The Western Australian School Leadership Programme: Towards a new paradigm for leadership development

The changes confronting the workplace, such as the process of decentralisation currently transforming the structure of school systems, have given rise to new relationships within organisations, particularly new models of leadership. These changes reflect a wider and more comprehensive set of forces shaping human social existence in the latter part of the twentieth century, often referred to as post-modernism. It is argued that the post-modern world requires a different kind of education for school leaders in terms of both the content and the manner in which it is delivered. This paper describes the design, structure and delivery of one such programme in the state of Western Australia—the School Leadership Programme. It is argued that features of this programme represent the shape of things to come in professional development for school personnel as the education sector responds to the move from modernity to post-modemity.