Learning to be an engineer: the role of school leadership

Despite the field of school leadership being well researched, it is hard to say what kinds of personal and professional attributes make for successful engineering education leaders in schools and what it is that successful leaders at all levels of schools do differently to facilitate it. This report describes a mixed-methods study to seek to address these issues. Using a positive deviance approach the authors build on early research into school leadership to suggest that school leaders who successfully create and sustain a vision for engineering do it by fostering a supportive culture across the school, maintaining and modelling a specific set of personal attributes, and enacting a coherent set of strategies, all of which are encompassed by the phrase pedagogic leadership.