Whole school development,change and leadership - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 109

6 Whole school development,
change and leadership
Overview
Research shows time and time again that unless the leadership of an organization is
open to the use of technologies to support learning then change will not become
embedded in practice (Hargreaves and Hopkins 1991; Lawson and Comber 1999;
2004; Leask 2001).
Research undertaken over 25 years into the adoption of technologies in schools
in the UK and across Europe (Leask 2011) shows the key role that national leadership
plays in moving practice in schools forward across a country.
When the Internet first became widely available to schools in the mid-1990s, Leask
and Younie (2000) found that schools in European countries with strong supportive
national leadership were able to move ahead quickly in developing new practices,
while in other countries practice in the adoption of new technologies was inhibited
by the absence of national leadership and lack of support for the change and of
resource allocation. Individual schools may innovate, but they do not have the remit
or resources to disseminate new practice to others on a national scale. The findings
from the research mentioned above (regarding how to bring about national change)
indicate that central governments have a responsibility to support, but not to direct
innovation. The passage of time since the early research has shown that innovation
can be crushed when centrally driven change takes a conservative turn. England pro-
vides an interesting case study in this respect, having moved from the existence of a
government agency, Becta, driving leading-edge practice in technologies in educa-
tion with the full support of the government in power from 1997 to 2010 to, within
months of a change of government, Becta being the first government agency to be
closed down and the educational resources and evidence banks built up to support
practice being removed from government websites. Such websites included Teacher
Training Resource Bank, Teachernet, Multi-verse, Behaviour for Learning, the Quali-
fications and Curriculum Development Agency resources and the General Teaching
Council in England's resources. Both the latter agencies were also closed down. The
speed of removal of any incentives to innovate through the closure of the lead-
ing national agencies supporting innovations, and the removal of case studies and
research and evidence from successful innovators on the aforementioned websites