School leaders[1] in Sweden have a large responsibility. They are appointed by the municipality[2] as both the administrative director and pedagogical leader of the school. It is the school leader that is in charge when it comes to increasing the level of goal fulfilment and improving the work in the school with focus on student achievement.

They can and of course should be the drivers of change in their own schools. However with so many other issues to cope with in a day’s work, they hardly get the chance. In order to improve the school leaders understanding of new technologies and to empower them to bring these technologies into their schools their competence needed to be developed.
 
During 2003 and 2004, a number of Swedish municipalities participated in a pilot project for the development of competences of school leaders. The aim was to increase school leaders' ability to initiate and lead the development of ICT in their schools. The project started with an inventory of needs of the school leaders' competence in each regional (i.e. municipal) authority and it continued with several conferences.

The needs identified in this initial phase could be categorised into four different strands:

Understanding technology – Can one separate technology and pedagogy? What does a school leader have to know about technology?

School improvement – Learning organisation, flexible methods, pedagogy and ICT

Efficiency – How to get pedagogical and organisational benefits from both school- and municipal ICT-based systems? How to use administrative systems etc.?

What’s right – legal issues, ethics and ICT-use.

The national project leaders from the National Agency for School Improvement discussed the proposed online leadership material with each regional authority to plan their special competence development. The school leaders in each municipality were divided into groups and each group chose the content in their competence development activities on the base of their needs. The next step for the participating school leaders - in their study groups - was to use the study material on the web.

The study material is developed by the national project team and is available (in Swedish) on the website: http://www.skolutveckling.se/skolnet/skolledare/.
The aim of this material is to support the learning process. Although the material is specially designed for the pilot group, it is free for anyone to use (for studies in groups or individually). The pilot project was a cooperation between The National Action programme for ICT in Schools (ITiS), The National Agency for Education in Sweden, The Swedish School Leader Union, The Swedish Teacher Union's School Leader Society and The Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen).

After the pilot phase this programme was offered to municipalities around Sweden. In all, over 1000 school leaders have participated in about 40 hours of competence development activities at a cost of 100 € each. The next step is to further develop the on line-version of these activities giving school leaders in smaller municipalities the possibility to join and form virtual study groups.

Notes:
1. Schools in Sweden must have a head teacher  (principal). In addition the school can have other leaders forming the school leadership team – among which might be the vice principals. They are often referred to as school leaders. Normally the head master does not teach and, depending on the size of the school, this is also the case for others in the leadership team.
2. Municipalities in Sweden vary in size from about 3000 inhabitants to several hundred thousands. They have a high degree of self-governing and can and do tax their inhabitants.