Presentation issue 4º

Experience tells us that behind all good teaching centers there is good school management. Research confirms that school improvement is linked to a leadership that exercises leadership, ensures teaching processes and serves as an interlocutor with the different social and institutional agents.

The inspectors who have exercised the direction -most of us have done it- understand well the complexity of the position in its many facets and functions. At the same time, the exercise of the inspection function integrates the simultaneous knowledge of multiple realities that make up other styles of exercising the direction. This is a privileged position to analyze the different managerial styles.

When the Education Inspectorate carries out the evaluation of the school management, it takes into account various indicators; Among all of them, training (which allows managers to act with confidence in unforeseen or conflicting situations), capacity to dynamize groups (which is usually done in unfavorable conditions, among other reasons because it can not influence the selection of staff at your expense); ability and enthusiasm, desire to work, to innovate, to have a vision and transmit it, so that it allows to channel the efforts of all the staff in the same direction.

All these aspects, varied and complex, are addressed by the different articles that make up this number. The first one of Manuel Álvarez, an expert in school management, deals with the possibility of defining a professional profile for the public school management. It establishes principles in the access mode, the areas that the specific training must have and defines the capabilities of the management profile.

Serafín Antúnez, professor at the University of Barcelona, ​​comments on the lights and shadows of the LOE in relation to management and on the same subject - the new Law on Quality - José Luis Estefanía, Technical Advisor of Academic Organization of the Ministry of Education and Science analyzes the profiles and the way of access to the address in the successive norms, from the LODE to the LOE.

The article by Luis Batanaz Palomares, Full Professor of the University of Córdoba, deals with the need to professionalize the directive function free of direct political dependencies or dependencies. José María Vera Mur, education inspector from Lleida, analyzes the competences of the management of a public center, access requirements, procedure for the selection of candidates, appointment, support and recognition, establishing a parallelism in each of these sections between the last two Organic Laws, LOCE and LOE.

Araceli García Flores, IES professor Felipe Solis, from Cabra (Córdoba), analyzes the management style and the leadership that management should exercise in an Institute that has implemented a quality management model.

Carmen Duque Revuelta, Councilor for Education of the City Council of Getafe, emphasizes the director as a mediating agent between the educational center and the environment.

Inmaculada Egido Gálvez, professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, describes the most outstanding features of the managerial figure in education according to the classical theoretical models of the Organization and the most representative political models in the countries of Europe.

Purificación Fuente Aguilar, education inspector of the Community of Madrid, justifies the need for an effective management capable of involving teachers in a future project and exercising institutional leadership.
Finally, Esteban Martínez Lobato, central inspector of the MEC and president of the ADIDE Federation, affirms that both educational research and experience have confirmed the importance of an adequate school management to have quality schools.
 
The management approach as a team that coordinates the work of all the staff of the center, even if it manages to improve the quality of the performance of the people in the team, is a future focus, which should impregnate teachers, students, schools, researchers, public authorities and society as a whole. And receive, consequently, the necessary support that facilitates its task.

The editorial board.