Claim 4: School leaders improve teaching and learning indirectly
and most powerfully through their infl uence on staff motivation,
commitment and working conditions
As we pointed out in relation to Claim 2, a key task for leadership, if it is to infl uence pupil learning and
achievement, is to improve staff performance. Such performance, we also claimed, is a function of staff
members’ motivations, commitments, capacities (skills and knowledge) and the conditions in which they
work. Considerable emphasis has recently been placed on school leaders’ contributions to building staff
capacity in particular. This emphasis is refl ected, for example, in the popularity in many countries of the
term ‘instructional leadership’ and in fl edgling efforts to discover the curriculum content knowledge that
successful school leaders should possess.24
There is, however, very little evidence that most school leaders build staff capacity in curriculum content
knowledge, or at any rate that they do so directly and by themselves. Indeed, to suggest they should is, in
our view, to advocate, yet again, an ‘heroic’ model of school leadership – one based on content knowledge
rather than on charisma, as in the past. Such heroic aspirations do more to discourage potential candidates
from applying for leadership jobs than they do to improve the quality of incumbent leadership.
Our review suggested that, while school leaders made modest direct contributions to staff
capacities, they had quite strong and positive infl uences on staff members’ motivations,
commitments and beliefs about the supportiveness of their working conditions. The nature
of the evidence is illustrated by the results of a recent study25 carried out across England.
Based on a national sample of teacher survey responses, the study enquired about the effects of most
of the basic or core leadership practices described above, as enacted by headteachers, on teachers’
implementation of the Primary Strategies (originally the National Literacy Strategy and National Numeracy
Strategy) and the subsequent effects of such implementation on pupil learning and achievement.
Figure 1 is a simplifi ed (number-free) model of the sort typically used to represent results of the kind
of complex statistical analyses used in this study.26 Such analyses are designed to test the direction and
strength of relationships among variables in a model, as well as the amount of variation in certain
variables that can explained by other variables.