'Leadership' has now become one of the most over-used terms in school organisation, so much so that it is now difficult to find mentions of 'management' and 'administration' in school organisation literature. Papers published in "Educational Management, Administration and Leadership" and "Management in Education" over the last…

Award-bearing transnational professional development training has received little attention in the literature. By taking a longitudinal mixed-methods approach, this project's researchers investigated the ways in which participants on a World Bank-funded programme practised leadership at the start of their training, before revisiting them a year…

Fundamental widespread changes affecting education's purposes, policies and practices have had transformational repercussions for school business across the developed world. Subsequently, school business demands and accountabilities continue to escalate in scope and complexity and governments, education authorities and school communities are…

This study investigates professional development among educational policy-makers, institutional leaders and teachers. Through a synthesis of associated literature, this study identified a large number of articles focusing on professional development among teachers and lecturers. However, only a few studies on professional development among leaders…

Many supplementary and complementary schools operating in the United Kingdom and other countries have connections and relationships with religious organisations. However, there is considerable variety and complexity in these links and connections. Amidst some public concerns about these schools and as so little is known about them compared with…

John Widdowson CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) is principal and chief executive of New College Durham. He chairs the Mixed Economy Group (a working group of 40 colleges that offer higher education courses in addition to their FE provision) and was a member of the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for…

In this opinion piece, the author reflects on some similarities with the National Health Service (NHS) in England, which has a long history of leadership tensions as hospital trusts have tried to wrestle administrative and operational decision-making away from clinicians and consultants.

The article, as an opinion piece, considers the experience of Government policy change with reference to the further education sector in England. An Institute for Government report, "All change: Why Britain is so prone to policy reinvention, and what can be done about it" focused on further education as one of its case examples. Those of…

For those in 'system leader' roles in English schools, whether formally designated or informally appropriated, there has not been much systematic or long-term thinking about professional development to date. To contribute to such thinking, this paper presents a common framework for system leader development, based on consultancy research. The…

This research poses two interrelated questions. How important is it for the formation of democratic ideas about educational leadership that the group or individual promoting those ideas is operating within a democratic political environment or, to the contrary, in the absence of one? And second, in the case of the latter, what are the available…

This article looks at the potential of using an online self-completing inventory that measures leadership consciousness awareness. The Consciousness Quotient inventory (CQ-i) has been developed to encourage leaders to be more conscious of their ability to be accountable and responsible for their leadership practice. The CQ-i as a method for…

This article will focus on the challenges of leadership and management of a key initiative of the 20052014 UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), namely the Regional Centres of Expertise in Education for Sustainability (RCEs). It will argue that in order to achieve sustainability, there is a need to move away from outdated…

This article is taken from a talk given by John Schostak at the Co-Operative Head Office, Manchester on 25 September 2015. Question addressed in this paper include: (1) To what extent is leadership needed for a democratic life?; (2) What form of democratic organisation, if any, is compatible with leadership?; and (3) Is democracy undermined by…

The importance of trust in institutions in Japan is a common theme that emerges from literature on Japanese institutions. This article presents a problem-based methodology investigation into a Japanese educational institution, and how a Japanese educational leader deals with student incidents. A theory of action detailing strategies chosen in that…

Recently, distributed leadership (DL) has become a popular approach to leadership across the social sciences, including education. This article documents reasons for the emergence of a distributed perspective and summarizes some of the background against which DL's popularity emerged, in a field of study with a traditional adherence to leadership…