The Handbook of Educational Leadership & Management

"The Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management "is your ultimate guide for leading and managing your school into the 21st Century. It presents current and future thinking in the area of education management and leadership and provides you with a benchmark for understanding the latest thinking and best practice.

There has been a tradition in the United States of publishing handbooks, which represent the full range of current thinking on educational leadership and administration. This is the first presented with UK editors and though, with a significant number of international contributors, with a clear UK focus. The editors of the ten parts all have international reputations for their distinctive and complementary work, and the parts cover arguably the most significant ten major themes today. Many of the contributors to those sections are equally the most qualified to present the topic they have been asked to contribute. This handbook provides, as it is intended to, coverage of the whole field of educational leadership and management at the start of the 21st century. The focus is very much on the leadership in schools, rather than developments in the delivery of leadership development and associated political developments.

The international focus, over a third of articles, is inevitably very strongly on the Unites States, Canada and Australia, with occasional chapters focussing on related developments for learning from Hong Kong, Israel and Japan. There is little from Europe but this does reflect the nature of current international understanding of educational leadership. This internationalism is genuinely characteristic of the field of educational leadership and management in the UK. All those writing have been encouraged to communicate their most recent and where appropriate futures thinking. An additional focus in some chapters on current best practice complements this. The expertise presented is of those who have been exploring the changing emphases in education management and leadership for some time.

The themes of the parts are listed below because they provide the best possible understanding of the prominent educational issues for those who are evaluating the appropriateness of the Handbook for their purposes. For many of those considering purchasing the book this list will clarify what can be anticipated.

1.      Leadership - John West-Burnham
2.      Leadership and Management Processes - Brent Davies
3.      The Policy Context for School Leadership and Management - Mike Bottery
4.      Leadership, Governance and Community - Janet Ouston
5.      The Business of Education: Social Purposes, Market Forces and the Changing Organization of Schools - Guilbert Hentschke
6.      Learning, Teaching and the Curriculum - Barbara MacGilchrist
7.      Achieving and Sustaining Change in Schools - Dean Fink and Andy Hargreaves
8.      School Improvement and Effectiveness - David Hopkins and Alma Harris
9.      The Teacher Career Cycle: the Role of Professional Development - Patricia Collarbone
10.  The Schools of the Future - Brian Caldwell.

The responsibility and privilege of a reviewer on this occasion is to read the whole book and to reflect on the whole and the journey through the knowledge and learning available. This has been a very worthwhile experience because of the quality of the contributions based on the clear framework based on what is clearly an agreed editorial understanding of where educational leadership and management is at this time. It has provided the reviewer with an opportunity to consider a lucid consistent map of the field. There is a coherence because the editors have selected their editors for the themed sections well, and these editors have selected well the other 60 or so contributors with access to the most highly regarded in the world. That coherence is the strength of the collection because it represents what the editors judge to be the most significant. In some areas inevitably this might be challenged because even with some 70 contributors there are other scholars and researchers one would have wanted to see. However it presents a distinctive understanding of research, scholarship and wisdom from a particular and important mainstream perspective. For those who wish to appreciate education leadership and management as understood in an international context in the UK at this time, the collection in this Handbook is unique.