Whole school development,change and leadership - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 110

provides a memorable lesson about the fragility of innovations and the need for sup-
port from national governments to support continuation. In England educators will
need to develop independent professional bodies which support and publish innova-
tion to avoid such a scenario occurring again.
Introduction and context
Understanding change management is essential for school leaders who wish to inno-
vate. Developing a high degree of political awareness will help school leaders under-
stand the level of innovation that their stakeholders are prepared to tolerate.
For example, in England there was a history of rapid change in expectations
about the use of technologies in schools before the demise of government agencies
as outlined above. With the establishment of the first national ICT strategy in 1997,
education policy on technology in the UK required schools to implement a technical
infrastructure to support virtual learning environments and to integrate technology
across the curriculum. Government investment was around £3.65 billion (Doughty
2006) with a further £639.5 million (Becta 2010a) invested in the years following
2006. The Harnessing Technology strategy (Becta 2008a) published priority guide-
lines for schools, which included improving learning services, such as learning plat-
forms and email, and the provision of more high-quality digital learning resources
for schools.
Research evidence from this innovative period showed the greatest improve-
ments to learning occurred when technology was used across the curriculum and
not just delivered in discrete subjects (ImpacT2 2002). This demonstrates the need
for technology implementation to occur at the whole-school level, with a holistic
approach from senior leaders. More recent corroborating evidence from Becta (2010a)
can be seen in the connection between e-maturity of a school's processes and school
performance. E-maturity describes 'an organization's readiness to deal with e-learning
and the degree to which this is embedded in the curriculum' (Underwood 2010: 24).
Robust evidence can be cited of a relationship between e-maturity and school per-
formance showing that individual performance was correlated to e-maturity.
Theory and research base
This chapter draws on research conducted over the past 25 years that has examined
the diffusion of innovations, making it possible to understand technology imple-
mentation as part of a process of diffusion; the research has also investigated the role
of leadership in embedding technology into schools, as part of a whole-school proc-
ess; then, research which has analysed the relationship between subject cultures and
technology, since it is known that curriculum subjects have appropriated technology
in different ways and to varying levels.