Recently, I was invited to a two-day event held by the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. The event focused on rethinking school leadership and brought together a fascinating group of people working across the education sector.

We grappled with what it means to be an education leader in this tricky time, when the world is changing all around us. We talked about how we can, as leaders, support others to be more resilient, focused and effective, while education goalposts seem to constantly move, and shifts in policy drive us towards managing organisations, rather than leading them.

We heard from academics, practitioners and headteachers, and took time to reflect, take stock and think again about how education leadership is developing and where it will go in the future.

As part of the day, I was involved in a deep conversation with a wonderful colleague on that big question that always perplexes those of us who work with schools and colleges - what is education for?  We ask so much of the system – to equip young people for the next stage in their lives, to provide them with a body of knowledge, to transfer our cultural values and norms, and yet we measure the outcomes through some blunt and somewhat crude instruments.  Using key measurements of achievement at 16 through a league table of performance results - be they GCSEs or whatever exam will emerge over the next couple of years - only measure one aspect of a young person’s education career. It might be an important one, but it’s not the only one.

We need to start thinking about wider ways of assessing the outcome of schools and colleges, both at the level of individual young people right up to the system as a whole.  How do we accurately capture the narrative of a young person’s 13 -year journey from early years to adulthood?  How do we make our organisations reflect the importance of the values and passions we have for education and the difference it can make?  Do we need a greater focus on collecting and understanding qualitative data rather than using the ‘blunt instrument’ that is quantitative performance data?

One of the challenges of this approach is not just the collection of data, but the analysis and understanding that is needed to ‘read’ complex organisations and enable others to understand what the data shows. 

Here at Learning Plus UK, we’ve just finished supporting our first ever group of accredited trainers, who are people who have a passion for making a difference to children and young people, and know the questions that data can make us ask and the importance of the answers we get. 

We’re excited about our work to support education leaders and know that whatever happens, organisations like ourselves and the Bristol Leadership Forum will have a key role to play in making sure that school leaders have the tools they need to continue to deliver a highly complex, rich, and effective system.