The Role of Leadership in the Promotion of Knowledge Management in Schools

Despite being in the learning business, schools and local education authorities (LEAs) are notoriously poor knowledge sharers. There are structural and normative reasons for this, built-in to the history and evolution of schools. Structural in that teachers have little time in the course of the day to get together to share ideas and refine their teaching. Normatively because teachers do not have habits of giving and receiving information. Indeed in many cases, the cultures of schools discourage such sharing (e.g., I don’t want to blow my own horn; who does she think she is; others won’t be interested in what I am doing etc.). In this paper, I make the case that the teaching profession, if it is to come of age, must be seen and experienced as an intellectual as well as a moral profession. Because the intellectual or scientific basis of teaching has been underdeveloped I spend most of the time focussing on the knowledge- sharing aspect of schools and LEAs. In the final two sections of the paper, I take up the questions of moral purpose and knowledge sharing, and leadership and