A Norwegian policy perspective on the relation between school leadership and pupils' learning outcomes.

Abstract

This article illuminates and discusses how three contemporary Norwegian White papers and the OECD document Improving School Leadership: Policy and Practice narrate the relationship between school leadership and student learning outcomes. First, the article describes the identified dominant policy narrative connecting pupils' learning outcomes to school leadership, before the narrative techniques used to make this connection are explored in more detail. The analysis shows how a dominant public narrative describes the relationship between school leadership and pupils' learning outcomes as a hierarchical one-way chain of influence, and not as a dialogical and dynamic relationship where the elements are interdependent and influence each other. The one-way, hierarchical chain of influence constructed by the narrative plot meets the need policy has to reduce complexity in order to express governmental goals and distribute responsibility. The linearity and causality embedded in the policy narrative produces an understanding of the relationship between school leadership and learning outcomes that also signals a narrow range of options available to school leaders and teachers. By proposing a limited range of teacher- and leader practices as significant for the fulfilment of the policy goals, the narrative plot also constructs a relatively narrow frame for the professional work of school leaders and teachers.

Keywords:

• learning outcome
• school leadership
• Norway
• education policy
• narrative policy analysis

Notes on contributors

Helene Marie Kjærgård Eide is Assistant Professor at the Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway. Her research is concerned with how school leadership and learning outcomes are related in public narratives presented by different actors within the Norwegian educational sector. She also has several years of teaching and leadership experience from Norwegian kindergartens and schools.

Gunn Elisabeth Søreide is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway. Her research is concerned with how educational practices and the identities of groups of professionals and learners are constructed and legitimized in public narratives about education, work and learning.