How Leaders Succeed in Challenging Reform Contexts

Dame Alison Peacock will provide a keynote about the practical implications of teaching without labelling children with numbers and grades and explore an alternative approach to primary assessment. The key message, however, is the importance of high quality curriculum and pedagogy that responds to the needs of each learner thereby enabling any summative assessment to tell a positive story of progress.

Dame Alison Peacock, DBE DLitt MEd BA, is co-author of 'Creating Learning without Limits' (2012). This research explores an alternative improvement agenda; identifying key dispositions for school leadership where every child and adult is valued and where no one is labelled by so-called 'ability'. Alison is Executive Headteacher of The Wroxham School, a primary school in Hertfordshire. The Teaching School has established an extensive Transformative Learning Alliance. Alison is a national member of the Teaching Schools Council.

This keynote presentation will pose a number of questions that may well have an impact on how leaders think about, enact and develop their leadership roles. Professor Sachs will pose a number of questions around practice, policy and professional development. This is a basis for the development of a framework that can guide the way in which individuals and organisations frame, enact and then use research as a political and professional strategy to improve leadership skills and capabilities.

Judyth Sachs is former Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and is best known for her landmark book about teachers' professionalism 'The Activist Teaching Profession'.

This presentation will focus upon teachers’ work, lives and effectiveness. It will examine how engaging in lifelong professional learning in different ways, may contribute to their ability and willingness to sustain their commitment to teach to their best in predictable and unpredictable policy and workplace environments. It will highlight, in particular, the need for professional learning and development to address teachers’ intellectual and emotional needs as well as their classroom practices.

Christopher Day is Professor of Education and convenor of the Centre for Research on Educational Leadership and Management (CRELM). During the last twenty years, he has led national, European and international research and development projects in the areas of teachers' work and lives and school leadership in Europe, North and South America, China and Australasia, including invited keynote addresses at several national and international conferences. His books have been published in several languages and include: Resilient Teachers, Resilient Schools(2014); The International Handbook of Teacher and School development (2012) ; New Understandings of Teachers' Work: Emotions and Educational Change (2011).