Robin Brooke Smith was principal of Edwardes College in Peshawar, Pakistan - very prestigious, very conservative - then director of the Univeristy of Toronto school, a high achieving “laboratory” school committed to innovation, research and arguement. It would be difficult to imagine, he says, two more different schools, yet the problems of management and leadership they posed were essentially the same: how to unlock the creativity that is the well-spring of good learning without generating the tensions that block it.

The trick, he says in Leading Learners, Leading Schools is to find the balance between order and disorder, stability and change.

Educational Leadership and the Community
Edited by Tony Gelsthorpe and John West-Burnham
Pearson Education pound;18.99

This book addresses the issue of the locus for improvement that exists between schools individually and collectively and their environment. It argues that community involvement brings two-way benefit: better learning for chlidren and the build-up of social capital.

Read more in this week’s TES Friday magazine