`Strategic Leadership and Educational Improvement contains essays that will be invaluable to those seeking succinct guides to the subtle elements of school improvement' - Tim Brighouse, Times Educational Supplement `This is a wonderful book. The editors have managed to balance powerful authors in an impressive survey in current thinking about education. It should certainly rate multiple copies in most libraries' - School Leadership & Management This volume focuses on strategic leadership, the impact of external and internal factors on organizational leadership, and how effective educational leaders manage the competing demands of autonomy and accountability. The book deals with the challenges of managing the boundaries between educational organizations and their external contexts, and reconciling environmental expectations and internal priorities. The editors believe that strategic understanding and involvement should be a central concern for all organization members and that, in order to be effective, strategic planning needs the commitment and ownership of all staff, not just senior managers. The book covers: - political, social and ideological contexts - governance and links with external stakeholders - marketing - organizational collaboration, competition, partnership - external/internal culture, and internal structures - strategic leadership and managing change * organizational effectiveness, accountability and evaluation This book is suitable for providers and students in higher educational institutions postgraduate level courses in educational management and leadership development provision for Headteachers induction programmes, NPQH and LPSH. It is also suitable for use on short courses and for practitioners occupying or aspiring to leadership roles in schools, colleges and other educational organizations.

`This is a very useful collection. It brings a wide range of articles on aspects of learning in different settings - from high tech companies in Cambridge to school classrooms' - Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning `This book will stimulate thought in any reader and could be of interest to academics in all subjects, or to educational developers - although it may be of particular use to students of cultural studies, education and communications' - Escalate `Knowledge, Power and Learning will be of interest to many adult educators who are interested in the "lifelong learning" age and makes, too a contribution to the relatively scarce literature concerned with the school curriculum in this "lifelong learning" perspective' - Studies in the Education of Adults New technologies are altering the relationship between knowledge, power and learning. The explosion of information resulting from the proliferation of Internet use has led to new questions about the nature of knowledge and how it is legitimated. At the same time, the new emphasis on learning as a lifelong process is changing relationships between teachers and learners and focusing on the multiplicity of sites in which learning can take place. This book considers the influence of the `information age' on the changing relationship between power and knowledge and how this affects learning in a wide range of situations, from the school to the learning organization and from the musical conservatoire to the high-tech workplace.

Drawing together current thinking and research by leading writers in the field, this Reader will help you to understand and critically analyse key strategic aspects of educational leadership, including: - leadership perspectives and values - external and internal contexts - autonomy and accountability - partnership and collaboration - leading strategy and change. The book explores major challenges for educational leaders in managing the increasingly permeable boundary between educational organisations and their external contexts and reconciling environmental expectations and internal priorities. The Reader will encourage you to positively problematize the field and reflect on current debates and issues. This book will be an essential resource for providers and students of postgraduate level courses in educational leadership and management, as well as those involved in undertaking professional development programmes. It will also serve the reflective practitioner as personal reference when occupying or aspiring towards leadership roles in schools, colleges and other educational organisations. Dr Maggie Preedy, Professor Nigel Bennett and Dr Christine Wise have taught, researched and published widely in the field of educational leadership and management. Maggie Preedy and Christine Wise are Senior Lecturers in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University, UK. Nigel Bennett is Emeritus Professor of Leadership and Management in Education at The Open University.