Enhancing academic outcomes in senior high school : the responsibility of the student, teacher, principal or heads of department?

Educational research identifies the tendency of schools to maintain a professional culture which reinforces ineffective teaching. Students are apt to find schooling dull, engaging with it as part of the instrumental process of achieving examination success rather than due to inherent interest. Approaches to promote deep learning have included emphasis on the application of knowledge, reasoning and independent thinking, distributing authority widely to practitioners and focussing on Heads of Department as key change agents. This paper uses exemplars from the author's career as a Principal to show that schools are likely to achieve the best outcomes from a diverse but coherent raft of initiatives. The bulk of this paper is a description of these initiatives, applied initially in a Government school led by the author, and subsequently further refined in an Independent school during his second Principalship.