The legacy publications: sharing our intellectual property

August has always been problematic for me. When I was a teacher, I found that at the end of the summer term it usually took a week or so for the adrenaline to subside. Then I would sleep for a week. After a bit, the mid-august blues would take hold, characterised by a depressing combination of indolence and guilt.  No timetable, no deadlines, no colleague’s hassling for action, just lots of amorphous faffing about. Meanwhile, the anxiety builds - what has to be done before the start of the new term?  My birthday falls on the 20^th but the timing is not good. There is nobody around to celebrate with. No cake in the staff room. Everyone is ignoring their emails and in full holiday mode. Then somewhere between exam results and August Bank Holiday, panic sets in and the adrenaline starts to flow again. As a schoolteacher, I never liked August and, even though I have been a university academic for a long time now, the feeling remains.

August is forgiven

However, this August has been different. Our new book has just been published. Teachers and the practice of leadership: enabling change for transformation and social justice is available on the Routledge website.

This blurb just inside the front cover starts with this:

         Driven by the pursuit of social justice and quality in education, this inspirational

book offers an alternative vision of leadership in education. It argues that teachers, regardless of status or position, should be empowered to exercise leadership in the pursuit of educational change and improvement.

This book, co-authored with Judy Durrant, Val Hill, Gary Holden and Amanda Roberts, is the culmination of three and a half decades of work. It includes a critical analysis of educational reform, teacher identity and educational leadership, and presents evidence to support our promotion of the idea of non-positional teacher leadership.

The book is accompanied by a package of Support Materials which includes a substantial document called Non-positional Teacher Leadership: Guidance and Support.

This is currently available in Arabic, English, Russian and Spanish from the Routledge site.  Other translations will be uploaded to the NPTL website as soon as they come onstream. So far, we have a Kazakh version and a German one. At the beginning of this guidance document, it says this:

This guide is addressed both to those who might want to know how to initiate a programme of support for non-positional teacher leadership and to those who might become the facilitators of such a programme. It demonstrates how to initiate, develop and facilitate a programme of support.

For those who decide that they would like to run an NPTL programme, there is a smaller document called Planning your non-positional teacher leadership programme and for each of 8 workshop sessions, a facilitator’s guide and a set of tools.  

If like me, you prefer books as physical objects that you can hold in your hand, you may want to buy the book. However, in keeping with our digital age, the book and the Support Materials are published on an Open Access basis so that anyone can download everything for free. I want to acknowledge with gratitude the HertsCam Network’s Board of Trustees for supporting the decision to devote our efforts and remaining resources to this giveaway of our intellectual property. This means that our influence as a charity can extend into the future, long after the organisation is wound up later this year.

And an academic memoire

To coincide with the publication with Routledge, I have also written what could be called an academic memoire in which I have curated my own publications in relation to teachers’ enhanced professionality and non-positional teacher leadership. Its title is: In pursuit of enhanced teacher professionality: a story of praxis. A reflective narrative puts into context the steady stream of books, chapters, reports, journal articles and conference papers related to these subjects, authored or co-authored by myself between 1989-2025.

I hope this memoire will be a helpful resource for those who study these matters. Early career academics may find it particularly helpful because it contains advice for about how to succeed as a published writer.  You can find it on the Non Positional Teacher Leadership website.

This August has, for me, been fruitful. Not only have the tomatoes and blackberries in my garden ripened earlier than usual, but I have also experienced the profound satisfaction of seeing my intellectual endeavour bear fruit. These publications constitute a legacy which my colleagues and I hope will be taken up by teachers, school principals, researchers, policy makers, union officials, civil society professionals and change-makers of all kinds. So please pass this on to anyone you think may be interested in empowering teachers and enabling them to become agents of change who will contribute to the transformation of themselves, their schools, education systems and wider society.