All portraits ended with the school’s ambition and the appreciation by the visiting inspector(s). After having made quite a few of such whole school portraits –both in the Netherlands and abroad[1] - we felt is was time to go more in-depth into a specific subject or field of expertise. This marked the coming into being of school portrait brochures such as “modern foreign languages in secondary education” and “culture education and ICT”. Instead of describing schools as a whole, in these brochures we choose to describe a field or subject, not only depicting what schools do but also what other stakeholders[2] contributed and were doing and what type of projects, software and initiatives were available. After the subject brochures, we entered a next phase. With it, we moved even one step closer to the people who are key in education: school leaders, teachers and of course pupils. In this article we will discuss the school leaders portraits. We will first discuss some methodological issues, before we go into conclusions that can be drawn about school leadership in innovations with ICT. Much of this text builds on the work of Theo Muntingh, who was the leader of this project, former inspector and recently appointed as school leader at a comprehensive school in the west of The Netherlands.

Part A The Methodology
What are portraits?
Portraits try to paint a picture. The term portrait implies two important characteristics of this product. The first is the role of the subject, the school, project or person that is being portrayed. It plays an essential part in the writing of the portrait. Not only by sitting and letting the observer do his/her work, but by actively contributing to the picture painted. The contribution is in the preparation (choosing the raw materials, setting the scene, selecting those examples that worked), in the execution (sharing truthfully their successes and failures) and in the evaluation (assessing whether the picture does them justice) . The role of the author of the portraits is also essential. Contrary to the notion of ‘value free research’, portraits acknowledge that there is value in the decisions that the author of a portrait makes. He decides what he describes and how he describes it. He decides what makes a specific example or case special or unique.
Together the author and the subject of the portrait shape the portrait. They develop an understanding together of the elements that the school visit should consist of, they decide on the information that is included and the final shape of the portrait. However, the final version of the portrait is the full responsibility of the inspector and should there be a disagreement, the inspector decides. This responsibility also means that he needs to dig deeper than what is apparent at first sight. He needs to triangulate, not with the aim to come to ‘one truth’, but to paint a picture that is complete and truthful. This understanding of what portraits are underpins each of the portraits, regardless of the different shapes, forms and methodologies chosen.

Individuals
School leader portraits present pictures of individuals. In that sense they are different from the previous portraits. In this case we took the school leader as the starting point of our project. That said, the final portraits were presented in two ways. For the secondary portraits, each portrait starts with personal competencies and then addresses the role of the school leader in school developments, whereas the primary portrait starts with a description of the school leader in different phases of the school’s development, working back to the personal characteristics of the school leader.

Interviews based on competency model
We used several sources and instruments to do the research for the school leaders project. The basis was formed by an intensive interview with the school leader. It was an open interview, with as a theoretical basis a set of competencies of school leaders that was developed for this project. The competencies were derived from an expert meeting at the beginning of the project and from existing competency models that were developed by school leader associations in the Netherlands. Based on this, the following competencies were chosen:

Education
Aimed at the primary process, knowledge of education and one’s own organisation, translation of policy to the practical situation, switching between developments on the work floor and the development of a vision;
Organisation
Organisational development: creation of coherence through a philosophy, management according to the subject material, people and resources, defining priorities, keeping everything on course
Organisational policy and management: creating conditions on the material and personnel levels, planning, being accountable, evaluating;
Environment
Entrepreneurship, taking the initiative, decision-making, courage, external contacts, external orientation, translator from outside to inside, acquiring funds, ensuring participation in projects;
Mental capacity
Self-reflection, contemplative and analytical capacity, charisma, listening skills, example behaviour, genuineness, exhibiting one’s own learning behaviour, situational leadership: taking account of phases of development and circumstances;
Decisiveness
A broad repertoire for dealing with situations: sharing leadership, promoting cooperation, providing space, communicator, creating a support base, motivating, delegating, sharing knowledge, addressing problems.

The interviews were recorded on video not only as a reference, but also to be edited for use on the internet.

Leadership tests
In addition each school leader took two tests. The first test was based on the concept of situational leadership. Based on an existing test, we developed a new one where we presented 20 situations in which the management of ICT played a role. The situational approach to managing people was developed by Kenneth Blanchard (1992). It is based on the mutual relationship between:
- in the first place, the amount of management and control
(controlling behaviour) of the leader and the amount of support (supportive behaviour) he gives;
- in the second place, the competence and the commitment (the level of development) of the member of staff to execute of a particular task.
This test distinguishes four styles, and scores the leaders also on flexibility: the extent to which they can switch between styles according to the circumstances.
The second test was a Management of  change test. This test presents leadership styles with colours. Eg a yellow changer assumes that changes can be realised by combining interests, formulating proposals, displaying the advantages of certain ideas and working towards compromises to which all parties can agree. A blue changer on the contrary assumes that changes should be controlled and planned. This test distinguishes four styles.

ICT module
To describe the strengths and weaknesses of the ICT policy in the school of these leaders, we used the ICT module of the Dutch inspectorate. This module can be used in addition to regular school evaluations and presents the school’s ICT quality profile in six categories. During the school leaders project, the module was still in a pilot phase. The module describes the school’s ICT policy and practice in terms of :

A. systematically assuring the quality of ICT use;
B. education of ICT: preparing students for future education and work;
C. ICT supporting the teaching process / pedagogy ;
D. ICT supporting the learning process ;
E. The school using ICT to support pupils individually and to provide care for pupils with special learning needs;
F. Infrastructure.

The module was used to describe the school’s performance in ICT, not to select the perfect ICT school for the project.

Objects of management
A final organiser for the portraits was formed by the model ‘Four in balance +’ as was developed by the Dutch ICT op School foundation. The original model Four in balance presented four essential areas that all need to be in place when integrating ICT in education: an educational philosophy, knowledge & skills, educational software and an ICT infrastructure. Based on review studies, the + model added the ingredients of leadership and   cooperation.

Part B. What can we learn about school leadership?
Based on the six portraits of school leaders (of which two were translated into English), the authors draw conclusion about each of the five competencies in the competency model that formed the basis for the brochure.

Education, focus on the primary process
It is because of their involvement with what happens in the classroom and their vision on education that the school leaders have come this far. Starting out with a relatively vague vision of the contribution of ICT, but increasingly adding focus, they work towards the goal of improving education.

“Interventions were very close to the work floor, the focus was on stimulation, supervision, support and motivation, but then based on a central philosophy of education that had to be customised to the individual pupils, who bore a great deal of responsibility for their own learning.”
From the portrait of Anke Harteveld

Mental capacity, decisiveness and entrepreneurship
School leaders need the courage to take decisions. These decisions so it seems are not only taken on the basis of knowledge or an exhaustive understanding of technology, but sometimes on a general notion, a gut feeling of what needs to be done. None of the school leaders did their work without bringing external expertise into their school. It proves that human networks are essential not only for bringing in this knowledge but also for obtaining additional funding: “Throughout his career, Anton Smithuis always had a practiced eye for the opportunity of obtaining certain materials for his school. However, any donations or projects had to be related to the developments he had in mind for his school. In his free time, he puzzled for hours over a way to obtain funds from various subsidies using the required project plan. And that, of course, was followed by the bureaucratic struggle to justify the funds from the various subsidies according to the very diverse requirements.”

Organisation: policy and management
Much of the management style depends on the size of the school and the position of the school leader. However, in general most school leaders start out by managing changes centrally. The more the integration of ICT evolves, the more they let go. That this by no means leads to disengagement is illustrated by Anke Harteveld: “Whereas in the past Anke was able to kindle people’s enthusiasm based on content and she herself put forward ideas and policy documents, now she functions more at a distance and has more of a facilitating role. That is not to say that she no longer plays the former role. She is still in attendance at workshops and open days, at least at the start. And she also takes part in ongoing projects.” What remains important is a strong focus on the conditions: when they fail, everything fails and you loose momentum. In some cases room to experiment became less because of more bureaucracy as Anton Smithuis confirms when he describes his early years as a head teacher: “There was more effective teaching time available and activities for the children were more plentiful, because of less bureaucracy and because people thought less in terms of blueprints.”

Directing professionals
When selecting their teachers and putting their team together, the school leaders in our brochure are very careful in maintaining a good mix of talents. They are not afraid of letting go of people who are not willing or able to go along with the new paths that are taken.   This search for quality almost has a self fulfilling element to it: teachers are keen to work at these well led schools. The vision can also include appointing people from outside education: “Herman Jansen is the Director of Facility Management. Before he took this job, he was a logistical manager in the Dutch Royal Navy. He admires Anke’s courage in appointing somebody from outside the educational sector for such a job. He appreciates the space that she gives him for his management portfolio, as her main priority is to be kept informed about what is happening.” Appointments like these are based on a vision: “You can only really let go if you’re sure you have good people with the right competencies and a close affinity with the PCC[3] culture.”

Organisational development
Based on their vision of education, school leaders soon discover that some educational changes imply huge organisational change (and resistance). They are keen to admit that when they are in their ‘visionary mood’, they sometimes go too fast. They need to learn to sometimes not to set the pace but to follow the others. Sometimes taking a step back is a good opportunity to reconsider what you are doing “In the late 1980s, the pioneering period came to an end. With the arrival of the boxes of Print – Comenius, a national programme to introduce computers in schools the development of ICT stopped for a while at his school. ‘In retrospect, that was a good thing. We started to reconsider the question as to how you can best use ICT.’ The computers and the software were not consistent with the ideas he had about learning through discovery and interaction.”

Conclusion
This article has given a short overview of the methodology and outcomes of the school leaders on line project. The project has successfully presented a picture of school leaders and their ‘travels’ to the type of leader that they are now. Each of their stories is unique. The English brochure contains two examples of inspirational school leaders. This brochure can be ordered by sending an e-mail with contact details to Bert Jaap van Oel (b.vanoel@owinsp.nl) . For those readers who master some Dutch, it is worthwhile to also check out the project’s website at http://www.schoolvoorbeelden.nl . What the portraits show is that Dutch school leaders operate with quite strong autonomy. It would be interesting and useful to see how this compares to the position of school leaders in other countries. An international version of the School leaders on line project would be one way of comparing. We are more then willing to share our experiences with others that are interested.

Notes:
1.Countries visited included France, Sweden, Ireland, Scotland and Canada.
2.Eg the Dutch centres of expertise, aimed at stimulating the integration of ICT in education in a specific subject. The centres of expertise were set up with funding of the Dutch ministry of education.
3.PCC is the acronym of the school