Ambition Institute responds to Ethical Leadership Framework

As a member of the commission, Ambition contributed to last year's report, entitled ‘Navigating the educational moral maze’.  

Ethical leadership is at the heart of our mission to help educators serving children from disadvantaged backgrounds. For many school leaders, it is the moral purpose of improving educational outcomes in challenging schools that motivates them to join our programmes and keep getting better.  

Tom Rees, Executive Director of School Leadership said:  

“It is right that we have high expectations of school leaders’ ethical behaviour: as custodians of the nation’s schools they set an example not only to their staff and pupils, but also to the wider public.  

“At Ambition, we’re privileged to see first-hand the work of educators in some of the country’s most challenging schools. They wrestle with the ethics of difficult decision making day-in day-out.  

“We believe school leaders are better placed to respond to ethical dilemmas when they have a deep understanding of complex educational issues, and the likely success and unintended consequences of their potential responses. 

“We think there’s more we can do to support school leaders who are often working in challenging environments and subject to many pressures. Through our programmes, we try to prepare school leaders to deal with the most complex and pressing challenges schools face – what we refer to as persistent problems – to enable school leaders to act and make decisions in both effective and ethical ways."

ENDS