topSCHOOLLEADER

topSCHOOLLEADER is an ideal App for clarifying your strengths as a leader and identifying the areas that you need to improve. It even offers advice on how to improve. Anyone in education can use it – senior leaders, middle leaders, service managers, team leaders and aspiring leaders. It uses readily recognisable aspects of leadership such as promoting the core purpose of learning through vision and values, exerting influence and making a real difference, focusing on what’s important, transforming what your school (or establishment or service) does to achieve great things, building leadership capacity, partnership working and creating the right culture. topSCHOOLLEADER points to your priorities for development. It is designed for iPad but will work on smaller screened iOS devices.

The topSCHOOLLEADER experience
• Elegant and simple to use
• No distractions or intrusive graphics or sounds
• Easy card movement using touch and drag
• Clarifies your thoughts about major aspects of leadership
• Gives advice on what and how to improve
• Engaging because it is about you and your leadership
• Records screenshots if you wish
• Offers 'Help' when you need it
• Allows you to go back and change your mind at any time
• Keeps your place, even when you close the App

Go further with topSCHOOLLEADER by
• Sharing the results with someone who coaches you
• Using the App to coach others
• Undertaking further reading on leadership skills
• Linking the results from this App to your corporate/professional leadership skills framework
• Collecting data from a number of leaders to find strengths and common areas for improvement
• Asking others’ to evaluate your own leadership skills
• Relating what you find in this App to your own country’s professional standards for leadership

The cards cover the following:
Vision, values and mission: promoting the core purpose
This set of leadership skills is about promoting the moral purpose of the school (or team, establishment or service). Achieving commitment entails leaders constantly sharing the school’s vision and living by its values. This set of leadership skills is also about active listening, openness and transparency.

Making leadership matter: Exerting influence and making a real difference
This set of leadership skills is about how leaders exert influence and, by doing the right things, how they make a real and positive difference in the world. These skills involve practised and impactful communication.

Direction: focusing on what is important
This set of leadership skills is about leaders differentiating between the day-to-day demands and the more important issues of making the right decisions and taking forward developments that will have a positive impact on the school and its outcomes.

Change and improvement: transforming what we do to achieve great things
This set of leadership skills is about using transformational change to achieve great things. Good leaders are never entirely satisfied with how things are going and are often driven by an obsessive curiosity around how others do things and how to improve their own school.

People and partnerships: building capacity
No school is an island: proactively developing supportive partnerships is vital to sustaining and improving a school’s success. Building capacity involves distributing leadership such that people are comfortable about taking decisions for themselves and accepting responsibility for their actions. In turn this involves a deep belief in professional learning for everyone.

Culture: enabling a positive ethos to develop and thrive
A first step in building a positive ethos is for leaders to have a thorough knowledge about exactly what is happening in their school. Identifying with a core purpose creates a powerful force for positive change. A less common strength is the ability to have difficult, but empathetic, conversations.