I note that the National College for School Leadership attempts, through extremely tortuous English, to promote itself and tell us (while at the same time denying it) that only those with the college’s badge of approval are real school leaders (NCSL think piece, TES, November 22).
This type of nonsense is what is driving thousands of well-qualified, and more importantly long-serving, middle and senior managers out of schools; the very people the NCSL vainly hopes will join it.
This fact of mass exodus of senior staff in schools is evidenced very well elsewhere in the same edition.
In fact the NCSL is an attempt to indoctrinate independently-minded and true school leaders into the mechanistic and thinly-disguised privatisation agenda that pervades the Department for Education and Skills.
Their insistence that only those (bullied into) taking NCSL courses are “professional” questions the many years of experience, independent thought and true professionalism already shown by many of our real managers.
If the NCSL courses had any credence there would be no compulsion involved, open or otherwise. In fact, it is well known in the profession that the NCSL is a shambles. What will happen is that thousands of real leaders will leave the profession rather than be forced into the college’s strait-jacket and we will yet again see massive damage done to our schools.
People are voting with their feet and like the Office for Standards in Education, that other great idea, the NCSL is doomed to be yet another failed “initiative” from the DfES.
George Black
101a Graham Road
Golders Green
London NW11
