The Leadership Challenge: Improving Learning in Maltese Schools

Abstract

This reflective paper aims to contextualise the notion of leadership and professional learning within the Maltese context and present the challenges that the country faces if it truly wants to improve the level of learning in our schools. It presents the main challenge that the country faces at the conceptual, policy and institutional levels as the country needs to grapple with our understanding of governance and how this has been addressed over the years. It is argued that through such an engagement can we relate to the notion of leadership and being a leader in Maltese schools. The paper will explore the role that leadership and governance have on the way we view reform and the nurturing of professional learning and development in Maltese schools. The position taken is that central to any changes requires exploring the need to nurture trust as a fundamental principle that governs the way we relate at both systems and school level. Unless a change in mindset is adopted few changes will leave an impact where it truly matters, student learning.

1. Introduction

We are living in an uncertain, turbulent world, a world where issues of corruption, injustice, migration, poverty, and acts of terrorism affect many communities, many nations. As we witness such events, they may make us feel helpless, vulnerable, or else we remain detached, oblivious of the realities that surround us. In fact, Lawrence-Lightfoot [1] argues that too many of the conversations we engage in about such events are reductionist or rhetorical in nature and encourages us to challenge the dynamics and the language used of such educational/social discourse [2] (p. 493). She incites us to question what we take for granted, to question the unquestionable; to take a stand; to deliberate and engage with issues that affect us and future generations.

As a result of the changes in the socio-political context we are living in, educational practice has changed and is continuing to do so at an incredible pace. Therefore, the role of schools, in general, and principals and teachers, in particular, in embedding change has become even more demanding, especially in managing turbulence through what Bush [3] describes as an “avowedly ethical approach to decision-making” (p. 402). No wonder school principals have been reporting lower levels of satisfaction, higher stress levels, increased pressure, and a lack of time to fulfil the growing demands on them [4,5,6]. This has led to a situation where there are high rates of principal resignations and attrition in many countries around the world [7,8,9].

The challenge on people to think and act ethically is gaining momentum, but, at the same time, it is more unclear and challenging at the personal and collective level as people are asked to handle challenges they have never been exposed to before. As a result, leaders have continually commented on the added pressure on them in terms of their leadership responsibilities, the teaching and learning taking place, and the administrative duties that keep piling up. Hoyle and Wallace [10] compare this to a lack of awareness or appreciation of leaders and practitioners and how they have to handle the varied contexts in which they have to implement centralised policies.

Schools are more than mere institutions of academic learning. They are social systems and now, more than ever before, very diverse, complex and demanding ones. The human relations dimension among educators and students plays a crucial role in school life as much as the curriculum does and indeed has a powerful effect on the learning and teaching that takes place. Studies keep highlighting the central role that school leaders play in both the cognitive and affective development of children and young people alike (e.g., [11,12]).

This paper aims to address the area of leadership by, first of all, acknowledging the challenge that we are currently facing in the islands of Malta. This challenge is contextualised within the educational and social scenarios that we are in. It is argued that reforms can only have a lasting impact if we engage with issues of trust and governance in new ways. Furthermore, new governance structures will help us to understand and nurture a leadership that will leave an impact on the lives of others and on student learning. For this to take place, the education authorities need to start grappling with the notion of instructional leadership that, both as a concept and as a way forward for an enhanced quality education, has eluded us so far. The focus on instructional leadership is deemed important, given the local studies that keep highlighting the concerns that our heads of school are still functioning as administrators rather than school leaders [13,14]. A series of recommendations conclude the paper.

This reflective paper focuses on two critical areas, namely, leadership and governance. The paper will explore the role that leadership and governance have on the way we view reform and the nurturing of professional learning and development in Maltese schools. A better understanding of these two areas can take place through an appreciation of the context in which the Maltese education system operates. This is what I will turn to next.

2. The Maltese Context

Malta is made up of a group of small islands, two of which are inhabited. The larger island is Malta and the second Gozo. Malta lies 93 kilometres to the south of Sicily and 290 kilometres to the north of the African coast. Its position in the middle of the Mediterranean and its natural harbours have attracted, over the centuries, a number of colonial powers to take possession of the islands. As a result, Malta has an extremely rich inheritance. With an area of around 300 square kilometres and a total population of over 535,000 (an increase of 0.33% from 2022), Malta is the most densely populated country in the European Union [15]. Malta is a small nation with a distinctive language (predominantly Semitic) and culture. History and geography made its population cosmopolitan, while a flourishing tourist industry continues to reinforce this national trait. The Ministry of Education and Employment (MEDE) is responsible for education in Malta. The government’s education policy is underscored by two main premises: equity and quality. This commitment is evidenced by an inclusive policy at all levels of education and the provision of free education to all from kindergarten to tertiary education in public schools. The government also subsidises church schools that do not charge tuition fees and gives tax rebates to parents sending their children to independent schools. Compulsory education covers the ages 5 to 16 years and is divided into two main cycles: primary education (5–11 years) and secondary education (11–16 years). Prior to the start of primary education, there is provision of child-day care (ages 0–3 years) and kindergarten education for children aged 3 to 5 years. Although not compulsory, around 98% of 4-year-olds attend kindergarten. Alongside the public education sector, which caters for just over 50% of the student population, there is also a non-state sector, which accounts for over 40% of the student cohort, consisting of church schools (approx. 42%) and independent fee-paying schools (approx. 6%).

The Education Act [16] specifically states that state schools within a college network system have the right to define their own programmes on the basis of their identified goals and objectives. Therefore, theoretically speaking, schools can address particular organisational aspects that used to be the prerogative of central authorities. Whilst this may be considered a major shift in devolving decision-making to the school site, in reality, such possibilities to control, determine, and implement curricular and organisational changes encounter problems of a financial and human-resources nature [17]. Various studies carried out locally keep highlighting that schools are not in a position to match their needs with the resource allocation needed, given that these aspects are still the prerogative of central authorities. This is the paradox that Maltese schools are facing. On the one hand, they are explicitly told to develop their own programmes and adopt a strategic stance to development, and on the other, they are not being given the appropriate support mechanisms to do so. Up until now, school leaders do not choose their staff and do not have the financial resources to manage the human resources needed to address the needs they identify through the result of internal evaluation. Whilst the laws that have been introduced are encouraging, more teacher collaboration is needed to address school needs, and these opportunities cannot materialise as most of the support needed to take specific decisions are out of the teachers’ hands. Whilst empowerment has been identified as the way forward to ensure that students’ academic and affective achievement is enhanced, the concern raised by various studies conducted locally is that, in the long run, this limited form of autonomy can lead to the frustration and disengagement of teachers and school leaders [18,19,20].

In a context where schools may require more control of how to seek help and support, colleges need to be in a position to control certain finances. The point raised by Mulford et al. [21], that for any significant change to take place, “the context for leadership and school reform must be taken more into account” (p. 150), shows that policymakers need to be more sensitive to the realities that are mushrooming in our schools prior to the development of policies that are often not even remotely related to the challenges faced by practitioners. It is within this context that this paper has been written.

Such an understanding and positionality implies that school improvement and the central role that leaders play cannot take place before we acknowledge the context and contextual variables (which may even be different for different colleges/schools) that, in my opinion, militate against a leadership that focuses on leading teaching and learning. For this to take place, we need to engage with language that will help to redress the current situation. Words such as moral purpose, cognitive diversity, professional inquiry, collaborative professionalism, community, transformational/distributed and instructional leadership, sustainable leadership, and a giving attitude and our understanding of leadership and our definition of leadership need to be become part of our discourse.

3. The Challenge

The demands on leaders today are multifarious, disjointed, relentless, and chaotic, to say the least [22,23]. Yet there has never been a time when the contribution of good leaders is more urgently required. We cannot explore the notion of leadership and being a leader unless we engage with our own personal views and understanding of the terms. Our current views about leadership impact on the notion of governance; the way we relate to power and control across all levels; and the existing practices that are embedded in our system. I believe that the terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are used rather loosely in the Maltese context. This has been manifested in various local policy documents that describe heads of schools as leaders when the local research studies argue that this is not the case [13,24]. To engage in such a discourse, we are faced with, first and foremost, a personal challenge—the willingness to look into oneself, the values one upholds, and the practices one enacts. This resonates with the ‘moral imperative’ that Michael Fullan [25] speaks about—it is about one’s commitment to what we do; hence, we need to explore the attributes of identity, passion, and meaning. This is why Thomas Sergiovanni [26] defines leadership as a personal thing, one that comprises three important dimensions—one’s heart, head, and hand. Leadership is about personal, professional, and collective transformation. These are not easy terms to relate to, let alone challenge and address. Here, I am not focusing on what one expects from our school leaders—for the way our heads can truly function as leaders is very much conditioned by the way leadership is modelled at the systems level. Talking about higher education, Chance [27] highlights the importance behind iterative approaches to change. Similarly, we need a new paradigm in the way we engage with each other; we need leadership processes that foster critical thinking and adaptive learning. We cannot expect educators at the school level to engage differently if central authorities do not change the way they engage with reform, the way they look at the notion of governance, and responsibility, the latitude that needs to be given to schools, and the creation of support structures that truly help schools address their needs and achieve their goals.

Schools in Malta have been used to working within a system that is hierarchical, centralised, and bureaucratic [28,29]. Our history of educational reform practices is replete with examples of state-mandated directives creating a culture of dependency, one that requires a technicist approach to doing things. There has been too much focus on ‘change’ and less on ‘improvement’, as Robinson [30] has noted. Various local studies have shown that educators have grown weary through disillusionment and stress [31,32]. School leaders and teachers constantly find themselves sandwiched between a belief in democracy and participation, on the one hand, and the daily experience of a lack of structures to function as decision-makers. Over the years, schools have been given limited opportunity to develop into vital places of learning, into sites of professional inquiry and reflective practice [13,14,28,29]. This militates against a leadership that is visionary, inspirational, and strategic in nature [29,33,34]. Moving from the shackles of dependency to one of ‘collaborative professionalism’, a term coined by Hargreaves and O’Connor [35], will not be easy. One cannot talk of such moves without really understanding the culture and climate that have evolved over the years that have led to the current situation, and which, in actual fact, to a large extent, determine how people think and act. Present conditions and circumstances of schools could not have been planned to be more antithetical to their becoming centres of inquiry and change. If we want to bring about lasting change, we need to review the way we develop and implement policies; the way our current governance structures function; how we view the role of evaluation and review; and lastly, how we view the role of our colleges and that of school leaders. Any effort to improve the effectiveness of schools depends on an understanding of the dynamics of schools. This implies exploring the actions and influences of teachers, students, education officials, parents, community members, and the curriculum and the ways in which these influences operate.

This implies reviewing our systems of governance and how this is related to the value of trust. Then, we need to move into our definition of leadership and how this is going to impact on the leadership at the school level to foster student achievement—both cognitive and affective.

4. Trust and Governance

As already highlighted, my belief is that we have a governance problem. The dominant and prevailing model of governance so far has set the policymakers apart from others that are expected to implement policies dictated from above. Leadership is transactional. The policies that have been penned over the past decades have been determined through different forms of involvement and engagement with different stakeholders. The Amendment to the Education Act of 2006 was meant to have eventually led to a context where schools, through the college network system, would determine their own agenda whilst receiving adequate support from the Directorates concerned. For various reasons this has not materialized. On the contrary, we have seen a concerted move to centralise decision-making, leading to disempowerment, disillusionment, skepticism, and disengagement [19,36,37]. The National Education Strategy [38] speaks of the need to review the college network system. This is a move in the right direction.

What is needed is a restructuring of governance through empowerment at all levels. The best guarantee will come from a re-engineered corporate structure predicated on checks and balances, whose constituent parts adopt the qualities of truth, honesty, and integrity as part of the way things are done. In this time of crisis, uncertainty, unpredictability, and insecurity, trust is essential. The belief is that, if you want to break the cycle of distrust, you have to respect others before they have earned the right to be respected, and then do the things that build competencies and trust over time. For example, Finland and Singapore began whole school reforms in education over forty years ago, without having a respected teaching profession, but their goal was to build such a system. Various studies on Finnish society and the Finnish education system have shown how trust permeates the whole fabric of society [39,40]. This implies that it takes decades for things to take root and impact on how people perceive and engage with changes.

The strategy of developing a teaching profession is important for us seeking to reform our education system, more so given a context where teachers self-efficacy is low, where young adults are not attracted to the teaching profession [31]. School leaders and teachers are working in an extremely fluid and turbulent context. Expectations are constantly on the increase, and they are being held accountable for issues that are often beyond their control. The testing culture is also chipping away at the traditional satisfactions of becoming and being a teacher. Support structures have not developed to the extent that they make an impact on teachers’ lives in the classroom. Reform fatigue is evident.

Trust is necessary for increased collaboration among stakeholders, accountability as a way of improvement, greater professionalization, coping with complexity and the reduction of existing asymmetries. For greater levels of participation and collaboration, the education authorities need to move from the transactional to the transformational and to transcendent leadership/governance.

5. The Meaning of Leadership

Only when we settle with the way we view governance and how this will impact on the level of trust needed can we view the central features behind school leadership and, more importantly, transformational and instructional leadership.

As Day et al. [11] have pointed out, “The concepts of leadership, management and administration overlap and have been accorded different emphases over time and in different contexts” (p. 10). Differences reflect the way education authorities view the roles that the different stakeholders have to play. Malta, being a British colony for a hundred and fifty years and now a member of the Commonwealth and an English-speaking country, has been heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon systems and perspectives. Our country, although gaining independence in 1964, has remained highly centralised in its approach to change and reforms, thus influencing on how institutions operate at the implementation level.

This, in itself, will represent a challenge to us. As we embark on this journey, we have to acknowledge that getting there is a slow and arduous process. The choices we make will reflect our preferences and our bias and hopefully determine not what we say but what we do. It is here that our understanding of leadership becomes a central issue and will determine our thoughts, our decisions, and the practices we introduce. Gini and Green [41] propose an interesting and challenging definition that resonates with the challenges we currently face:

“Leadership, of every kind and at every level, is about offering others an ‘action guide’, a plan, a challenge, a goal, a purpose that they are willing to embrace and carry on. Leadership is about motivating and mobilizing people to get ‘something’ done, be that extraordinary or otherwise. Leadership is a catalyst for action. … Leadership is also about the personality and character—the ethical substance—of a particular leader.” (p. 5)

What is particularly striking about Gini and Green’s approach to leadership is not only the link between issues related to motivation, empowerment, the collective purpose, but, more importantly, that we need ethical leaders to take us forward. Leadership is a power-laden, value-based, and ethically driven relationship between leaders and followers who share a common vision and accomplish real changes that reflect their mutual/collective purpose and goals. Maybe this has been a missing dimension in our formula. This is why we have levels of distrust across the different levels.

6. What about School Leadership?

The international literature keeps highlighting that school leadership has a significant impact in fostering student achievement thanks to its direct and indirect influence on teaching effectiveness [11,42,43,44]. The impact of leadership is greatest where it is focused on improving teaching and learning and is amplified when responsibilities for leading teaching and learning are widely distributed across the school or network [45,46,47]. So, while teachers have a direct impact on students in their classroom, a school leader affects all students in a given school through their ability in empowering teachers, in supporting teacher agency, sustaining teachers’ professional development over time [48,49], and creating a safe environment based on principles such as care and respect [50,51,52]. Effective heads and teachers are recognised as the two most important school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school [12,53,54].

More studies have helped to highlight the key dimensions of successful leadership:

• defining the vision, values, and direction;

• improving conditions for teaching and learning;

• redesigning the organisation: aligning roles and responsibilities;

• enhancing effective teaching and learning;

• redesigning and enriching the curriculum;

• enhancing teacher quality (including succession planning);

• building relationships inside the school community;

• building relationships outside the school community;

• defining and modelling common values;

• ensuring students’ well-being and providing equitable access to support for all students [11] (p. 6)

Such dimensions help us to put into perspective what successful school leaders and leadership focus on, namely, teaching and learning, not only facilitating the learning taking place in class but in the creation of learning opportunities for teachers to come together and constantly reflect and review their practices. The literature highlights two main models behind successful leadership—transformational and pedagogical/instructional leadership.

7. Transformational Leadership Practices

This model of leadership is most often associated with vision, setting direction, restructuring and realigning the organisation, developing staff and curriculum, and involvement with the external community [55,56,57]. “Transformational leaders motivate followers by raising their consciousness about the importance of organizational goals and by inspiring them to transcend their own self-interest for the sake of the organization” [58] (p. 375). As various studies have highlighted, “much of what has been discovered about such leadership in this body of research reinforces the validity of … four core sets of leadership practices” [11] (p. 15) (see Table 1).

While some studies have suggested that transformational leadership practices primarily emphasise relationships (e.g., [45]), it is clear from the literature that effective transformational leaders also place an emphasis upon promoting better student outcomes through the use of pedagogical/instructional leadership, also sometimes referred to as ‘leading for learning’ [59].

Instructional leadership (IL) places teaching and learning at the forefront of school decision-making [60]. It is an overarching orientation that gives structure to a school’s direction, evidenced by leadership practices and skills that support teaching and student outcomes and drive school improvement and sustained success [43]. IL emphasises the importance of establishing clear educational goals, planning the curriculum, and evaluating teachers and teaching. It sees the leader’s prime focus as responsible for promoting better outcomes for students, emphasising the importance of teaching and learning and enhancing their quality [45]. Robinson et al. [45] have gone on to claim that “the more leaders focus their influence, their learning and their relationships with teachers on the core business of teaching and learning, the greater their influence on student outcomes.” (p. 28).

Important questions need to be raised when confronted by this literature. How the Maltese education authorities relate to what the literature presents is essential for the decisions we take and the paths we pursue for school improvement.

With this backdrop and awareness of the risk of sounding paternalistic, what follows are a number of proposals that can be used in further and future discussions. Naturally, they are purposely not finite. They are meant to instigate debate, to engage other stakeholders coming from different sectors of society to start engaging in a critical discourse, and to create what Matthew Syed [61] defines as ‘cognitive diversity.’ We need to engage in different networks and to challenge our own current perceptions and practices. This is a major challenge that Maltese society faces.

8. Proposals

The move towards shared governance will lead towards empowerment at all levels. It will help to redress the current scenario which sees a teaching profession that has practically disengaged with the reforms given a context that disempowers educators rather than building on their expertise.

Strong inspirational leaders and leadership teams at all levels are needed to help forge the way from the hierarchical and linear models that are currently in place and the infinite flexibility of the lifelong learning society. A change in the way we view the nature of human interactions will be needed for a genuine transformation in shared governance to take place. Many studies have shown that a focus on specific leadership styles (e.g., instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and distributed leadership) help to nurture a more engaging and collaborative stance for addressing school issues. Such involvement and participation lead to more empowered and motivated staff [62,63,64,65].

Our commitment needs to be towards nurturing systems that promote sustainable leadership [18,66] that are committed to the principles, values, and attributes that lead to transformational and transcendent leadership. In this regard, in order to address the challenges identified above, a number of proposals are presented.

The following proposals are meant to support a drive to nurture sustainable leadership in our schools. We need to invest in our schools and leadership. Schools need to be given greater autonomy and responsibility to plan their development and improvement plans. Sustainable leadership matters, spreads, and lasts. It is a shared responsibility to adopt an activist engagement with the forces that affect it and build an educational environment that promotes the principles of social justice, diversity, and capacity. As noted by Jesacher-Roessler and Agostini [49], we need to focus on leadership practices that allow for ongoing professional learning to take place across all levels and involves educators learning with and from each other. Learning becomes more teacher-focused [67,68].

8.1. Increase College/School Autonomy

The current system sees schools fulfilling the demands/expectations of central authorities in terms of standards, outcomes, and results. A performativity culture permeates our education system. This is known as contractual accountability. We need to move towards responsive and reciprocal accountability, which encourages greater decision-making by educators [69]. It is concerned with process rather than outcomes, with stimulating involvement and interaction to secure decisions that are based on identified needs and preferences. As a small island state, we need a model of governance that establishes a balance between quality control and local/college empowerment. This requires a commitment by central authorities to ensure greater participation in the reform and policymaking processes. This is where the Education Strategy and Quality Assurance Department plays a key role and hence why this conference exists. We need to understand the critical and central role that internal and external review plays and how an engaged and reflective environment is needed and can be created and sustained over time. As argued elsewhere [34], in “an empowered organization, everyone’s contribution to improvement is encouraged and valued”. Empowerment becomes a structuring principle. To achieve empowerment requires constant dialogue and discussion so that a sense of trust is fostered [70,71].

8.2. Schools and Their Staff Take Ownership of Their Own Learning

Time is a precious resource. Schools need to manage their own learning rather than following prescribed modes of learning. An adequate amount of time needs to be identified after extensive consultation with the stakeholders so that each school is responsible and manages their own learning/professional development throughout the school year. Currently, a number of colleges/schools are addressing ways of improving the quality of their teaching. We need to explore different models that can take our schools forward.

As OECD’s comparative review on teachers noted [72]:

“Effective professional development is on-going, includes training, practice and feedback, and provides adequate time and follow-up support. Successful programmes involve teachers in learning activities that are similar to ones they will use with their students and encourage the development of teachers’ learning communities. There is growing interest in developing schools as learning organisations, and in ways for teachers to share their expertise and experience more systematically.” [73] (p. 49)

The focus is on creating a collaborative culture that supports a move from transactional styles of leadership to transformational ones. Transactional or transformational leadership induce different behaviours and results. The former is sustained through extrinsic rewards while the latter aims at renewing values, beliefs, and attitudes that can change practices, or vice versa, where changed practices challenge existing beliefs [74]. School leaders also have a strategic capacity to inspire what happens in schools through a series of what Walker [75] describes as “connective strategies”.

8.3. Teacher-Driven Continuing Professional Development and Learning

A major initiative that our education authorities need to seriously consider is to focus on turning our schools into Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) [76,77]. A PLC is an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. PLCs, as DuFour and colleagues argue, “operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators” [78] (p. 10). Teacher-driven CPD designs empower teachers because they are centred not only on what they know but also on what they want to share and learn with colleagues. Such designs challenge our traditional culture of teacher learning. At the same time, we need to acknowledge the complexity that surrounds professional learning and that we need to see learning as a way of being: a process that provides opportunities for questioning, and critical consideration of and reflection on practice [79].

Such teacher learning models are driven by collaboration and not compliance and are rooted in shared solutions to developing knowledge about teaching and learning and not necessarily by an external ‘expert’. The focus is on teachers supporting teachers and teachers learning together within and across schools offering robust models for CPD. Such CPD exemplifies ways of how practice, research, and policy can merge and transform our current views and practices of learning for teachers and students [68]. It is built on educators working in different set-ups (e.g., class/subject teachers, heads of department, education officers, university lecturers, etc.) coming together to enhance the learning experience that develops through dialogue. Such partnerships are essential for a more diverse approach to engage in school improvement issues.

Scholarship shows that the highest-achieving countries on international measures such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have been particularly intent on developing teachers’ expertise both before they enter the profession and throughout their careers.

In top-ranked nations, support for teaching take the form of:

• ▪. Universal high-quality teacher education, featuring extensive clinical training as well as coursework;

• ▪. Equitable, competitive salaries, comparable to those of other professions, such as engineering, sometimes with additional stipends for hard-to-staff locations;

• ▪. Mentoring for all beginners, coupled with a reduced teaching load and shared planning time;

• ▪. Extensive opportunities for ongoing professional learning, embedded in substantial planning and collaboration time at school;

• ▪. Teacher involvement in curriculum and assessment development and decision-making [80].

What the international studies are showing us is that collaboration among educators is critical, not just because working with other teachers is a nice thing to do, and it makes school a more pleasant place to be in [81]. In fact, it turns out that high-performing schools—like high-performing businesses—organise people to take advantage of each other’s knowledge and skills and create a set of common, coherent practices, so that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data provide evidence for this: Participating in peer networks is a key element of teacher professionalism, which is associated with teacher satisfaction and self-efficacy. Teachers in high-performing countries spend a great deal of their learning time in collaboration with peers. This is possible because, in many of these countries, teachers spend less of their working day directly in front of students. Darling-Hammond et al. [82] found that an average of 49 h spent on staff CPD over a year boosted student achievement by 21 percentile points, whereas more limited time (5–14 h) showed no statistically significant effect on student learning.

We can ill afford to have a strategy that ignores the impact that collaborative/networked learning can have [83,84]. There are various implications behind this that need to be addressed and will need to be embraced within a new way of introducing policies, one that the National Education Strategy [38] seems to uphold.

8.4. Provide Immediate and Ongoing Support to Teachers (Where and When Needed)

Our highly centralised system has, to a large extent, conditioned the way schools operate. They often lack the resources, mainly human, to address particular issues that require immediate attention. Issues related to psychological support to students or staff often take months to be addressed, leaving schools helpless in the process. A move towards decentralised decision-making and -taking would mean that colleges/schools would be given the finances to manage particular resources (human or otherwise) based on needs. Particular decisions could be tackled across the college network system or individual schools depending on the area of concern. The implication behind this is that we garner the expertise that we have within our country in a different manner. This approach will also dispel the idea of experts determining what happens in schools to one that sees people bringing their varied expertise to the table and working in the field. This can be achieved through such a strategy. It is here that transcendent leadership will be nurtured as educators place service above self and place learning above station in life. As Cardona [85] notes, transcendent leadership sees leadership from a relational perspective. This perspective focuses on the relationship that is created between a leader and a follower. The type of partnership that the leader is able to create determines the quality of the follower’s behaviours and demonstrates sets of values and behaviours that the leader shows in action.

The methods used are the message as people engage in dialogue where human talents and energies are maximised for the betterment of all. Expertise can and needs to be sought from outside the education sector. This is how communities of practice come into being.

This move will also be supported through a different approach to Professional Development. The proposal here is to move away from current CPD courses that are based on the one-off, often off-site, sessions [68,86,87]. This is a linear and delivery model that ignores the processes that teachers undergo as they learn about their professional craft, as they gain new knowledge and understanding and review and reconstruct their attitudes, beliefs, and practices as they engage and struggle with the demands of the curriculum and the change processes.

Links between institutions are critical requiring a transversal approach to doing things. This implies that people from different bodies (e.g., Department of Curriculum Management, Faculty of Education, a State College or Colleges; the Chamber of Commerce; a Further and Higher Education institution) come together and work together on identified issues.

8.5. Review the Role of School Leaders

Studies keep highlighting that school leaders feel that they are administering their schools rather than being visionary and strategic [37]. They are constantly addressing minor issues rather than working with and alongside their teachers to address issues related to the domains of teaching and learning, assessment and curriculum design, and development and implementation. This goes against the principles of the NMC [88] and the NCF [89] that speak of school leaders that are transformational in their approach to doing things.

This can be countered by giving the respective Council of Heads greater autonomy, by providing each school with the necessary personnel that will take on the administrative responsibilities that are currently consuming the time of the school leaders.

9. Policy Outcomes/Directions

Naturally, for such proposals to bear fruition will require that a new approach to strategic development and policymaking is introduced so that greater levels of participation do take place. I subscribe to the point raised by Chance [27], who argues for a shift from linear models to more iterative approaches to planning and doing things. Such decisions will filter down the system and lead to the much-desired improvements taking place. To address this, a series of recommendations, mainly for discussion purposes, and will also need to capture proposals coming from other stakeholders as the Education Strategy, encourages further debate amongst different stakeholders.

1. All existing reforms are reviewed. Review teams involving different stakeholders set up to understand and study the impact of the recent reforms.

2. Identify existing forms of learning and study the impact that they are having on student learning.

3. Consider the introduction of new ones that help nurture more collaborative and collegial models of learning.

4. The levels of disempowerment, disengagement and scepticism that abound within the profession is approached in practical ways through college-based and school-based initiatives. Most reforms have remained detached from the realities of school life. This proposal encourages schools to identify issues that are of immediate interest and concern to school leaders and teachers. Move away from one size fits all.

5. Review the current policy documents that define heads of school as school leaders, which see teachers as teacher leaders (e.g., [88,89]). This can be done through documentary analysis, focus group sessions with heads of school, Council of Heads, education officials, and meetings with different stakeholders so that we have a clear picture of the roles that school leaders and teachers are undertaking. A review of the local literature will also be undertaken. This will help us propose realistic goals rather than remain on current rhetoric that is oblivious of the realities our schools are facing.

6. Promote and engage in CPD models within colleges and schools to allow for the identification of good practices that can be shared with others. This will help to empower teachers and show that their work and efforts are respected.

7. Explore greater collaboration between educational institutions and community/regional/national organisations to see how they can impact on the learning process.

10. Concluding Remarks

We are living in challenging times that put pressure on individuals calling for a leadership that impacts the lives of everyone. Within such a context, leaders need to play a central role, one where they exhibit particular traits, which include empathy, openness to different perspectives and ideas, resilience, and strong communication skills. Whilst educational leaders are trying to navigate in these currents, they are, as we have seen, also faced with an educational context focused on performativity, accountability, and managerialism, and we run the risk of losing sight of the moral purposiveness of our role as leaders.

Back in 2007, James Kouzes and Barry Posner [90], in their bestseller The Leadership Challenge, put forward the proposition that leadership is primarily about specific kinds of behaviour. Although each leader is a unique individual, Kouzes and Posner are convinced that there are shared patterns to the practice of leadership and that these practices can be learned. Since then, various studies have explored the specific values, personal traits, or characteristics that one looks for in a leader, or what we look for and admire in a leader. Whilst such studies are important, I believe that it is not enough to identify the values that people say they admire. It is also crucial to put one’s words into action.

As Glaze [23] has argued, we need to engage with the values and attributes that leaders need to manifest in order to take our schools forward. We need to engage with values such as passion and purpose, honesty, moral courage, moral vision, compassion and care, fairness, intellectual excellence, creative thinking, and deep selflessness. In today’s world, leadership stands out as an essential component for personal, collective, and organisational growth. The research reviewed is replete with calls for more collaborative, participative, and distributed forms of leadership, given the observed benefits on the entrusted individuals. The leadership espoused in this paper is focused on transformation within and between people, which, in turn, brings about human growth and organisational reform.

The approach proposed is built round the principles of trust, belief, collegiality, and collaboration, which, in turn, help to empower rather than disempower, to engage rather than disengage, to fill educators with confidence rather than cynicism, and to create meaning in the chaos. This approach will in turn help to give value to adult learning, which is one of the main missing ingredients in the current reform and negotiating processes. The proposals are aimed at injecting pride and belief into our profession, giving shared responsibility to educators. The strategic approach being proposed shows a determined commitment to work with and alongside educators. The approach brings people from different institutions, who occupy different positions together, forming multidisciplinary teams when needed, to address the demands that educators in schools are facing to provide a quality education for all. Malta is facing challenging times as they engage with new forms of thinking and working. Time will tell whether we are prepared to adopt a growth mindset that sees us thinking and acting outside the box.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Secondary source data used for this paper.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Footnotes

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

Table

Table 1

Domains and practices of transformational leadership.

Domain of Practice	Specific Leadership Practice
Set Directions	Build a shared vision. Identify specific, shared, short-term goals. Create high-performance expectations. Communicate the vision and goals.
Build Relationships and Develop People	Stimulate growth in the professional capacities of staff. Provide support and demonstrate consideration for individual staff members. Model the school’s values and practices. Build trusting relationships with and among staff, students and parents. Establish productive working relationships with teacher federation representatives.
Develop the Organisation to Support Desired Practices	Build a collaborative culture and distribute leadership. Structure the organisation to facilitate collaboration. Build productive relationships with families and communities. Connect the school to its wider environment. Maintain a safe and healthy school environment. Allocate resources in support of the school’s vision and goals.
Improve the Instructional Programme	Staff the instructional programme. Provide instructional support. Monitor student learning and school improvement progress. Buffer staff from distractions to their instructional work.

Leithwood et al. [44] in Day et al. [11] (p. 17).

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