David Hopkins

There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary school improvement and system change in education. Why is it that despite the phenomenal increase in our recent knowledge about what works in schooling, standards still lag behind expectations and school level performance is far too variable? Unleashing Greatness addresses this paradox and concludes that, unless we focus unrelentingly on the quality of teaching in both our small and large-scale reform efforts, current practice will never meet society's expectations.Unleashing Greatness is a compilation of David Hopkins' writing into one concise manual to provide an eight-step strategy for unleashing greatness. Introducing a rational and conceptual framework for pedagogic improvement that has the potential for generating an increasingly specific language for teaching and learning, this book significantly aids consistency and precision in the quest for both excellence and equity for all students.Written for 'school improvement activists', particularly those who work in laboratory schools or who wish to emulate that ethos and way of working, the author himself has located his professional practice for over forty years, as well as this book, in the middle of that triangle bounded by the vertices of practice, research and policy.

Since its emergence in the early 2000s, system leadership has been viewed as an important driver for building system capacity required for positive change. System leaders are those Heads or Principals who are willing to shoulder system wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own. The chapter is divided into three sections: the first, outlines the genesis of System Leadership pre-2010; the second, reviews the international literature post 2010 as the concept achieves maturity and is better embedded in policy reforms in many countries; and third, future challenges are identified.

In 2008 we published an article in this journal entitled Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership. The article was based on a major literature review that was summarised in a paper published by the National College for School Leadership in England. Both the National College paper and our subsequent article proved to be far more popular than we anticipated and both have been extensively cited over the past 10 years. This article revisits each of the seven claims, summarising what was said about each in the original publications

The article begins with a review of what is known internationally about system level reform. With these frameworks in mind, a critique is then made of recent educational change efforts in Wales. This is followed by a comprehensive description of a system reform strategy for Wales based around the four drivers of personalised learning, professionalised teaching, intelligent accountability and networks and collaboration, all of which are moulded to context by system leadership. It is this framework that holds promise for sustained progress in student achievement throughout the country.

There is no more important goal for educators than enabling their students to develop the habit of enquiry and to embed a spirit of curiosity. Accomplishing this, as well as achieving high academic standards, is a task that seems to be beyond most jurisdictions, however well intentioned. For we are at a time in our educational history where there is a dominant culture of top down reform and external accountability. Nevertheless, David Hopkins and Wayne Craig did just this through using the ‘powerful learning’ framework they developed in the Northern Metropolitan Region of Victoria, Australia. In this contribution to the Education Today themed issue on “Understanding Achievement”, David and Wayne tell the story of how they achieved Curiosity and Powerful Learning for their students by working from the ‘inside – out’ and by building a systemic work culture that facilitated teacher leadership.