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Journal of In-Service Education

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Professional Development Needs for Leaders in Special Education

Stephen Rayner , Helen Gunter & Stephen Powers
a a a a

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Published online: 19 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Stephen Rayner , Helen Gunter & Stephen Powers (2002) Professional Development Needs for Leaders in Special Education, Journal of In-Service Education, 28:1, 79-94, DOI: 10.1080/13674580200200172 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13674580200200172

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Journal of In-Service Education, Volume 28, Number 1, 2002

Professional Development Needs for Leaders in Special Education

STEPHEN RAYNER, HELEN GUNTER & STEPHEN POWERS University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

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ABSTRACT This article reports on a small-scale survey of the professional development experiences and perceived needs of teachers with leadership responsibility who work in special education within the Midlands (United Kingdom), both in special and mainstream schools. The study reveals that issues around leadership and management are central to the concerns of many professionals in special education and they would welcome more opportunity for professional development in this area, especially around issues of performance management. Furthermore, there is a perceived high need for their continuing professional development in leadership and management. Secondly, local short-term training and longer-term professional development through postgraduate study is enabling many Special Educational Needs (SEN) professionals to engage with their own learning needs, but targeted and government funded training is either not attracting them or is not targeted at them. Thirdly, respondents to this survey wanted training for the positions they were in, rather than training for promotion.

Introduction The importance of good leadership and management at all levels in education is now well established, though research and policy interventions have tended to focus on headteachers (Smith, 1995). Factors concerning leadership and management are strongly associated with effective schools (Sammons et al, 1995; Stoll & Fink, 1996; Dalin, 1998). The governments commitment to improving leadership in education is evidenced in the establishment of a National College for School Leadership (NCSL) and the funding of training schemes for heads; NPQH (National Professional Qualification for Headteachers), HEADLAMP (Headteachers Leadership and Management Programme) and LPSH (Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers; DfEE, 1998).

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Despite this recognition of the importance of leadership in education and the very extensive literature on the subject, little is actually known about the experiences of leading and leadership in special education (Rayner & Ribbins, 1998). This lack of empirical work and conceptual analysis is problematic because site-based management is changing not only the tasks managers and leaders perform, and the structures they inhabit, but is also reworking professional behaviour and relationships, and hence, the identities of these same people. This article is aimed at realising an understanding of how educational professionals in special education describe and understand their professional development needs to prepare for the challenges of leadership in times of rapid modernisation. It reports on a small-scale survey of the professional development experiences and the perceived needs of teachers with leadership responsibility who work in special education, both in special schools and mainstream schools.[1] In general, the study reveals that issues around leadership and management are central to the concerns of many professionals in special education, and they would welcome more opportunity for professional development in this area, especially around issues of performance management.

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Modernising Leadership in Special Education Those who have leadership and management responsibilities in special education, like their mainstream colleagues, are being modernised. The emphasis in Teachers: meeting the challenge of change (DfEE, 1998) is on site-based performance management in which the individual has responsibility for meeting their own professional targets and the identified targets for learning outcomes of the institution. Status, pay and recognition within the profession are to be differentiated through performance related pay, and evidenced through data collection, analysis of examination results and value added calculations. Reflecting this new approach to career development and teaching practice, particular emphasis has been given to a Headship Training Framework, which comprises: Qualification: through the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) as the benchmark for entry to headship; Induction: through the HEADLAMP scheme to consolidate and reinforce the skills of new heads; Extension Programme: building on the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH) to give experienced, successful heads the opportunity to stretch their skills (DfEE, 1998, p. 27). Also, central to the move to performance management is the in-service training of teachers to undertake leadership roles, and in particular, to become team leaders (e.g. heads of subject/year) or to take on a strategic

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school improvement role as a part of the leadership group. This overall professional development process is underpinned by the National Standards for Headteachers (TTA, 1998a), Subject Leaders (TTA, 1998b), and related literature (Hay McBer, 2000), which provide detailed descriptors of the attributes and skills said to be needed to be effective. These National Standards set an improvement agenda based on a topdown school-based model of leadership and management. For those professionals located in special education this model of leadership and management is problematic because the emphasis has been on bottom up approaches in support of meeting the needs of individual children. Educational professionals cluster around the child as the focus of professional attention, rather than seeing themselves as integrated into a particular organisational structure. This is visible through the work of inter-agency networks that cut across organisational boundaries. CPD has tended to be specialised and has been organised around the categorisation of special educational needs, e.g. courses on working with deaf children, or the visually impaired or autism. A further problem is created by the fact that current targeted and resourced funding for CPD from official bodies, e.g. the TTA or the National College for School Leadership, is for teachers and managers in schools, and this excludes service providers in LEAs. In the current context of government policy, therefore, leadership is largely presented in the form of tasks, behaviours and competencies that a head teacher performs. Such an approach is contradictory to an emphasis on collegial relationships within schools, and between those in schools and other services who support childrens needs. Leadership is presented as directly linked to school improvement and this is at odds with the emphasis on the range of services (e.g. in LEAs, special units and social services), used by schools in supporting childrens needs by a range of professional and interested parties. What headteachers and other leaders and managers should know, and what is worth knowing in order to do the job, is being defined and described around generic skills or capabilities that are concerned with enabling educational performance to be measured and evidenced. Alternative understandings of leadership and knowledge that provide the capacity to exercise professional judgement are being marginalised. This, interestingly, appears to be negatively reinforcing a traditional segregation and isolation in special education previously identified by Rayner (1994). The promotion of this narrow and exclusionary form of leadership and organisational purpose creates a number of conceptual and operational dilemmas or tensions for those involved in special educational provision. There are, subsequently, major implications for those in leadership roles in special education. For example, a special school headteacher may wish to focus, through his or her professional development, on a particular form of special education (e.g. severe

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learning difficulties) and/or an aspect of the curriculum (e.g. literacy), whilst on the other hand the policy context is making demands around officially approved knowledge and tasks. Thus, individually held educational values appear not to be determining choices in professional development courses. The urgency embedded within current policy texts regarding the need to make changes to and within schools means that professional development needs are being widely redefined in terms of short-term technical training about how the reform proposals can be implemented. Our approach is, therefore, that the special educational context should be re-emphasised in the organisation of CPD. The Research Project The research project reported in this article is a survey of the professional development needs for leadership in special education as perceived by practitioners working in roles of leadership and management in special education. The research intention flowed from a belief, expressed by the research team, also revealed in their previous research and in discussions with colleagues in schools and services, that there existed too few dedicated professional development opportunities for special educators in the area of leadership and management. To test this assumption, and to gather feedback on a number of issues, ideas and aspects of leadership identified by the research team, a pilot survey (n = 30) was organised in the form of a questionnaire, together with evaluation pro forma designed to elicit perspectives from respondents. The group targeted for the pilot comprised practitioners with leadership responsibilities in special education. Encouraged by a very positive evaluation of the questionnaire and an almost total affirmation in the response to the relevance and importance of the research intention, revision produced a survey questionnaire comprising 14 lead questions organised into two sections. The items in the first section asked for information about the respondents professional identity and experience. The items in the second section included questions on the respondents past record of CPD, current opportunities for CPD and the extent to which further CPD would ideally include training in the areas of managing self, working with others, and working with the school and the system. Further questions focused more directly on the ideal structure of CPD, and whether some special educational courses should stand separate to generic management training or alternatively whether those courses should be made more role specific. A number of different response formats were used throughout the questionnaire to control for response bias, and provide for clarity, utility and relevance. These included closed-ended items, with a mix of fixed personal data prompts: 5-point Likert scaling; 82

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Yes/No ratings; ranking. The final version of the survey questionnaire was used with a selected sample of educators from the East and West Midlands. Participants were identified using criteria comprising type of provision (special school or service) and category of SEN (autism, emotional and behavioural difficulty, hearing impairment, etc.). A mailing was completed targeting 30 institutions (special schools and services) with five copies of the questionnaire to be completed by staff with leadership and management responsibility identified by the headteacher in each institution. Each copy of the questionnaire had its own FREEPOST return envelope. Discussion of Main Findings The survey return totalled 117 scripts, representing a very good response rate of approximately 80%.[2] Analysis of the data was completed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows 10. SPSS is a software package for statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics were computed, using frequency counts and cross-tabulations. Several recodings were completed for questions involving more complex patterns of response data in order to elicit frequency and cross-tabulations across sex, age, current position of leadership held, years in post and forms of CPD experienced. The Respondents The 117 respondents included 34 head teachers (13 heads of schools and 21 heads of service), 25 deputy head teachers and 49 others (including teachers in charge of units).[3] Forty-nine percent of respondents were from special schools, 34% from services and 9% from units. In the sample, 42% of the group had held their current position for 5 years or more, while 30% had been in the position for 2 years or less. The sample comprised 66% females and 34% males, and this 2:1 ratio was sustained across the age range. Over 80% of the group were more than 40 years old, and over 85% had between 11 and 30 years of teaching experience. The sample was therefore regarded as representative of special educational provision for England and Wales, in so far as it comprised a mix of special schools, SEN Services and units. Interestingly, females were predominantly represented as managers in special education. Secondly, a very high number of those surveyed were over the age of forty.

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The Experience of CPD: past and present Table I presents the data where respondents have experienced CPD in leadership and management. It should be noted that respondents might have experienced one or more of these forms of CPD.
Type of professional development provision Short course (School based internally or externally provided, LEA based internally or externally provided, or NVQ) Higher education provision (Certificate/Diploma/Masters/Taught Doctorate/Research degree) Government agency provision (NPQH, HEADLAMP, LPSH, TTA funded, OFSTED) Other (Management study, Investors in People training, Threshold Assessor, Courses offered by NGOs, Beacon School activities, Conferences) No professional development undertaken Percentage of group 52%

46% 15% 14%

20%

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Table I. Professional development experiences in leadership and management.

Table I shows that the most popular form of professional development, taken by over half the respondents, is short course provision, either school-based, LEA-based or NVQ. The importance of higher education provision is also clearly established, with almost half the respondents having completed or currently following postgraduate accredited courses, such as Masters degrees, and 14% of the group having registered for higher degrees, e.g. taught doctorates/research doctorates. Courses offered by government agencies are less popular being undertaken by only 15% of respondents. Interestingly, and a point which may merit further attention, a large number (20%), including four of the 21 heads of services report having undertaken no professional development in leadership and management. Regarding the government headteacher programmes, three people had attended LPSH courses, three had attended HEADLAMP courses and one person a NPQH course. Ten people had attended OFSTED training. Table II shows the type of professional development undertaken according to the respondents places of work. This shows that government courses had attracted only one person from the 36 people from LEA services and only eight out of the 50 people from special schools (but six out of the nine people from units). Higher education courses had attracted equally across the range of provision. Short courses were also reasonably well distributed across place of work.

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A further finding was that overall, the mix between generic or SEN dedicated CPD experienced by the group was evenly balanced, with perhaps a surprisingly large number of respondents indicating that they had taken SEN specific training (49%).
Type of PD undertaken Special school Short course HEI course Government agency course 54% (27/50) 46% (23/50) 16% (8/50) Place of work Service 39% (14/36) 53% (19/36) 3% (1/36) Unit 33% (3/9) 44% (4/9) 67% (6/9)

Table II. Type of professional development undertaken according to place of work.

The Content of CPD for SEN Leaders: priorities and preferences Respondents were asked to identify their current professional development needs from a list of 25 possible topics relating to three categories, and derived from the literature on school leadership (see Newton & Tarrant, 1992; Stoll & Fink, 1996) and school development (Ainscow et al, 1994). Respondents were asked to tick one box in a Likert scale from 1 (they would benefit Not at all) to 5 (they would benefit A lot). The 25 items were: Managing self Providing the leadership vision Managing own time Setting personal goals Effective communication skills Managing personal stress Working with others Team building Decision making processes Delegation and target setting Staff selection, induction and training Staff disciplinary procedures Staff professional development Managing staff stress Other support for staff Home-school relations Performance management Working with the school and the system Development planning

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Finance management Property maintenance Public relations/marketing Collaboration/partnership networking Managing inclusion Using comparative data for target setting School/service self-evaluation Crisis/disaster management Administrative systems/ICT The most requested items of professional development were identified by totalling the number of respondents who ticked either boxes 4 or 5 in the Likert scale. The results are shown in Table III.
Topics Performance management School/service self-evaluation Delegation and target setting Using comparative data for target setting Administrative systems/ICT Category Others School/system Others School/system School/system

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Table III. Most requested topics for professional development.

What is particularly interesting about these data is how systemic matters dominate and that those people-centred issues, which are prioritised, are concerned with enabling the system to work and work better. There is nothing here about managing self. All the items, in fact, can be seen as concerned with different aspects of accountability or performance management. This topic is a high profile and perhaps contentious part of the ongoing restructuring agenda and, hence, enabling it to happen without undermining professional relationships is an area of tension for all those in leadership roles. We should therefore not be surprised by the findings in Table III, although it is interesting that leaders and managers in the field of special education share these concerns. The least requested items of professional development are shown in Table IV.
Topics Property maintenance Homeschool relations Effective communication skills Managing personal stress Public relations/marketing Category School/system Others Self Self School/system

Table IV. Least requested topics for professional development.

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The items least requested are the more traditional areas of leadership and management. It seems that many of the topics that dominated the minds of educational professionals in the early days of site-based management are no longer a priority. For example, enabling schools to function well through new tasks, such as property maintenance, has now been absorbed by senior staff, as experience has been gained and expertise developed during the last decade. It is also true that while the market still impacts on schools and services, much of what originally worried senior managers appears to have been brought under control with the use of marketing processes and policies that support home-school liaison. In many ways, therefore, in consideration of CPD these are management topics that appear to be well covered. What is of further interest, is that certain aspects of selfmanagement are not dominating thinking and it might be that the urgency of the current performance agenda means that the development of self as manager is put to one side. The need to cope or even to survive educational restructuring is leading to demands for professional development that is more about how to do it and how to do it without undermining people, rather than what it might mean personally for the people who are charged with leading and implementing it. Further analysis of the data was completed looking at the relationships between perceived ratings of CPD content and the factors, sex, age, years in post and current leadership position. The analysis revealed that sex was a factor in the rating of CPD content, with females generally valuing CPD courses as more important than male respondents. This was found to be especially true on the items managing personal stress, staff disciplinary procedures, other support for staff and development planning. There was, furthermore, a 20% or greater difference between the sexes for all items. It was noted, however, that the difference reduces on the most requested topics (Table III), where both sexes see a priority for CPD in these areas of leadership and management. The one exception, for which men see a greater need for CPD than women, is managing own time (58% men, 44% women). With the exception of administrative systems the most requested items also reflected a priority shared by respondents across the age range and irrespective of years in position. Generally, however, younger respondents saw a greater need and place for CPD, especially on the items effective communication skills, team building, staff disciplinary procedures and homeschool relations. The one exception was administrative systems/ICT where older respondents reported a greater need for professional training. The difference between younger and older respondents, according to the data, is not explained simply by younger respondents having received less CPD.

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Deputy headteachers consistently rated most aspects of CPD more highly than heads. Heads laid less emphasis on CPD aimed at managing people or self (i.e. traditional areas of leadership and management), while deputies valued both these aspects and interestingly, property management. Place of work impacted upon priorities for CPD on a number of items, and this is shown in Table V, where the figures refer to the percentage of respondents from each place of work who ticked either box 4 or 5 on the Likert scale.
Topic Providing the leadership vision Decision-making processes Staff selection, induction and training Homeschool relations Development planning Finance management Property maintenance Public relations/marketing Managing inclusion Special school (%) 59 38 62 40 59 64 46 40 46 Unit (%) 67 56 44 33 78 33 22 33 67 Service (%) 47 58 33 17 47 49 20 58 53

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Table V. CPD priorities according to place of work.

Some of these findings (e.g. finance management or property maintenance) are not surprising, but others are more notable. It is interesting that public relations/marketing is much more of a concern for those in services than those in special schools, perhaps reflecting that this is something special schools have had to give priority to for some time. Alternatively, services are now usually costed budget-centres, which survive only if they sell their usefulness and meet the needs of the client (schools), so public relations will be an obvious priority. Furthermore, the low priority that those respondents working in services give to home-school relations could indicate either that special schools and services have different marketing needs, or that in the case of services, their home-school relations are relatively easy to manage. On the item managing inclusion, it is perhaps surprising that those in services do not give this greater priority, whilst at the same time it is reassuring to see that about half the respondents from special schools recognise their own needs in this area of work. Why staff selection, induction and training is much more a concern in special schools than units or services is not clear, and further research is merited. Finally, it is noteworthy that those respondents working in units are very interested

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in CPD, and particularly in the areas of providing the leadership vision and development planning. Should Professional Development Be SEN Specific? The questionnaire allowed for respondents to include qualitative comments on their professional development experiences, and these illustrate the self-perceived need for specific professional development. For example, one head of unit wrote: Currently, I feel that there is insufficient availability of professional development in leadership and management that focuses on practitioners in special education. My role as head of a PRU [pupil referral unit] and the complementary services attached to it is a demanding one but also seemingly an unusual one. I feel quite isolated at times and the ability to share experiences with others in a similar position would be helpful. One head of a special school wrote: Any course, which makes me a better head teacher, is very important to me and my governors. Sadly, although the work of a head teacher in a special school is very similar to the work of a head teacher in a mainstream school, there are differences and these are not recognised or valued! One head of service commented: I think it would be an excellent idea to provide leadership and management courses in Special Education especially for aspiring heads/team leaders/senior staff. Over 80% wanted at least some SEN specific element (Table VI), but there is also a desire not to be marginalised with 62% only wanting training courses to be SEN specific in part and, furthermore, they greatly value training that is tied to their present role.
Response category Yes In part No Not sure Response 20% 62% 16% 3%

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Table VI. Should professional development be SEN specific?

The range of responses to this question was evenly spread across position and context.

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Role Specific Training and Accreditation When respondents were asked about how much they felt they would benefit from role-specific CPD the response was markedly high in respect to CPD, which was dedicated to current role and responsibilities. For example, only five out of 14 deputy heads of special schools expressed an interest in training related to the role of the head of a special school, whereas all 14 were interested in training related to the present role. The general finding may reflect an interest in CPD that is instrumental in developing professional expertise, rather than being aimed at fuelling further career development. These findings and those in Table VI suggest that, in the minds of respondents, the question of CPD for SEN is not a straightforward matter, reflecting an ever increasingly complex set of realities in the world of special education. While they perceive themselves to be in need of particular types of training, they also want to network and engage in professional development beyond the urgent and specific. Table VI also shows that when asked if professional development should be targeted at just special education then the response is varied. Some workers in special education would like bespoke and specific training, while some are happy to attend generic training, but the majority (62%) would like to see SEN training as a part, but not the whole part of the training experience. In other words, in spite of the previously identified impact of reform agenda, the urgency for short-term technical training and implementation of reform proposals does not appear to wholly undermine the traditional special educational value of working with other professionals from a variety of educational settings. The range of professional development undertaken by the respondents in the survey reinforces this sense of a desire for a pluralistic approach. Responses to the question that asked for an indication of the importance of accreditation of CPD supported the emphasis upon bespoke training linked to role expertise. While 39% felt that accreditation was important, 38% felt it to be somewhat important and 24% were not interested in accreditation at all. The Delivery of CPD for SEN Leaders Preferences for the delivery of CPD were addressed according to venue, timing and format. The most preferred place for CPD was a local venue within a geographical region or LEA (the best options for 65% of respondents), in contrast to campus-based or distance learning. Termtime (day-release) or twilight sessions were the preferred options (69%), rather than other timings such as a Saturday, residential weekends or holidays. Lectures were the most popular option (74%), followed by mentoring (47%) paper- (26%) and web-based (21%) programmes.

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Distance education, either through the conventional medium of text- or web-based delivery, is often popular with government and providers because of cost. However, the survey data indicate that respondents most value provision where they have direct contact with the providers and other learners. They also prefer provision that takes place during the working week. Summary The survey reported here appears to have added significantly to our knowledge of the leadership and management professional development needs and experiences of those in special education. The key outcomes of this study are that: those working in special education report a perceived high need for their continuing professional development in leadership and management; this need for professional development is evident across special schools, services and units; perceived professional development concerns are largely focused around the current centralised policy demands on schools and educational professionals; local short-term training and longer-term professional development through postgraduate study is enabling many SEN professionals to engage with their own learning needs, but targeted and government funded training for a particular role, e.g. the preparation and support of headteachers, is either not attracting them or is not targeted at them (e.g. there is no equivalent of the NPQH for heads of service); respondents to this survey were wanting training for the positions they were in, rather than training for promotion. The writers undertook the survey in the belief that there is at present a gap in current provision in the United Kingdom. The findings reported here provide clear evidence of this, and also that those issues around leadership and management are central to the concerns of many people in special education. This is not only the case for headteachers and deputies but also heads of units and other teachers. There is a need, therefore, to look more closely at the conditions in which professional development needs are identified and articulated. The rapid pace of change in education in recent years, including the massive increase in managerial accountability, has probably resulted in most schools and teachers now being in what we would choose to call adaption and compliance mode. An important question is to what extent has this determined the agenda of CPD identified here? One of the important roles of teacher educators is to encourage teachers to move beyond the government agenda to also address other values and aspirations in working to achieve an effective education. However, this 91

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survey has revealed a number of concerns regarding the types and opportunities for both training and longer-term professional development, which need to be addressed. Acknowledgements The writers would like to thank Shirley Flannery and Janet Little (School of Education, University of Birmingham) for their excellent administrative support. Thanks are also extended to colleagues and respondents who participated in the pilot questionnaire and the main survey. Notes
[1] In the United Kingdom children with special educational needs are educated in special schools, in mainstream schools that have been specially resourced (these special resources are often called units and is the term used throughout this article) or on an individual basis in mainstream schools. Pupils in units are supported by specialist teachers. Peripatetic (visiting) specialist teachers, working for local authority teams called services often support pupils individually within local schools.

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[2] It is not possible to calculate the exact response rate as the 150 questionnaires distributed were not individually targeted. [3] NB. Information on this question was missing in nine cases.

Correspondence Stephen Rayner, Assessment Research Unit, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom (s.g.rayner@bham.ac.uk). References
Ainscow, M., Hopkins, D., Southworth, G. & West, M. (1994) Creating the Conditions for School Improvement. London: David Fulton Publishers. Dalin, P. (1998) School Development: theories and strategies. London: Cassell. DfEE (Department for Education and Employment) (1998) Teachers: meeting the challenge of change. London: DfEE. Hay McBer (2000) Research into Teacher Effectiveness: a model of teacher effectiveness, report by Hay McBer to the Department for Education and Employment, June 2000. Available at: www.dfee.gov.uk/teaching reforms.mcber. Newton, C. & Tarrant, T. (1992) Managing Change in Schools: a practical handbook. London: Routledge. Rayner, S. & Ribbins, P. (1998) Headteachers and Leadership in Special Education. London: Cassell.

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Rayner, S. (1994) Restructuring Reform: choice and change in special education, British Journal of Special Education, 21, pp. 169-173. Sammons, P., Hillman, J. & Mortimore, P. (1995) Key Characteristics of Effective Schools: a review of school effectiveness research. London: Institute of Education for the Office for Standards in Education. Smith, R. (1995) Successful School Management. London: Cassell. Stoll, L. & Fink, D. (1995) Changing Our Schools. Buckingham: Open University Press. Teacher Training Agency (1998a) National Standards for Headteachers. London: TTA. Teacher Training Agency (1998b) National Standards for Subject Leaders. London: TTA.

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