3: Quality Leadership for Learning Systems

The central theme of this edited volume is how system leaders should respond to ensure that the school systems they lead can thrive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The urgency of this issue has been clearly set out by the editors in the introductory chapter to the volume and previously in Duignan (2020). Arguably, no area of strategy is more important in this context than the system’s quality strategy. In a report for the European Commission, Maxwell and Staring (2018) define a quality assurance strategy as:

This definition is not simply focussed on assuring that schools consistently meet a fixed standard of quality provision, but also, more dynamically, ensuring that schools are engaging in the generation and spread of further improvement. Strategies that are successful in these terms will deliver high quality but will also foster the innovation and adaptability so essential to thriving in a VUCA environment. They assure that quality is continuously improving, not just settling at a stable level.