 I appreciate, we all appreciate the whole team appreciate yet, that you'll all have just finished your working day and you'll have to trade across the great London network of rail, tube, tram, however it be to get here to see one, but you're very, very welcome. We're delighted you're here. We're also delighted that Dr Maren Coleman's here to offer our keynote lecture this time. By way of an introduction, I'm going to hand over to Professor Russell, who some of you may have met or you may not have done as yet, but Professor Russell is here, not least to hear more of Dr Maren's lecture. Well, good evening everyone. First of all, let's see where you all come from. Staff, hands up, that's in the Department of Education. If you have either a slager, slager, slager, who's in the inmate leading generation of change? OK, that's the majority. Peggy, Hugh, any others? OK, Mark, so now we have a citizen who's happy. Some of you I met when I came to your fascinating conference in New York, and what I said then, I'm going to say on this job that you need to have a quick message, because something is so important to be heard more than once. The thing I want to say is that the tremendous success of the inmate leading generation and change in the school of education is a reflection upon a very interesting, indigenous model of research that the school led by Geraldine Mcdorgale, a wonderful staff, have been pushing forward. Now, it's interesting, Pope Benedict XVI has this nice phrase that theory gives practice, breathing space, and all of you who are on that inmate, you learn from your own experience in schools, that it's one thing to have the experience, you also have to get the meaning. Once you've got the meaning, what's really good is to theorize the meaning, and then if you go on, you can then begin publishing your theorization of the meaning and the discoveries you've made for improving pedagogy of students throughout the world. That's ultimately where we're heading here, so to have such a huge base of this wonderful pyramid fills me with enthusiasm and with hope for what the school is doing. In addition of course, we're not just doing this in any institution, we're doing it in an institution that began its life in 1850, training teachers to teach poor Catholic children. So our interest in social inclusion in opening up educational opportunities to people who haven't previously had them is fundamental to who we are to our values. So that's why issues such as what we're about to hear tonight, social justice university, aren't just interesting features as there may be in other institutions, for us we're talking about core values and core identity. So you are part of that. You are, if you like, central to allowing us to continually connect with who we really and mostly we are. So great to see you all here tonight. Dr Mary Ann Coleman, who's come to join us, is an emeritus reader in educational leadership and management at the Institute of Education. That's left wonderful place not so far away on the other side of London. Very, very widely published and some of you will know that the book actually happened tonight. Up to night we will know if you published in 2010 educational leadership and management developing insights and skills. And I gather from what a little conversation we've already had that although she's an emeritus, Dr Coleman is still very active in publishing indeed. She's been freed from selling. She has more time than ever to lead in theorising and promulgating the thoughts of her theories in areas like this, which is so close to who we are. So, I'm delighted to welcome you and welcome you all here tonight. Thank you so much for inviting me and it is wonderful to see so many people here tonight, particularly after you've all had a hard day, I'm sure. If I could pick up on a couple of things that Professor, as I said, first of all, something that crossed my mind when you were talking about theory was there's a lovely saying. I can't remember who it's to be attributed to. There's nothing so practical as a good theory. And also I'm very conscious of the fact the topic that we have here tonight is something that is really integral to the nature of the teaching and the learning that goes on in this institution. So, it's happy for me that my particular interest, which is this at the end of my career, this is where I am, that my particular interest is so much in tune with what you are all actively involved in in your everyday lives. It's rather a big topic. In fact, it's incredibly ambitious to have leadership, social justice and diversity, three enormous concepts in one title for one lecture. But let's be ambitious, shall we? Let's look at some of these things in a little bit of detail and try and unpick them and move forward a little bit in what we're doing. It's a huge topic, but it's something that is at the heart of what education is all about. I think in one way, first of all, it's likely that it's something that is in tune with all the efforts that people are making to, for example, bridge that gap between those children, those students who are not achieving as well as they might and those who are achieving so highly. If we are going to unpick the differences there, then we need to look at what the different aspects of the diversity of those children are. Let's have a look at what I'm actually hoping to cover tonight. First of all, defining what we're meaning by diversity and social justice in the context of educational leadership. We're working in a world now that's very different from one of, say, 25, 40, 50 years ago. We're living in a time of globalisation, we're living in a time of mass movement of people for economic and political reasons. We're no longer, particularly in London, this is very true, isn't it, that ethnically there is a huge diversity in London schools. Less so perhaps in other areas of the country, but it's particularly so that we have great ethnic differences, huge mixes in all our schools. What are some of the benefits and challenges of leading for diversity and social justice? Well, we need to think and unpick that because we can talk in general terms about what is morally right, what is effective, but what are we actually going to be facing if we are actually putting leading for diversity and social justice at the heart of what we do? It won't surprise you to see that I want to look at the implications of these concepts of diversity and social justice for educational leadership theory. And I know all of you will be, to some extent, familiar with some of the theories that there are. But theory and practice go hand in hand, and I'm actually a fairly practical person, although I've spent quite a lot of time looking and working with theories. I don't want a theory to exist in the ether, I want it to be capable of being applied to everyday life, so I want to look tonight at some of the ways in which diversity and social justice can affect educational leadership practice. And then finally, something which I've been very interested in over the last five or six years, what is the implications of diversity and social justice for the choice and preparation of our educational leaders? Now, all those things I want to try and unpick a bit. Also, one of the things about diversity in education is, when you find it's being written about, it's usually to do with the classroom. We're usually looking at what's happening with children, students, young people as they're being taught in the classroom. Very few people actually in England, in the UK, are looking at the impact on staff. I'm interested from the leadership point of view of, in the first place, how educational leaders actually lead the adults in their institution. Now obviously that's not divorced from the students. One of the things I think about educational leadership is that we all know, we are all quite sure that the effectiveness of educational leadership has an impact on the classroom. But it's transmitted via the staff. The direct impact of leaders is going to be fed down through, in a distributed way hopefully, through the staff and out to the student body. It's very hard to prove cause and effect, but there are lots of studies looking at how educational leadership actually impacts on the classroom. And it is possible in lots of ways to see that, but very hard to actually prove a certain amount of impact. We feel that the connection has to be there. So going on now to look at the defining of diversity and social justice in the context of educational leadership. Now I'm going to do something which perhaps I don't know if it's right to do in the context of so many people. But I want you at the end of your working day, in the beginning of this lecture, to just turn to your neighbour and talk for one minute about how you define diversity and social justice. Diversity perhaps particularly in the context of educational leadership. Right, I'll give you one minute. Because at the end of the lecture this evening, I'll offer the opportunity for questions and discussion amongst us as a whole. So that's just given us nice time to get the last few people into the room and I'm sure it's given you an opportunity to begin to think in your own way about diversity and social justice. Nothing like a bit of reflection, is there? Nothing like a bit of application of theory to your own circumstances. That's what the MA is all about, isn't it? It's about actually enlightening your practice through the theories that you learn and allowing your knowledge through your practice to feed back into the theoretical work. And that's what happens in the process of the research that we all do. So I'm not going to ask for feedback about what you just said, but I'll give you hopefully some of the things that you might have said. Well, I don't mean what the government means by diversity. When the government is talking about diversity in education, they're talking about often a diversity of provision of schools. That's not what I'm here about tonight. I'm talking about diversity between individuals and groups, and obviously the differences that are visible are those that really hit you in the face. And from my point of view, the research that I've done over the last 15, 20 years, my own research, I've been involved in a lot of research projects of a sort of general nature, but my particular interest has really always centred on difference. I think from an early age I've always been very conscious of class differences. But when I started work in educational leadership and management, I was asked, somebody reminded me here of a book that was written in the early 1990s called Principles of Educational Management. And I wrote several chapters in that book, one of which was about women in educational management. And I was asked to write that. Why? Because I was the only woman on the team. And they thought they'd better have a chapter on women. So it was a bit of an add-on, but it really fired me up actually when I wrote that. Because although I was generally obviously aware of issues about gender coming from the background and the age that I am, it really was an issue in the 60s, it really fired me up to do my reading on the topic. And it got me going on years of research, which I still am involved with now. So gender, for me, was a huge area there. More recently, I've worked with, I don't know if people here know her, but you may do, Rosemary Campbell Stevens, who runs the investing in diversity programme at the Institute. I've worked with her and done some research around ethnicity. Some of those things are the very obvious differences amongst us. There are differences that are much less visible and perhaps are coming to be much more important. Religion comes to mind. I think we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Sexuality is a huge and difficult and hidden issue. But then there's the diversity of personality types. I don't know if you've studied the theory of Belbyn, have you? Theories of Belbyn? Are you familiar with teams? Yes? A little bit? His theory just very, very quickly is that there are different personality types, and in order to have a high performing team, you have to have people who represent the different types that will make up a good working team. If you have all people who are all good at real leadership, their drivers, that will not be a good team because they'll be fighting each other, but all wanting to be on top. You have to have people who are team workers, who are supporters. You have to have people who are called completeer finishers, those people who will actually make sure a job gets carried through to the end. So that's another area of diversity that really is important when it comes to managing teams and leading teams in schools and universities and other places. Diversity is a slippery concept. I mean, I already mentioned the fact that the government has actually perloined the term diversity to use to describe the different types of schools that are going to be or are on offer. Diversity is also now used as an alternative term for ethnicity, isn't it? And yet it means much more than that. You find that people slip into just alternating, you know, using that for ethnicity. So it's a concept that's changing. You can't always get a hold of it. But I'm using it in the very general sense, all the differences between people. But it's not just about difference, it's also about the ways in which differences are valued. And that's another bit, isn't it? Because there are some differences that are less valued than others. And we do have a tendency to categorise people based on a presenting aspect of diversity and then to stereotype them. I put positively and negatively, but quite honestly, it's usually negative. People perceive you according to one particular aspect of how you present. And it's only, you know, when people begin to break down some barriers and things that people see through to whatever it was that stops them, hopefully they see through. Otherwise, maybe they just hang on to their stereotypes and never move on. This is concept of the outsider. Now, I think women I've seen as outsiders in lots of circumstances, less so now, things are improving. But there are still areas, for example, outside education in the city of London, in the financial institutions, women are still seen as outsiders. Issues about being an insider and an outsider. Properly, the archetypal insider is a white, heterosexual, middle-class, middle-aged male. That's your archetypal insider in this country. Anybody else might be seen in some circumstances as an outsider. These statements here can be backed up by elements of social-psychological theory, sociobiology. I mean, there's all sorts of theory that underpins these statements that I'm making here. We relate to people most easily who are like us. There's no doubt if I'm in a social setting, I will gravitate towards another woman of a certain age, i.e. like me. It's easier to talk. You've got so much in common. You're halfway there before you even start. We all find that tendency. The importance of gatekeepers. I cannot stress enough the importance of gatekeepers. It's been known for a long time. People appoint in their own image. As men have tended to be the gatekeepers, i.e. the people who have had seniority, they've tended to appoint people like them. I actually was privileged to do some research in China, in mainland China, some years ago now, mid to late 90s. I don't speak Chinese, so I had interpreter. But I remember asking usually the male senior management teams in schools, why aren't there any women on the senior management team? They'd say, you know, is there a problem? They'd say, no, no, no, men and women are completely equal. They've been equal since 1947, when the communists took over. Completely equal. Why haven't you got women? Well, it just happens that our women are not very good. I'm sure if you went down the road, you'd find they have lots of women. Well, they didn't, because of course everywhere you went, it was the same story. And there was a terrific stereotype of women being, another thing they would say always is, of course men can think strategically, men have got the big vision, women are good at detail. So these stereotypes, you know, just were very hard to move. And in fact, it made me feel like I didn't want to bother carrying on. I love doing that research, but I didn't take it any further because at that stage I didn't think there was much movement going on. I've got things like that now. So gatekeepers are very important. Strangers and anxiety. Strangers make us anxious. It's difficult to break through stereotypes sometimes about people who are not like us. We would prefer not to. No, let's just get that over with and we'll move on back to the people we know. The degree of difference is important. Again, there's been quite a lot of social psychological research about this. For example, particularly with people with disabilities. A really severe disability will throw people badly. People who are not disabled. There's a lot of issues here of things that you have to break through and get over in your own stereotyping. A lot of this is about emotion. Emotion is a difficult thing to deal with if you're a leader. I think it's important to realise that in accepting the diversity amongst us, people will be anxious until barriers are broken down. Another thing about the insider-outside thing is that it requires a degree of altruism to actually change things. Why should white middle-class, middle-aged men hand over some of their power to anybody else? That's a silly question I know, but you see what I mean. If for somebody else to benefit, somebody has got to give something up and that's hard. So there's a lot of emotion, a lot of anxiety involved with all of these things. Discrimination is not necessarily about the BNP, for example. Discrimination may be completely unthinking and just reflect the way that we've categorised people. This is a bit like what I was saying with the Chinese example. They weren't deliberately discriminating against women in the senior management teams. They were just being passed over for people who were in the in-group, in this case males. So actually they were being excluded, but it wasn't sort of deliberate. They weren't out to get at women. So this makes life a little bit more difficult in a way. If it's obvious prejudice, you know what you're dealing with. But what I'm saying is that there are internalised stereotypes which we don't even recognise and which will, unless we bring them to the surface, will actually affect the way we make our judgements. So we have to work on ourselves to ensure that we are operating with equity, with social justice and in an inclusive way. It's not easy and as a leader to encourage people to be like that, you have to first examine your own situation. Now, just quickly, what do I mean by social justice? I see it as an overarching ideal, that something that can then inform the way that people operate in lots of smaller ways. I see it as something that places value on each individual. The equal importance of each life seen on its own terms. Now, what that means, though, is that people may be treated differently, because if you look at each individual person, they'll have different needs. So it doesn't mean treating everybody exactly the same. What it means is putting the same value on each person and seeing what might be necessary for that person to allow them to move on. I thought this was a particularly appropriate list of characteristics of educational leaders who are moving towards social justice. I think the first one is particularly important here, because I think working for equity and social justice, working for diversity within social justice, you have to be aware of the broader context outside the school or outside the institution in which you work. You certainly have to take a critical approach. You have to be thinking all the time about not just accepting what is fed to you, but actually thinking through it and critiquing it. There is a commitment to democratic principles within the institution. Now, this obviously will go right through the place. I don't think you can say... I talked about staff and students, but the same spirit imbues both, doesn't it? I don't think you'd expect to have a situation where, for example, there was a very collegial atmosphere amongst staff and a very autocratic traditional way of teaching from the front in the classroom. The way in which staff operate, the way in which they are treated is going to presumably feed through into a more personalised approach within the classroom. A moral obligation to have a narrative of hope regarding education, so expectations, and this determination to move from rhetoric to activism. It means action. Working for social equity for justice in diversity means actually doing something, not just saying it, but actually acting out in small ways that you actually believe in, having integrity. Some benefits and challenges are leading for diversity and social justice. What are the benefits? Why are we doing this? Well, I think first and foremost, of course, because it's morally right, and I think we all want to feel that we have morality on our side. It feels good. It's the right thing to do. It's proper. But there are other things. There are benefits in diversity. I mentioned Rosemary Campbell-Stevens, who leads the investing in diversity programme. For those of you who, I don't know if anybody here knows about it, has anybody been involved in it? It's a programme that's been running in London for probably about eight years now, I think, and it's for middle leaders in schools from a Black Minority ethnic background to actually bring them, it's inappropriate for these people in particular. It's meant, I'm putting this badly, but obviously what we need is programmes where people are brought together. We don't want necessarily to isolate out BME staff, but there's a great benefit in bringing together people for a particular programme where they perhaps haven't experienced working with other BME staff in the same way. The evaluations of this programme, although they don't necessarily want to be treated as something special or different, the evaluations say how wonderful it is to share experiences with somebody who really understands. They get fantastic evaluations and good results. People are moving on. I'm going to talk more about this programme later. It's interesting that Rosemary Campbell-Stevens rejects the term Black Minority ethnic and chooses instead global majority. It's rather nice, isn't it? There's something called the business case for diversity. Now, this, you do come across obviously in business more than perhaps in education or in the public sector. But it's a good idea. I mean, we live in a smaller world. We live in a time of globalisation. We cannot ignore that people are of diverse origins and backgrounds. It makes sense if our customers are diverse, we have to actually cater for diverse needs. Again, I'm taking an example here of gender. But there's a terrific dearth of women directors on the boards of directors of public limited companies. Particularly the big FTSE 100 companies, FTSE 250 companies. I think 11 or 12% of the directors are women and there's lots of boards that have no women on at all. Why? Who's doing the buying around here? Who's making the buying decisions? And yet these boards are made up of almost entirely of men. I mean, that's just again drawing the example from gender. But again, we're living in an ethnically diverse society. Why don't the boards represent the real society that we have? It's crazy. And they are gradually beginning to understand this and actually beginning to put together a sort of outline of practice which says, yes, let's include a more diverse set of people into the decision makers in our business. Challenges. Well, there are huge challenges. There is all the things that I was talking about earlier, the fact that we have these innate preferences for working with people like ourselves. The speed and ease of stereotyping. It's so easy just to write somebody off because they are such and such. You put a label on them and that's it. You don't see past the label. It's such an easy thing to do. We all do it, don't we? I've read a lovely example, actually. In fact, I'm going to just read you a little short passage from a very eminent black African American academic. She had been invited to something a bit like this, actually. But it's in America, so they go for it in a big way and she was taken from her own place. She went to another city. She says, one of the nice perks that come with these lecture gigs is a decent hotel. This one was no exception. My accommodation was on the hotel's VIP floor equipped with special elevator access key and private lounge on the top floor. As I stepped off the elevator, I decided to go into the VIP lounge, read the newspaper and have a drink. I arrived early just before the happy hour when no one else was in the lounge. I took a seat on one of the couches and began catching up on the day's news. Shortly after I sat down comfortably with my newspaper, a white man peaked his head into the lounge, looked at me sitting there in my best and conservative dress, dress for success outfit, high heels and all and said with a pronounced southern accent, what time are you all going to be serving? The speed and ease of seriatiping. For leaders, there is also the business of running successful and effective teams within the institution. The research shows that people who are coming from diverse places into teams, a diverse team, is actually harder to work with than one that is homogeneous. They take longer. You know this lovely Tuckman sequence of teams forming, norming, storming. No, forming, storming, norming and performing. You have to go form, storm, fight each other a bit, establish the norms and then perform. Diverse groups, diverse teams take longer to do that and they may in fact not do it very well ever, but then that's true of all sorts of homogeneous teams sometimes as well. But the diverse teams once they have been established will add value. Additionality, as Rosemary Campbell Stevens calls it. Another challenge is allowing for an understanding cultural differences, avoiding the belief that one's own culture is correct. Now, cross-cultural theory. I absolutely love this. It's so insightful. I don't know again if you've come across Hofstadter's theories. Western, the theories of leadership are western. If you work in other cultures, if other cultures are working within this country, there are going to be differences and issues. Hofstadter was a Dutch psychologist, established this theory, working, I think it was within IBM. IBM have got units in, you know, virtually every country in the world, certainly in all the continents. And they did, this team actually did a huge survey and then working backwards from the outcomes, established these different dimensions of culture. We live in a particular sort of culture. We live in a time when on the whole, the power distance ratio between, you know, as it were, bosses and employees is not that great compared to, say, China, where there's immense deference for leaders. So you can establish differences between cultures and power distance relationship that there is between the employer and the employees. When I started working in schools, we would never have addressed the head teacher, and it was usually a head master, by anything other than his surname. You'd never have taught him by his first name ever. That power deference, that power distance has reduced over the years. I'm not going to go through all of these, but these are all ways in which cultures differ, and you can actually measure, on a continuum, where your culture is on all these dimensions. Something I would really recommend to you. If you're interested in different cultures and how leadership operates in different cultures, this is really good stuff. And this last one, synchronic and sequential timekeeping, is something that I've got quite interested in, because it's a very different way. In the Western world, we're very keen on the idea of punctuality, of one event following another in sequence. In other cultures, it isn't not like that. There's a lovely example in this book, and this is talking about business and working in business in different cultures. It says that something like 15 minutes, being late 15 minutes in this country, might be okay, but in some places in Africa and so on, and in the Middle East, being late might involve anything up to a day. People aren't so worried about that, because they've got other things to do. They're not necessarily doing things in a sequence. They're handling a number of different things at the same time, so if somebody doesn't turn up, it doesn't matter, they'll be doing something else anyway. And it's more important to deal with the person who's being late. If they met somebody who was important, then it was better that they'd be differential and nicer to that person than they turn up to that meeting on time. You know, there are different understandings of what time means, and for people who are actually either leading people from a different culture, or people coming in from a different culture to this Western way of working, these are issues that have to be taken into account. People aren't being rude if they don't turn up, it just is that we're doing things differently. And actually interestingly, that synchronic and sequential timekeeping is somewhat of a gender issue too. Men tend to be more sequential. You know this whole thing about men being able to concentrate just on one thing at a time, whereas women tend to be doing several things. I mean, I'm only happy if I'm doing several things at once actually. If I'm doing only one thing at a time, my life doesn't seem right. So there are lots of different ways in which people operate. And we need to be careful that we're conscious of these differences. Leadership theories, now you've all studied leadership theories. They're always evolving. The libraries are full of books on educational leadership. Books and shelves that are added to every year. I can't begin to think what the number is. And you've seen new names for leadership coming up all the time. I came across sustainable leadership recently, productive leadership. I think if I could actually stretch my brain a bit, I could probably come up with 20 different sorts of leadership that are written about as theories in books, and they're growing all the time. What are the ones that really relate perhaps or relate best to diversity and social justice? I don't think any of them do completely. Even collegial and distributed leadership really relies on everybody actually coming to the same agreement about what's going on. Now, I don't know if you're really coming from diverse places and I don't know if that can be done. I think a theory that actually copes with diversity and social justice might have to find a place, find a way in which people can hold different opinions and yet still work together and maybe hopefully this is a productive way of working. Servant leadership is something that as a Catholic foundation you'll be perhaps familiar with, the work of Greenleaf and so on. I think that obviously has a bearing on leadership for diversity and social justice. Values led moral leadership clearly, authentic leadership, I've got a little quote about that in a minute, and finally transformative and transformational leadership. I'm going to actually look at the last three of those in a little bit more detail. This is a salatory phrase, isn't it, or a salatory sentence. Values is not a technical term. We're talking about something that is the experience of everyone and what's important is to revisit, examine and articulate those values. Now I don't know whether you do that in your school. I don't know whether you actually talk about the values that you share. Hopefully you do and hopefully that's something that you revisit at different times. If we had a bit more time I would stop here and ask you to actually examine your values but perhaps you can do it mentally a little bit while I'm talking. What would be the key values that you would actually promulgate in leading a school? Now I have asked that question of headteachers in the past in surveys and mostly they do come up with things that you'd be pleased with, I think. They come up with things like respect, respect for everybody, respect for yourself and others. They come up with achievement for all. This is a particular example. There's not one moral purpose in leadership. I've quoted Rosemary Campbell-Steven several times this evening but here is her statement of her moral purpose. She is an ex-headteacher coming from a particular place. What I'm talking about is a moral purpose that meets the needs and aspirations of those who've traditionally been failed by the education system. I think the way you judge which kind of moral purpose underpins most systems is to view who benefits and who does not. What they choose to measure, what they choose to reward and affirm and what the outcomes are for the masses who go through that process, which research is done and when completed acknowledged and informed practice. There are so many choices there, aren't there, about ways of behaving as a leader. So many questions. Who benefits? Who does not? Who's rewarded? Who's affirmed? Authentic leadership is either part of what I'm talking about in terms of leadership for diversity and social justice. It's spiritual. It's intrinsically ethical. It's understanding yourself and your values but being sensible to the feelings, aspirations and needs of others. Now, this concept transformative may be new to you. You'll have heard of transformational leadership and indeed transactional leadership, yes? Transactional leadership is actually like an agreement between a leader and a follower. I will lead and I'll make sure you're all right. You will follow and do what I say, roughly speaking. That's a bit harsh but there's a place for transactional leadership. Transformational leadership is more than that. It is about actually imbuing your whole leadership activity with understanding, inspiring others, moving them on. There are these four eyes that are identified with transformational leadership that include inspiration, stimulation and individual consideration. Transformative leadership is not talked about so much, although it was part of the original transactional, transformational dichotomy that Burns first outlined in the 1970s. Transformative is about moving on in the way that I've been talking about earlier, not just about private and individual achievement but also looking out to the wider society. I've got another quote here actually about transformative leadership. Transformative education at minimum will not necessarily change the wider societal patterns of poverty and power but it will acknowledge their existence and effect on students and will therefore make policies in schools that redistribute resources to correct inequitable outcomes. It recognises the wider societal patterns of poverty and power and acknowledges their effect on students and then moves to redistribute resources to correct inequitable outcomes. This is from Caroline Shields who is an excellent theorist and practitioner. She goes on to say, this is not as easy as it sounds even with strong commitment and moral courage. I think it's about recognising the impact of the outside world on the students within your school and doing something about it. Looking now a little bit more at leadership practice, I think one of the first things about leadership for diversity is, as I've already mentioned, to examine your own conscience in a way, to examine your own thoughts. And this is a difficult thing to do to pick yourself up and be somebody else just for a little while. It's a wonderful thing to do actually if you can. If you can see things from another point of view entirely, it can revolutionise things for you. And this quote is about that. Although we know that one pair of glasses does not fit us all, as a culture we're expected to use a common lens to view our world. And this lens is ground in the framework of the dominant culture as a result we come to know our world through images that reflect the deeply embedded values and beliefs derived from a dominant culture of white middle class heterosexual males. Other perspectives which do not reflect the norms and standards of this dominant culture become blurred or rendered invisible. So it's about finding another lens. It's about critical consciousness, reflection and mindfulness. I love this quote. This is from an Australian in service course. The pre-service students have little awareness of their own subject positioning in relation to ethnicity. So ethnic is a label for others, but not themselves. For example, Jody, a white Australian says in response to a question about how she understands her ethnicity. I'd always assumed that I had none. Australia is an extraordinarily diverse, ethnically diverse country. But I think that this girl from a white Anglo-Saxon background just thinks she doesn't have ethnicity. I mean, just think about picking her up and making her see that she does. Critical race theory, have you come across this? It's something that originated in the States actually within legal studies in the States. And it actually echoes what Jody was saying. It's there at the understanding that white people appear to be exempt from racial designation and racism in normal Western societies. It's about turning that on its head and recognising that white is also an ethnic description. It's also about recognising racism. Richard Delgado was the first actual, I think, proponent of critical race theory. He's a lawyer, a very eminent black African American lawyer. Just to give you an example, he's now refusing to go and do speeches in schools and universities. Because he says that he can't honestly be a role model to black African American students. Because their chances from an inner city school of making it to the sort of position he's in are so remote that it's unfair for him to go and present himself as a role model. Now that's turning things on their heads of it, isn't it? Because we would probably say, great, you know, have this bloke in to be a role model, show people what can be done. Yes, it can be done, but it's so rare that it's actually fair to present him as a role model. Awareness of the context. It's important. Awareness of the wider social context. I just took these quotes from the Equality and Human Rights Commission report about power in the UK. Because it's quite good illustration. The snail's progress. The snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years, just slightly longer than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in Parliament. At the current rate of increase. And it'll be 73 years for women to achieve an equal number of female directors of FTSE 100 companies at the current rate of increase. People often say there's no issue for women anymore. Gender issues are over. And I do think actually in London schools to a large extent things have improved so much. I think yes, I can see why people might say that. But if you look at the wider context, the issues are still there. If you look at, for example, the numbers of women who are secondary head teachers in London, they're about equal. It's about 50-50. In fact, there may be slightly more women secondary heads in London than men. But if you go outside, the further you go out of London, the less there are. So, if you go to North Yorkshire, there's like 20%. If you go to Scotland and Wales, there's even less. So, you know, there are issues about London that are very different from other parts of the country. Now, I'm actually, I think, running out of time. So, I'm just going to summarise some of the last things that I want to say. We're talking here about the practice of educational leaders working towards social justice and diversity. And three of the most important things for leadership are culture, structure and power. And all those things need to be employed if you are working as a leader towards justice and diversity. Culture, sharing of values, establishing a common vision. It's not easily done, but there are ways of doing it. You know, just talking about values, having insect days where you're talking about important, deeply held, underpinning beliefs. It works well to make that a feature of insect. Structures. Now, structures are a bit dull, but actually they're very important. This is a statement from a leader in a university who I interviewed fairly recently. And she just came out with this. This was verbatim. We concentrate on diversity. This training and induction includes awareness of family responsibilities and religious differences. They monitor the statistics for different sorts of diversity. They look at, they have targets. They look at the advertisements and interviews and other types of assessment to make sure they're fair. Flexible employment policy, a special initiative to encourage women. All these things, structures are in place. Policies are in place. Power. You'll come across these ideas about micro-politics, power in the small arena. Why not use your micro-political skills to achieve your ends? People working outside the school, educational leaders working on committees that actually cover the whole area. Extending your influence, getting to know people. All those things that are micro-political skills can be harnessed and used for working towards diversity and social justice. Professional development is part of perhaps the establishment of the culture. Moving away from these three things of culture, structure and power, professional development has a special trace. It can be of many different sorts of professional development. I've just identified a couple of things there. A whole-school approach, I've said, including Governors. Governors are gatekeepers. Remember what I said about gatekeepers? Governors are often pinpointed as being a bit of a barrier in making more diverse appointments. Of course, investing in diversity, I will just take the time to look at that quote. This particular course, which is aimed at BME middle management, middle leadership staff. One of the participants said, the course prepared me for a bigger, wider picture of what the headship was about. I've been in the school for too long. I decided I did have the skill sets and understanding. The course demystified what the headship was about. I had low expectations and aspirations. It was a cycle of deprivation. How could I possibly achieve a headship? It's the messages you acquire that are subtle, both from the outside community and your own. Courses and networking opportunities. This is some work I did fairly recently with networks. I've looked at a number of networks, but one was of women headteachers, one was of women in our education management. There are benefits sometimes in actually mixing with people like yourself and being able to exchange experiences and then coming out and being fitter to cope with the early, burly of everyday life. Like going into a warm bath. I don't know, maybe you don't see that as being a good thing, but it was so easy and comfortable and helpful to talk with women who were like themselves. Mentoring and coaching and having role models is terribly important in developing individuals who may not actually be in the mainstream of those who are normally appointed to leadership positions. Now, this is just the final bit I wanted to say. In terms of the preparation and choice of educational leaders, I think this is a particular issue. I mean, we've been looking so far really at managing and leading in a school. We've looked at what the underlying values might be to some extent. We've looked at the ways in which theories might change to encompass more diversity and social justice. We've looked up briefly at some of the practices that educational leaders might actually take up in order to move towards justice and diversity. But what about social justice and diversity in the choice and preparation of leaders? There are still issues and problems here. There's bias towards men as headteachers, even in primary schools, although 13% of primary teachers are men, 30% of primary headteachers are men. I've come across a lot of primary heads and others talking about how the government is like to have a man in place. I mean, there are still issues here. The actual statistics for black minority ethnic headteachers don't exist, but I did a national survey in 2005 where 96% of the heads, and this was right across the board, identified themselves as white and in the same survey only 1% stated that they were disabled and in most cases that was deafness. One was a wheelchair user. 16% of vice-chancellers are women. I think 18% of professors are women. There are still issues here in the UK context. What are the obstacles? I've picked out the governance. I might be being a bit mean, but they tend to come up quite a lot actually. They should be forward thinking. This is a little bit like that quote I put up earlier about discrimination. They don't mean to discriminate, but they do because they've got this innate set of expectations. They don't look outside the box and think what a candidate could bring to a role. The educational world is conservative and traditional in crucial areas like appointments, they still tend to play it safe. In this last quote as well, Asian women tend to step back. This is a woman headteacher. She's aware both working with her governors and with external agencies that there are cultural assumptions made about her. Asian women tend to step back. This can be interpreted as a lack of competence by men in particular. I'm not happy about the national leadership programmes and what they do in terms of preparation for issues to do with diversity and social justice. I don't think that they're doing what we've been talking about tonight at all. I actually was asked to do a gender audit of leading from the middle. This was a few years ago. These are a slight adaptation of the recommendations I made because I was asked about gender, but I did look at ethnicity as well. I made these recommendations to a room full of people at NCSL who all went away and probably forgot about them. I'm really unhappy about it so I'm telling you now. These are not very difficult, these things that I'm suggesting, to ensure that the coaches and tutors represent the diversity of the population of the course. Provide some training for the tutors giving them permission to raise equity issues. At the moment it's up to the people on the course whether they do that or not. Recommend relevant leadership literature including equity and diversity issues. The recommended literature tends to be rather bland and often American and doesn't represent the vast array of literature that there is about educational leadership. They could invite relevant role models. I know I said earlier about that role model in America, but nevertheless having said that, to have role models that actually represent some sort of diversity for educational leaders is great. I had a lot of the BME staff talking about how their ambitions were raised by seeing a black head teacher or a black inspector. It's important offering support on career planning and offering mentoring that is actually sensitive to diversity. I don't think those are groundbreaking, do you? I think they are all sensible. My last word, and this is from Jill Blackmore who is a wonderful, critical writer. The issue is between critical and non-critical approaches to leadership. Are you those who explicitly argue an agenda for social justice? If school leaders and teachers are not prepared to lead to reduce inequality, who will? Thank you. Is that enough for everybody? Yes. Is there any kind of theories as to whether they would even reach 50% if it would ever get to the community by itself? Is there any theories on that? Yes, I think so. I mean that's a rather extreme example. Any of them? Who knows? There are some theorists who claim that, I'm not one of these by the way at all, who claim that there are only a certain proportion of women who actually want to be in a position of power and influence anyway. I've had that said by women surgeons and by others. There's a particular theorist at LSE called Catherine Hakim who has this theory. She's often in the news, you might even have heard about her, that only 20% of women actually would want to be leaders. And the rest of them choose to make work of lesser importance in their life, that they're family centred. I mean I really don't agree with that. I think the whole social circumstances are much more complicated than that. But I don't think we know the answer to your question. Of course an interesting thing that's happening now in Norway and in Spain and maybe going to happen in France is that they have decreed that 40% of directors of public companies should be women. And this sort of affirmative action at the moment has not been accepted by this country but maybe it's only a rush of time. And in Norway and Spain where this has happened there was a lot of talk about how it couldn't possibly work and the women wouldn't be equipped to do it and so on but actually it seems to work rather well. So we shall see. Right, yes I think that's a very good point actually. I think they're quite individual things, it depends on the circumstances. But for example that HE person that I quoted, she had revolutionised the way in which the management and the leadership of that institution operated. She put diversity at the heart of everything. There's something called mainstreaming which you could apply to diversity or to gender for example or ethnicity. Which is every single decision you ever make about absolutely anything in your institution you actually interrogate through diversity for diversity for gender or whatever it is. So it's at the heart of everything that you do, every decision you make you think how does that impact. So it could be about the curriculum, it could be about the school, the way that the money might be going to be spent on refurbishment in the school. It could be about governor training, absolutely anything, you interrogate that in terms of diversity. So it's going to depend on the individual circumstances in a particular school. I was just reading actually an article I think about this and it was an example I think in Canada. I mean I don't think that necessarily this would come up but in this country where one of the headteachers had actually stood up against homophobic talk in a governor's meeting. You know quite casual that actually the headteachers had made a stand against something that was a throwaway remark that actually was quite insulting. So it could be something as a run-off small as that but I think it can come into every aspect of what's done. Was that good enough? Yes. Sorry you could say that again. Sorry how has the person been affected by certain networks and is it has been a particular adversary or positively? By social networks do you mean the sort of online stuff? I don't honestly know the answer to that question. I think networking generally speaking is actually very important. I don't know if there's been very much research done on online networking. There have been from the point of view of media specialists who are interested in just the impact of it generally but not specifically from the point of view you're talking about. But I think networking that I've investigated which is much more about networking for personal support and business connections or useful work connections. I think two sorts of networks work well. I think the network that's quite specialised for you whether it's specialised by gender or specialised by occupation or whatever can be very good about being supportive because you're talking to people like yourself and it really does help to clarify some of the issues that you thought might be any personal to you. But you also want to mix much more broader networks to get new knowledge. You don't want to just always be talking to the same people because you don't actually extend your contacts or your knowledge. You also need a wider network. So I was looking at gender networks and really it did come to the conclusion that a supportive network of women only can be very good for some purposes as indeed presumably could a supportive network of men. But these women also needed for their work development and to help what was going on in their work. They needed a much wider network to work both. Well it's been put down to a number of things. One of them is maybe this is going back too far now but one of them was the ILEA which actually was very progressive in working on gender issues all those years ago and actually laid a sort of bedrock. Now presumably most of the people who work for the ILEA are now on their way out or have already gone but the heritage might remain. I think the other thing is it's just more bain you know more sophisticated and more diverse. It seems very much the case that you know on the whole gender equity I don't know what your experience is but there's much more gender equity and not sure about ethnicity equity in London and also Birmingham as the other big metropolitan area. The further you go outside of those areas the more old fashioned conservative and traditional people tend to be. I'm generalising obviously. It's interesting though. There's a woman who's done a whole study on actually just pulling apart the statistics of men and women headteachers in secondary schools across the country called Kay Fuller and she's working at Birmingham now and she's mapped it. And it's you know it's really interesting. I did it but I did it quite a long time ago and she's done it more recently. Yes. Gosh that's an interesting question. I suppose that they're theorised by I think originally they probably arise from social psychology. Most of the you know the sort of early theories about leadership were actually conducted within American industry and usually on male subjects. So there's a whole thing there about unpicking whether or not how true these leadership models really are. If you move them from America and they was done often in the 1940s and 50s and 60s. So we're talking about 50 years ago. We're talking about another culture. We're talking about usually only males because actually quite a lot of those areas were even done in the army. Done from you know models in the army. How appropriate are those models for us here today? Which is I suppose one reason for actually trying to work out some new models. And I suppose the people who are now putting forward new models are people a bit like me really. Interestingly Caroline Shields whose work I've quoted here and other people have done what they call backward mapping. So they've done a big study a qualitative study of in-depth interviews with say head teachers. And identified those who are very socially conscious and you know looking for equity. And then actually matched back on what they do the actual practices they carry out in their schools. To develop what they see then as a model. So you know there are ways and ways of doing these things. Given the fact that you know we've come from a period where lots of money and resources have gone into education in the schools generally or across the UK. And yet when you established that in the fact that it seems to have increased in the UK since 97 up to most recently. Books have a spirit that will talk about the massive social pathologies that are mushroom because of a growing inequality in this country. Does it not make you consider perhaps that we've overplayed the role that education schools can play in diminishing equality. And make you a bit more concerned that now we're moving into a period where those resources are going to be withdrawn. I think you're absolutely right. I mean I wouldn't want to be guilty of putting all that responsibility or the way that's saying that. Putting all that responsibility on the schools it's unreasonable. There's lots of work being done on how much impact can head teachers generally schools have on these vast inequalities. And you're quite right. And inequalities have been growing even before 1997 actually. I think right back from Thatcher the inequalities have been growing. So no, you can't finish a war into schools of course not. But on the other hand perhaps leaders in schools. I think we have perhaps along with the medical profession a certain set of duties and rights of understanding of having some sort of mission of wanting to put things better. Perhaps we have a particular role to play. But certainly we cannot be responsible for all the ills of society of course not. And it's a worry. I think what you're saying is a real worry. As somebody who actually spent 10-3 years ahead of principal in the IRA working for the IRA and didn't even happen, I start with a fair degree of angst about it or not. I've actually been as an employer to dive diverse. If he was going to invent a computer program piece of software which actually could appoint without any kind of prejudice, without any kind of discrimination, would you expect a normal distribution of that to reflect in that particular group's presence in society? That's a good question. First of all I think it would be almost impossible actually to produce a computer program that wasn't free of some sort of bias. I don't think that there's any assessment centre or any means of selecting people that hasn't got some sort of inbuilt bias into it. If you could get it right, yes, I think I would expect something like the normal distribution. I mean that may be idealistic of me, I don't know. But I suppose that's really what I'm saying. The one tried really hard. Don't always manage it, no. Well, no, it's a complex business. That's being sent from your tutors, one on gender issues and one on black money, minority ethnic groups in terms of leadership. But I think maybe just in summary.com what you could think and take away with us today is about our role in leadership, how we make decisions about the way in which we choose others, not only in terms of diversity, but the issue about social justice as well. And what that truly means to us. We've all been through what you've won. We've all looked at our own educational values. And what do those values, where do they sit within social justice? So I thank you for raising that as an issue for us this evening. John Foku, in his book Discipline and Punishment at Birth of the Prisoner, wrote about the power of the norm. He wrote about normalisation. How big institutions aim to normalise and instill a homogenous view of people, whether they be young people, whether they be incarcerated people, whether they be in hospital. The institutional idea of normalisation. I think it's that which you've challenged through our presentation today about how do we lead for social justice through managing diversity and the way in which we lead. A conversation which I had some months ago reading Cromper and Punishment, I didn't read up the things to do with people reform. It was Dostoyevsky, and he wrote that his mission was to find a human being, and that very much resounds what we've covered today about what it is, why we do it, and how we make sure that we take everybody with us on that journey on a leadership. That's somewhat different to my own experience of growing up, which was broke up way of my way, no way. And that brings us to the facts. I sat through the Brits last night, or the rerun of the Brits last night, and the only thing that I could really take from it was I really liked Silo Green and Flanffay. I really liked those two. And how not to go on when you're thankful for people. So, thank you very much. So, there's been a whole body of people that are playing that presentation. But I think, in addition to Professor Eswer, your kind words for your introduction into the whole team that's gathered this evening, we'd love to thank you all for this. Thank you.