Chapter 6: The Role of a Specialist Leader of Education in England: Position, Timing, Challenges and Opportunities

This chapter gives an overview of education reform policy in England from a case study perspective of a school leader practitioner. This practitioner is leading innovation in schools in the West Midlands of England. The individual concerned is a Specialist Leader of Education (SLE) who is responsible for Science improvement in schools that ‘buy-in’ her expertise, as an exemplar of the ways in which school improvement in England has been devolved to the lowest level: individual, or groups, of schools. The chapter explores the ways in which educational leaders have been developed inside the English School-to-School Support system over the last decade to lead the school system. It analyzes the ways in which embedding learning now takes place in diverse, increasingly complex and corporatized education landscape. In this case, inside a recently re-organized Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) who are ‘selling’ their SLE staff’s expertise to other schools in the locality. This is the neoliberal government’s preferred version of school improvement. School improvement services have been reduced at local and regional government levels, and levels beyond the individual school, or groups of schools, are no longer funded to provide such services.