To afford school middle leaders meaningful opportunities to initiate change, we must provide them with the space and flexibility to engage with agentic and creative responses to policy and practice. Whilst we argue that the tensions identified in Bennett's seminal reviews persist, there may, nonetheless, be opportunities for school middle leaders…

Purpose: There is an urge worldwide that school leaders' mental health and well-being must be prioritised within the education recovery at the local, national and global policy levels. This research identified the intentional well-being practices that school leaders cultivated as they faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

This article explores the experiences of those who lead undergraduate education-related programmes in further education (FE) colleges in England. Questionnaire and interview fieldwork with 14 further education-based programme leaders were supplemented by a comparison survey of equivalent professionals from higher education institutions (HEIs).…

In this conceptual article, the issues and insights in leadership are examined in the context of ECE settings. This is a unique field with a predominantly female workforce, and the issue of making a distinction between leadership and management needs to be considered. It is important to develop an understanding of the concept of leadership and…

This paper presents the findings of a self-study exploring the experiences of women leaders, and the intersections of leadership work with roles as mothers. Drawing on narratives of women from across experiences of leading to support women in the workplace, to women who juggle leadership work and mothering, and women whose mothering involves…

Many Senior Leadership Teams (SLTs) are engaging in professional development to nurture explicitly anti-racist practice. Teachers' knowledge gaps about racism, its traumatic, lasting impact and how racism is generated through schooling persist within a cloak of silence. This small-scale study explores interview data from senior leaders in English…

In this article, we examine the role of the Principal within Further Education colleges in England and explore the often neglected issue of succession planning in the sector. To provide background and context to the current situation, key policies and developments over the past 30 years are reviewed and challenges identified. Interviews with…

The systemic changes in the education policy landscape in England under the academies reform movement have nurtured a growing prevalence of educational organisations such as Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) operating as meso-level institutional actors that shape the implementation of policies and mediate between social structures and individual…

My research investigates the experiences of a range of professionals tasked with the role of enacting a policy aimed at achieving social justice. In a drive where one of the priorities was aimed at reducing exclusions from mainstream schools, some participants report feelings of being marginalised and excluded from the policy process. This paper…

This article sets out an original conceptual framework for place-based professional learning by teachers and schools in decentralised education systems. High quality Continuing Professional Development and Learning by teachers is associated with improvements in children's outcomes. Most research in this area focuses on evaluating formal…

The work of school leaders during lockdown has been emotionally charged and emotionally draining, affecting immediate well-being and longer term career plans. To communicate the emotions that we were told about and which were obvious during interviews with serving headteachers, we turned to arts-informed methods. We used poems made from…

This paper contributes to recent debates pertaining to neoliberal technologies of performativity including fabrication, panopticism and post-panopticism. These terms are discussed here in relation to constant visibility from recent school inspection arrangements in England and the impact of this on school leadership. Case study research within one…

Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, schools across the world closed, either periodically or over a considerable time. The OECD reports that during this period, globally, over 1.2 billion children were out of the classroom. As a result, schools moved part or all of their curriculum online, teaching remotely via digital platforms. Evidence suggests…

In considering how to bring joy back to education and the curriculum in England, I argue that it is also necessary to bring the joy of teaching back to classroom practitioners. A fundamental contribution to this may be leadership typologies employed by schools' senior leadership. As an experienced secondary English teacher, over the last 20 years…

Educational management and educational leadership are central concepts in understanding organising in educational institutions but their meaning, the difference between them and their value in educational organising remain the subject of debate. In this article, we analyse and contrast the two concepts. We conclude that educational management…