Articles

The role of the school principal is complex, and still evolving. Principals require a broad repertoire of skills and the confidence and acumen to deploy those skills with impact. At present, the average age of principals in Australia is increasing, and too few suitable candidates are stepping forward to take the place of those who will soon retire; it appears that many potential candidates are put off by perceptions that the complexity and demands of the principal’s role lead to high stress and low wellbeing. A new report, Preparing Future Leaders: effective preparation for aspiring school principals, highlights the key challenges in preparing principals for current and future school needs and provides an up-to-date and comprehensive picture of the current state of play across Australia. The current article provides edited excerpts from the report.

In 2010, the Australian Government asked AITSL to work with the profession to develop the Australian Professional Standard for Principals, which was completed and endorsed by Ministers in July 2011. In 2014, the Leadership Profiles were developed to provide more detailed support for principals and were published in a new document that combined the Standard and the Profiles. Both the Standard and the Profiles are accessible and written in plain language, aiming to make sense of what is a highly complex and important role. This article summarises key elements of the Profiles, after first describing some of the research findings that informed them, and their relationship to the Standards. The article is adapted from the text of the report 'Leadership on the Edge: Big Ideas for Change and Innovation': Exploring the Leadership Profiles.

Since 2003 Curriculum and Leadership Journal (CLJ) has had the charter of providing high quality and relevant information to school leaders, in short form, in plain language and in a clear format; linked to further resources wherever possible. In playing this role the journal has been part of three trends in the world of information. One trend has been the increased use of filtering, as readers sift out what they need from the overabundance of information on the web. Software makes it easy to store and organise the selected information, while social media makes it easy to share it with colleagues. Another trend has been to rely on summaries of longer texts. The lead articles in CLJ have usually been summaries of longer works, and in its Abstracts section efforts have been made to distill into one paragraph the key information in pieces published elsewhere. By diving into a very wide range of sources for education literature and news, CLJ has also been part of a third trend, to free up the flow of information between academic researchers, educators, policy makers and the public.