What makes a good leader? At Confey College, a coeducational secondary school in Kildare, students are finding out first-hand: they are learning about how to identify and develop leadership values such as listening, respect, a positive attitude and accountability.
Joanne Logan, a career guidance counsellor at Confey College, has overseen a programme called Lift - Leading Ireland’s Future Together - at the school. It is introduced to second years and completed by all students in transition year (TY). Those that want to pursue it further become Lift facilitators in fifth year.
“I often approach teachers and ask them who do you think is a really good leader?” Logan says. “It’s not always the obvious person. Sometimes it might be the quiet child down the back, but they might actually be an excellent leader. They might show really good listening skills. They might be very positive, or they might be very determined even though they mightn’t be the loudest student in the room.”
Roundtables are the cornerstone of Lift’s model. Participants focus on the different values in weekly sessions, reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses associated with each trait. It is an opportunity for conversations that might seem unusual in a traditional school structure, and word of Lift’s impact at Confey College has spread.
“Our fifth years are often involved in other schools in promoting Lift,” Logan says. “I’ve had teachers in other schools approach me and say, we’ve heard you have an excellent leadership programme running in your school – would you mind coming to our school?
“We’ve gone over to other schools in the locality. Our fifth years have stood up and made presentations about Lift, and then they actually run roundtables on that day with the students from the other school.”
A real highlight for students, according to Logan, comes in sixth year when roundtables are conducted with teachers. She often endorses the programme as being good for a CV (a former student recently told her he has started working with a company that uses Lift), but many of the benefits are less career oriented).
“It might be somebody who could use the encouragement and be given that piece of responsibility,” Logan says. “Some students mightn’t get that opportunity elsewhere. It can be life-changing for them because they think wow, I’m actually selected as the leader.
“There are often students who are going to be the captain of the football team or they’re the tallest, so they’re picked for everything. Sometimes it is an opportunity to pick the students who wouldn’t be picked for other things. We always have a great mix of students so it’s fantastic.”
As of the end of last year, almost 400 Irish schools have participated in the initiative developed by Lift, a non-profit social enterprise. Similar initiatives are also taking place at third level.
Ali Moore is in the final year of a bachelor of commerce with French at University of Galway (UG). Having grown up in Galway, she found it more difficult to meet new people in her first year at college. Moore was introduced to Lift on an Erasmus to France in third year. She took part in roundtables with other Irish students on a year abroad.
“It was an opportunity to get to know everyone and learn about people’s strengths and weaknesses,” she says. “It was quite an interesting activity to take on with a group of strangers. You’d have these conversations with people you’re close to, but it really opened us up to new aspects of people that you wouldn’t get from a face value conversation.”
For Moore, Lift’s initial benefits revealed themselves in exposure to new people and a boost in confidence. She believes exposure to the programme at second level would have benefited her in every aspect of her life.
“We loved the continuity of every week,” she says. “You’d reflect on the week before – the actions that you’d set for yourself. You’d just take two minutes to start the day saying yeah, I actually did well there – pat on the back. Or I probably could’ve improved a little bit there, so I’ll put it on the list of things to do this week.
“The different key values – they all had something different from offer. Somebody in the room might stand out to you as a very good listener. Then another week, we’d speak about something, and you’d think, oh maybe I’m the one at the head of the accountability programme.
“It was nice to be able to pick someone out and give them a pat on the back – say this is what you’re good at. Also getting time to reflect yourself and say I could probably do better there. I never really realised that was what integrity is – stuff like that.”
UG announced its partnership with Lift in 2021. Emer Mulligan, a professor in taxation and finance, is one of the people overseeing the programme at the university. Like Ali Moore and Joanne Logan, she sees a wide variety of benefits in the model.
They learn from a very young age that you’re accountable to yourself. It isn’t always about accountability outwards, and sometimes you have to be honest with yourself on what you’re doing and what you’re not doing
— Emer Mulligan
“When people sit down and get together in an organisation like ours where we have over 18,000 students, some people can get very lost,” Mulligan says. “Roundtables, which are the very mechanism by which they go through the values, serve very well for people, in the first instance, to even make friends.
“Certainly, they secure a sense of belonging. They do that by talking through these values. Then they can move on to start to learn very significant things that should hold true for life – how you carry yourself? Do you show respect to people no matter what your position is?
“One I really like is accountability. I think of honesty and accountability together. They learn from a very young age that you’re accountable to yourself. It isn’t always about accountability outwards, and sometimes you have to be honest with yourself on what you’re doing and what you’re not doing.”
It can be a challenge to measure the direct impact of a leadership programme, though there is scope for assessment of Lift’s effectiveness as the years go by and more data is collected from participants. Mulligan stresses that leadership can only be taught best if it is truly embedded in the structure of Irish education.
Support for school leaders
Lift is not the only initiative devoted to leadership in Irish education. Mary Nihill is the director of leadership at Oide, the national support service for teachers and school leaders. While Lift is mainly focused on emboldening students, Oide’s work revolves around principals, deputy principals and middle leaders.
“There’s about a 10 per cent changeover of principalship in the two sectors [primary and post-primary] every year, believe it or not,” Nihill says. “If you were a newly appointed principal [NAP], you would be offered a national induction programme called Misneach – the Irish word for courage.”
Misneach facilitates learning modules for NAPs and grants them a trained mentor for their first year – often an experienced principal with a background in a similar type of school. Oide has different programmes available for aspiring school leaders.
Some of the values Oide aims to foster are different, perhaps, to Lift. A common thread though, is in the holistic nature of leadership itself. If it is to be successfully ingrained in Irish education, leadership has to be taught in a variety of ways.
“Leadership is a very emotionally laden activity,” Nihill says. “It’s those aspects. Having that difficult conversation; challenging inappropriate behaviour; dealing with a distraught parent and an emotional child – those types of activities are the ones that keep principals awake at night. Dealing with that type of advice, help and support is best done in a face-to-face setting.”
