Learning First offers a Consultancy Service to assist school leaders in exploring ways to improve the quality of Learning in Irish Schools and Colleges.

There is now almost universal acceptance that key role for school leaders, above all others, is to be a Leader of Learning.  The challenge for leaders is to initiate and then sustain a dialogue among teachers and learners to ensure that effective (and more enjoyable) learning happens in classrooms.

Leaders need to facilitate collaboration between teachers, collaboration with learners (engage them about their learning) and collaboration between schools (we have very little tradition of this in Ireland, contrast with Finland!)

The golden thread underpinning this exploration is the concept of Learning to Learn (L2L).

Curriculum content will, over time, fade but all the content will we ever want is available at the click of a mouse.  Students need to learn what to search for, how to know they have found it, how to critically appraise, manipulate and use it and how to scaffold new with existing knowledge.

Leaders need to facilitate the development of students’ capacity for thinking about - and understanding - how they learn (meta-learning).  Research shows that L2L can simultaneously meet educational, societal and economic needs – resulting in successful, thinking and adaptable citizens.

There are some who will argue that leaders have enough on their plates, managing with less in times of austerity and expected to do more.  While sympathetic to this view, we argue that it is our responsibility – and privilege - to help bring about the changes urgently required to benefit today’s learners, our schools and our country.

There is considerable research to show that school leaders who become engaged with self-fulfilling and enriching projects such as Leading Learning are happier and stay longer in the job.  As leaders we must rediscover why we came into teaching in the first place, that learning is enjoyable and that it makes us happy because it is inherently pleasurable.

Trying to reform the entire schooling system at once will be like turning the Titanic.  Rather than wait for change to come from above, change will best happen at local level – individual school leaders are the people best placed to lead change in their schools.

On a daily basis Principals need to rethink - and critically separate - what is urgent and what is important.  School leaders are very familiar with arriving at day’s end exhausted, never having stopped, yet finding it hard to recall completing one significant piece of work completed.  Some describe it as fire fighting, others as air–traffic control.

Unless we consciously and persistently decide to  make it otherwise by prioritising (getting used to saying “no” and/or “not now”) and with deliberate time management (“it’s time to stop what I’m doing and move on”), this will be the leader’s typical daily – and ultimately career – experience.

We all came into teaching with high ideals – while sometimes we may lose sight of them in the day to day hustle and bustle, they haven’t gone away you know...