THO04214 1 Beyond the power of one: Redesigning the work of school principals Pat Thomson and Jill Blackmore Paper presented to the Annual Conference, Australian Association of Research in Education University of Melbourne, 19 November-2 December 2004 Contact:jillb@deakin.edu.au A growing body of national and international research suggests that teachers are deterred from applying for principal’s positions - and some principals leave their positions - because they see the job as too onerous, intrusive of family life and geared inappropriately to managerial, rather than educative tasks (Brooking, Collins, Court, & O'Neill, 2003; Cooley & Shen, 2000; Davis, 1998; Forsyth & Smith, 2002; Jones & Webber, 2001; Pounder & Merrill, 2001). In our ARC funded study of the declining principal supply in Australia, we have been exploring the normative construction of the principal position through policy, selection practices, and public representations of the job. We came early to the conclusion that rather than spend time asking how teachers might be made more interested in the principalship, and/or how schools and school systems might build a cadre of aspirant principals 1 , one of our particular contributions would lie in thinking about how the principal position might be redesigned (and rearticulated). We have argued elsewhere (Blackmore & Sachs, forthcoming; Blackmore & Thomson, 2004; Thomson, Blackmore, Sachs, & Tregenza, 2003) that this is necessary in order to attract not only more applicants but also a more culturally diverse group, given the homogenised Anglo, male images generally associated with school leadership, particularly in secondary schools (e .g. Baskwill, 2003; Breischke, 1993; Smith, 1999; Walker, 1992). We are not alone in thinking that principal’s work needs to be changed. Mulford’s (2003) review of the changing role of school leaders, the OECD (2001) scenarios for the future and Glatter’s (2002) models of school governance for example also indicate the need to redesign the job to meet future needs. In this paper, we consider five ways in which the work of principals has been explicitly redrawn: distributed pedagogical leadership, co-principalship, shared principalship, multi-campus principalship, and community-based principalship. We examine the organisational systems that have been established to allow a stronger focus on pedagogical leadership given that current managerial systems are often seen to be more an impediment to focusing on teaching and learning. We begin by considering the notion of ‘redesign’ and go on to signpost some key issues about principals’ work, leadership and management. We conclude by raising some issue that matter when redesigning principals’ work so that it also supports significant changes for teachers and students. 1 This is not because we do not think that this is useful, but it is work that others are doing (D'Arbon, Duignan, & Duncan, 2002; Dorman & D'Arbon, 2003a, 2003b; Lacey, 2003). We did not want to duplicate this effort, but rather do something complementary