Virtue ethics and toxic leadership: Tackling the toxic triangle

Teaching continues to develop in English Sixth Form Colleges as teachers look to improve their professional practice. However, despite improvements in terms of practice and students’ outcomes, teachers continue to be closely managed and experience ever closer mechanisms of scrutiny. For those observers who adopt a critical position of Government policy and the impact of New Public Management, recent experience has led to the redefinition of teachers’ work and their professional identity. The autonomy of the professional in the classroom has been replaced by the panopticon of a bureaucratic audit culture in which teachers are evaluated according to their ‘performativity’ (Ball, 2003). It is within this environment that toxic leadership is able to emerge and indeed flourish. This paper explores the nature of toxicity in the post compulsory sector and offers some strategies to address this issue.