In this Bourdieusian analysis, we explore the intersection of gender and leadership within China's hierarchised higher-education sector. A key contribution is our conceptualisation of 'concentric multi-fields,' illustrating how actors navigate competing logics from the higher-education field and the overarching field of power, which, we argue, is where gendered doxic logics are primarily located. Through narrative analysis of two senior women leaders, distally positioned in the HE field, we argue first that leaders embody their hierarchised institution's habitus; second, participants' field positions are demonstrated in how they conceptualise and 'do' leadership; and third, gender interplays with the resulting forms of leadership to reveal the strategic and instinctive deployment of capitals from the HE field and also the field of power that concentrically encompasses it. The study advances understanding of power dynamics in higher education, calling for intersectional methodologies to critically examine leadership and social reproduction in non-Western contexts.
This study examined organizational trauma and coping mechanisms in two educational organizations in Israel's Upper Galilee during the Iron Sword War: an evacuated formal school and a non-evacuated non-formal educational setting. Using a qualitative case-study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 leaders, including principals, teachers, counselors and parents. The findings revealed distinct responses to the crisis. In the formal school, evacuation and geographic dispersal disrupted educational and community continuity, contributing to blurred professional boundaries and weakened organizational identity. In contrast, the non-formal setting benefited from strong community cohesion, local continuity and organizational flexibility, which supported social and emotional stability despite staff burnout. In both settings, strong professional commitment and a heightened sense of mission were evident. The findings suggest that organizational trauma is context-dependent rather than event-dependent and shaped by structural and communal features. The study recommends cross-organizational learning, resilience-building mechanisms, and community-emotional training as part of emergency preparedness.
Schools in a democracy need community involvement; community engagement in schools needs structures to support it. This article scopes how community engagement is conceptualised and enacted within Aotearoa New Zealand's self-managing Tomorrow's Schools system between 2009-2024 through a systematic integrative review of scholarly and grey literature. Using a replicable, PRISMA-informed protocol, we identified 68 eligible sources across government, education and academic sectors, and analysed them using reflexive thematic analysis. Definitions of community engagement were rarely explicit, and reported practices clustered at the lower end of the engagement continuum, particularly communication and participation, with comparatively few examples of durable, democratic decision-making. A consistent theme arising from the review is that policy ambiguity, including an under-specified notion of 'community', can constrain meaningful engagement and may leave gains for historically underserved groups less secure. The review concludes with implications for policy and future research, emphasising definitional clarity, representative infrastructures and longitudinal, collaborative inquiry.
This study systematically reviewed empirical and conceptual research on Islamic educational leadership to identify its core characteristics and administrative principles. Using a systematic review method, the authors examined 18 peer-reviewed studies (11 empirical and 7 conceptual) retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The findings show that Islamic educational leadership operates through two interconnected dimensions: the Islamic Spiritual Core of Leadership, which includes God-consciousness (Taqwa) and sincerity (Ikhlas), and the Application of Islamic Administrative Principles, which includes trustworthiness (Amanah), honesty (Sidq), compassion (Rahma), patience (Sabr), justice (Adl), and consultation (Shura). These dimensions reflect a progression from internal spiritual values to observable leadership practices. Although leadership practices may differ across Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority contexts, the study concludes that Islamic educational leadership is grounded in universal moral and theological principles that transcend geographical boundaries.
This study examines scholarly articles on social justice-oriented educational leadership published between 2000 and 2024, tracing the field's conceptual evolution, theoretical foundations, and key thematic trends. Employing a hybrid systematic review approach that integrates quantitative bibliometric mapping with qualitative thematic synthesis, it investigates core theories underpinning this leadership paradigm and the challenges of translating theory into practice. Unlike prior reviews that relied on either bibliometric or narrative approaches, this study combines both, offering a historical mapping alongside a thematic interrogation of 20 influential works. Its main contribution lies in the thematic analysis, which reveals how structural, political, and ethical constraints are theorized across contexts, moving the field beyond descriptive mapping toward critical synthesis. Drawing on 25 years of publications from Scopus and Web of Science, findings show significant growth in the field and increasing attention to ethical, cultural, structural, and political dimensions. The study underscores that effective educational leadership must address systemic inequalities, while highlighting policy constraints that limit the enactment of social justice principles and calling for equity-centered reforms.
This paper reports on the life of Sir David Normington. His career with the civil service is unusual in length (1973-2016) and location (three ministries - Employment, Education and Home Office - leading in the latter two for 10 and then 5 years as chief regulator of the service). Having outlined a three-level research approach the paper draws on a four-stage life-history model (making, becoming, being, leaving) to enable comparative analysis. Reflecting on the capabilities required of civil servants, Normington lists four strands - policy work, project management, human resource management, and ministerial support. What this means, can vary considerably between departments. Illustrating this, we focus on two issues. First the determination of policy on academy schools. Second, the management of problems relating to rapid turnovers in the tenure of ministers and civil servants. Against this background, the paper concludes with Normington's defence of the service he served for so long.
Instructional leadership has been widely recognised as a central driver of teaching quality and student achievement. However, its enactment is often constrained by various factors, such as principals' knowledge, limited time, and external context. This qualitative study explores how interpersonal dynamics within the teaching staff may also inhibit principals' efforts to exercise instructional leadership. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 27 elementary school principals across Israel, the analysis identified three recurring patterns that hinder leadership practice. Non-instructional collegiality occurs when teachers prioritise personal relationships over professional collaboration, creating a culture in which social harmony displaces instructional dialogue. Teacher-controlled boundaries emerge when staff collectively restrict the principal's legitimacy to shape pedagogy, fostering conflict-avoidant norms that protect underperformance. Coordinated non-cooperation reflects instances where close teacher networks subtly or overtly resist leadership initiatives, offering surface-level compliance without meaningful engagement. Taken together, these dynamics illustrate how school micropolitics complicate the enactment of instructional leadership.
This study uses the notion of 'care paradox' to examine how a care ethics generates paradoxes in aspiring for school leadership positions that have not been adequately theorised in existing scholarship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with women in middle leadership at two separate Victorian Government Secondary schools in Australia, we present detailed case studies that illustrate how care paradoxes manifest in school contexts. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of care paradox: institutional, temporal, relational, and professional. These paradoxes create situations where women's care ethics simultaneously prepares them for leadership while creating barriers to career advancement, where their caring dispositions are both valuable and devalued, and where caring responses generate conflicting ethical demands. The study contributes new theoretical understanding of how ethics of care mediate career sense-making, reveals the complex internal tensions that shape women's career trajectories in education, and provides insights into how these tensions are navigated.
Parent engagement is framed in Australian schooling as central to school improvement. Yet in affluent, high-choice contexts, such engagement is increasingly shaped by consumerist expectations that recast parents as clients and reposition partnership as oversight. This study examines how consumerism is experienced as reshaping the practice and emotional demands of school leadership. Drawing on Gadamerian hermeneutic phenomenology, it explores the lived experiences of two primary school leaders in an affluent school community, interpreting how parental scrutiny, escalation, and entitlement are understood as disrupting relational leadership and challenging professional legitimacy. Behaviour management was a particular flashpoint, generating conflict and reputational risk, while constant demands for accessibility intensified emotional strain. The study contributes to critical educational leadership and policy scholarship, arguing that neoliberal consumerism reconfigures leadership practice, trust, and wellbeing in schools, positions parental consumerism as a significant yet under-theorised source of emotional exhaustion, and prompts a rethinking of parent engagement.
This paper traces the emergence of workload as a central policy problem by analysing workforce survey data from the Australian College of Educators (ACE) and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Using Bacchi's What's the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach, it examines how shifts in survey design, question framing and policy responses over time have transformed workload into a measurable and governable issue. Drawing on Foucault's assertion that discourse constructs the objects of which it speaks, we argue that the codification of workload as a problem has been shaped by changing workforce surveillance. Through an analysis of survey instruments from the 1960s to the present, we demonstrate how workload became an object of policy concern via a discursive shift in how policy and the profession came to represent teachers' and school leaders' work. This discursive shift evident in the surveys, we argue, shows that teachers' and school leaders' experience of work has changed but also has created a workload concept that fails to adequately characterise those changes.
Professional learning in education policy should support school-based education leaders to engage critically with policy. Taking a broadly socially critical perspective on education leadership, we draw on theories of agentic leadership and Ball et al.'s (2011; 2012) typology of policy actors, including narrators, critics, and receivers to explore how leaders can reframe policy from a set of mandates into a flexible tool for equity and local responsiveness. Narratives from school-based senior and middle leaders who completed postgraduate policy courses reveal shifts in policy understanding and identity across four learning contexts: university, personal, work, and professional. While participants developed new perspectives and aspirations, their ability to enact policy was constrained by institutional hierarchies and cultures of compliance. The study highlights the need for professional learning that deepens policy knowledge and also supports leadership practice capable of reshaping policy engagement. It advocates for inclusive, collaborative, and contextually relevant approaches to policy work.
The leadership practices of Black women principals are seldom theorised nor included in Educational Management Leadership and Administration (EMLA) literature. This oversight is problematic as extant research has made clear that Black women principals are critical to the educational success and overall wellbeing of children in general and Black children in particular. The purpose of this study is two-fold. I use a Black feminist lens to (1) describe and analyze the leadership practices of a Black woman principal, and (2) put forward a framework for school leadership, Black Feminist School Leadership, to inform the praxis of racially just school leadership. While this conversation and theoretical framework centre the realities of Black women in the United States (U.S.), anti-Blackness is palpable throughout the African diaspora. Hence, the leadership strategies gleaned from U.S. Black women school leaders are germane to the schoolhouse on a global scale.
While there has been increased interest in trauma-informed practice in schools which support students with diverse and sometimes complex needs, there is a dearth of literature on trauma-informed leadership practices that aid the navigation of crisis events. This article draws from both crisis leadership and trauma-informed education literature to generate a model for trauma-informed leadership. It builds on previous research by mobilising qualitative interview data from 13 principals in Aotearoa New Zealand, to map dimensions of trauma-informed leadership in education settings. Nine interconnected dimensions of trauma-informed leadership practice are profiled which can be used to inform work in schools. The researchers highlight that effective crisis leadership involves understanding and addressing trauma's impact across the schooling ecosystem. Although there are different levels of preparedness, these events are marked by their unpredictability and leaders can foster an environment that supports emotional and psychological well-being within the school community.
Managerialised universities perpetuate students as consumers, structures that physically and virtually separate the university community from one another, and relegate quality teaching as secondary to research output. This study reveals more of the impact of this by evoking a deeper view of embodied, unspoken first-year student experiences. Using an arts-based methodology (novel in this field), the struggles, perseverance, and hope during the first semester of study are seen. Not because of support from the managerialised university, but in spite of it. Social support from family and friends plays a peripheral part in this early stage, but their first semester is an experience of navigating their student lives alone. Students come to study with deep emotional reasons, not purely rational and financial ones. University leaders and academics should pay attention to an absence of social connection to the university community when transactional, managerialised conditions treat students as consumers - not learners.
In this article, I critically examine how place matters for parental engagement in the governance of schooling in subordinated communities. Thinking with Barad's concept of intra-action, I explore how place physically embodies meaning, in its entanglement with human actors to configure corporatised versions of parental engagement. I argue that place acts co-agentically in an entangled intra-action with corporate actors managing parents' engagement, positioning expertise, acting as promoters of public relations and exercising control. I make two contributions. Firstly, I provide an analytical construct to explore the mattering of place in the corporatisation of parents' engagement. Secondly, using Barad's concept of intra-action, I have provided a novel way of thinking about the role of place in the configuration of parental engagement in the corporatised governance of schooling to critically explore how the matter of the embodied place articulates the boundaries of agentic relations in these human and non-human intra-actions.
School leadership has been recognised as central to the success of projects which seek to improve educational outcomes of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students (Trimmer, K., R. Dixon, and J. Guenther. 2021. "School Leadership and Aboriginal Student Outcomes: Systematic Review." Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 49 (1): 20-36). Nevertheless, in the Australian context, leadership models that extend beyond the traditional western bureaucracy and/or management practices are rare. This paper builds on existing literature on the theme of leadership in schools with significant enrolments of Aboriginal students, by theorising the leadership practices required for the long-term sustainability and success of the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project (CNS). The paper engages with the theory of practice architectures (TPA) (Kemmis, S., J. Wilkinson, C. Edwards-Groves, I. Hardy, P. Grootenboer, and L. Bristol. 2014. Changing Practices, Changing Education. Netherlands: Springer Singapore) to consider elements that enable and/or constrain leadership practices. We argue that culturally nourishing schooling practices represent an opportunity for schools and systems to reimagine a relationally responsive approach to school leadership within the broader context of Community and Country.
While previous research has provided insights into crisis management, specifically during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the complexities and unique interactions of school leadership during a wartime crisis warrant specific consideration. Through a conceptual and theoretical synthesis of the existing research literature, we discuss how crises affect schools, education during war crises, and school leadership during war crises. We then suggest nine key roles of school principals during war crises. The nine roles of school principals during war crises are organised within three major clusters: Developing holistic, agile and adaptive management; Ensuring physical and psychological 'shields'; and Developing ecological support and engagement. This article contributes to understanding principals' central role in wartime crises. By understanding the complex challenges and opportunities, we can better support principals in these difficult contexts and improve the quality of education in war-torn and conflict zones.
This paper explores the relationships that principals identify as most significant to their leadership and how these shape their professional identities. Drawing on Foucault's concept of the 'made subject' and Biesta's 'impulse society', the study situates principalship within a web of power relations that render the principal both accountable and emotionally vulnerable. Interviews with sixteen principals identified five key relationships, with each relationship exerting distinct disciplinary pressures. Two intertwined tensions emerge for the principals: a fear of failing students' education and a fear of being publicly exposed as a failure. The study contributes original insights into the emotional labour of leadership, the confessional nature of accountability and self-governance and the seeming absence of ethical resistance among principals. It offers a critical, relational and affective account of principalship, advancing theoretical understandings of subjectification and governmentality situated within the impulsive society while highlighting the ethical and emotional consequences of leading.
