Transformational leadership research has always been viewed with the cisgender white male in mind. Very limited transformational leadership studies are available regarding underrepresented women who are in the racial or ethnic minority, LGBTQIA+, religious minority, and/or have disabilities. This research examines how underrepresented women…

After the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NEU (2021) report states that one in three teachers plan to leave the profession in the next 5 years. As previous studies published by the DfE focusing on workload have not affected the wastage rate of the profession, there is something deeper at work which needs to be explored. A critical theory,…

The place of Church school headteachers as spiritual leaders of the school community is rarely highlighted. This article investigates how 13 Church primary school headteachers (Catholic Church of England, and Methodist) interpret this role. It draws on the Faith in the Nexus research which investigated how church primary schools nurtured pupils'…

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…

School leaders are expected to act with integrity, but values are always contested: one person's 'moral purpose' is not the same as another's. Researchers have explored these issues from different angles. One approach focusses on individual leaders, seeking to understand how their values inform their practice. Other work highlights that individual…

This paper reports the findings from a small-scale collaborative autoethnographic study of two teacher educators' experience of leading Initial Teacher Training (ITT) programmes at a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in England during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected via narrative conversations between the two teacher educators such…

The study draws on mixed methods research with further education middle managers across England in order to explore whether there are gendered differences in management. There remain debates about whether there are gender differences in management or leadership. The study adds to this debate with results that reveal that women and men are…

This article offers a comparative analysis and interpretation of leadership in the four UK education jurisdictions (Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland), informed by the articles in this special issue and by a project report, all outcomes of an initiative, 'Educational Leadership, Management and Administration in the United Kingdom: A…

In this article, we analyse the ways school headteachers/principals (HT/Ps) at different stages of adult ego development (AED) make sense of and respond to the organisational complexity of their schools. The AED stage of 20 HT/Ps in England was assessed using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test. HT/Ps in the self-aware,…

The article explores the governance, leadership and management of complementary schools through the case of Greek Cypriot complementary schools in England with a view to developing a research agenda for this under-researched yet significant sector of education for children and young people. Drawing on stakeholder and bottom-up theories of…

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…

Using data from a national study on principals' responses to the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, we describe crisis leadership as boundary spanning -- managing up, down, and outwards to lead the response. School leaders had to manage outside expectations to ensure their schools responded to the crisis in ways that allowed for…

While much has been written about the impact of metrics in higher education, less is known about the variety of response orientations that individual academics may adopt in reaction to the increasing metricization of academia. Taking the English higher education sector as a case study, this research surveyed the views of academics from Education…

Purpose: To improve school organisational performance and innovativeness, and meet diverse student needs, school leaders should be innovative, risk-takers and proactive, thus applying entrepreneurial practices/strategies and market mechanisms. This study aims to investigate, from a schoolteacher's perspective, the degree of entrepreneurial…

Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of…