provision means that public servants, be they school leaders or school governors, are called upon to make themselves accountable to stakeholders and evaluation and funding bodies, typically through horizontal and vertical relations of accountability that rely on performance benchmarking, external inspection and high-stakes testing. Governance (broadly conceived) concerns the extent to which these relations and structures of accountability function successfully within a narrow definition of rational self-management.