Leadership of school leadership is a white male preserve
First published in Schools Week on 27 May 2017. The new board of the Foundation for Leadership in Education is all white and nearly all male – a fact which in no way reflects the reality of the sector it claims to represent, argues Dr Kate Chhatwal If the role of a board of trustees is to set the tone at the top, I’m a little perplexed at the note the Foundation for Leadership in Education (FLE) wants to strike. Years in the making, it went live last week, but of the nine trustees on its new website , eight are men, only one is a woman – and all of them are white. The cause of this problem doesn’t lie entirely with the Foundation itself. The founding trustees represent the organisations behind the FLE, and all of these except NGA are run by white men (though I’m not sure why the serving female presidents of both ASCL and NAHT appear to have been overlooked). News of the board’s line-up reached us the same week that NAHT confirmed the appointment of the aptly named Paul Whit