Clive started his career as a teacher of economics and geography in a college of further education. From here, he moved, in 1974, to Madeley College of Education, where he trained teachers of economics. All the time he was developing an abiding interest in education as a field of study and practice - a prime motivation for his undertaking a doctorate in comparative education at the London Institute of Education, where he was greatly influenced by his supervisor, the late Professor Brian Holmes. During his doctoral studies, he moved to University College, Cardiff (now Cardiff University) in 1978 to take a lectureship in educational management, one of very few Universities offering the subject at the time. After 10 years developing the field of educational management at Cardiff, Clive moved to the University of Western Australia (UWA), where he again established post graduate programmes in educational leadership and management from scratch. In 1996, he took leave from UWA to join the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he stayed for 5 years and developed an enduring interest in writing about – and developing - a cross-cultural perspective on educational leadership. After a brief return to UWA in 2000, Clive moved to the University of Leicester in 2001, where he directed the Centre for Educational Leadership and Management. In 2009, he was invited to lead a major government funded research project mapping leadership practices across the whole Singapore school system – a unique opportunity to study leadership on a system-wide scale in a ‘top-performing’ school system. It is intended that the current baseline study will be followed by in-depth investigation of the leadership contribution to school improvement and student learning, and school intervention studies to sustain and scale up informed evidence-based leadership practice system-wide. He greatly cherishes the opportunities and insights afforded him through having lived, and worked as an academic in educational leadership, on three continents.
Clive’s latest book – Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement, is published by Routledge in 2012. Leadership is defined primarily as about capacity building. Adopting a somewhat different perspective from the norm, new themes are introduced, such as the ‘research-engaged school’. Besides new concepts and themes, the book addresses a number of current mainstream issues, such as learning-centered leadership, distributed leadership and leadership of schools as professional learning communities, but it also looks at some of them through a cross-cultural perspective, especially comparing Anglo-American and Asian perspectives. It is part of a 5-book Leadership for Learning Series, for which Clive is an Editor. Each book in the Series takes a specialist area of leadership and explores it from three aspects – concepts, themes and impact.
In 2000, Clive published a seminal book, Designing the Learning-Centred School: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. This brought together another of his major enduring interests and passions dating back 20 years, namely, connections between leadership and teaching and learning. Research evidence on efficacious methods of teaching and learning, and curriculum, as well as uses of technology should inform – it is argued – leadership and how schools of the 21st century should be designed.
His involvement as an author with Routledge goes back to 1993, when his first book was published – an edited volume, School-based Management and School Effectiveness. This was followed by two books in 1997, both co-authored with Tom O’Donoghue - Innovative School Principals and Restructuring: Life History Portraits of Successful Managers of Change, and School Restructuring: International Perspectives. In 2002, his influential School Leadership and Administration: The Cultural Context was co-authored with Allan Walker.
He is on the editorial boards of School Leadership and Management and the Journal of Educational Administration. His articles appear in many Routledge (Taylor and Francis) Journals, such as British Journal of Educational Studies, Educational Review, Leadership and Policy in Schools, Journal of Educational Policy, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, Compare, Comparative Education and Asia Pacific Journal of Education.
Clive can be contacted at clive.dimmock@nie.edu.sg