Conference Agenda

Internationally, education has become more and more interconnected. Global reform movements, powerful supranational bodies, and comparative assessments have brought national education systems closer together in one sense. Many individual countries are faced with increasing influences and pressures emanating from external sources in what can now often seem to be a borderless Western education space (McNamara et al. 2022) and this has many implications for leadership and policy. However, it is commonly acknowledged that global agendas, processes, and drivers do not affect national education systems in fixed and linear ways (Savage and O’Connor 2015), and there is growing awareness in some quarters of the importance of context in both leadership (Clarke and O’Donoghue 2017) and policy (Braun et al. 2011; Ball et al. 2012).

While there will be similarities between different countries, certain leadership and policy issues can be very different across countries in terms of how they are embraced, enacted, and experienced by practitioners, as well as how they are explored by researchers. In this session, a range of perspectives will be offered on the lessons a group of researchers have learned from researching leadership and policy in different countries: Australia, England, and Ireland.

This symposium is being held by the Critical Education Leadership and Policy (CELP) research group from the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. As a research group, CELP undertakes policy scholarship that explores education leadership as a site where policy is enacted, power relations exerted, and professional identities and practices are suggested and inhibited. Researchers in CELP use and develop a wide range of methods, social theories and conceptual frameworks, and a critical approach that foregrounds the relationship between the wider context and school leaders’ practices and identities. This context includes the policy, ideological, historical, economic, political and cultural.

A particular strength of the CELP group is that it comprises scholars from different countries and with experiences of working and researching in different countries. As part of this symposium four of CELP’s researchers reflect and share the lessons they have learned from researching education policy and leadership in these different jurisdictions. From this range of perspectives on researching leadership and policy, there will be some commonalities, convergences, and complements, but there will also be more distinctive cases. All of these perspectives, it is envisaged, can help other leadership and policy researchers to follow new lines of thought as well as posing ‘new questions and new problems for leadership and policy researchers’ (Ball 2011, 52).

Educational leadership as a field has previously been critiqued for a lack of diversity in topics of focus (Lumby & Moorosi, 2022), theory (McGinity et al., 2022), and method (Thomson, 2017). We respond to the ECER2023 call for papers by recognising the importance of field histories and research foundations, while centring a future of research that ‘benefits society’ and the wider education profession. In this symposium, we consider what can be learnt from our experiences of researching in different contexts, in an effort to move forward toward a field that recognises the unique and shared contextual features. The papers in this symposium draw upon our research in the field of educational leadership to ask important questions about what it means to “do research that benefits society” and how the field of educational leadership might move towards more diverse approaches to our work.

This paper’s national perspective comes from Ireland, a small country on the periphery of Europe. Education is widely acknowledged as being highly valued in Irish society (Drudy and Lynch 1993; Harford 2010; Dolan 2012; Quinn 2012). The education system is a high-performing one and like many education systems around the world it is now closely aligned with the economy and viewed competitively and as a way of attracting foreign direct investment (McNamara et al. 2022). A notable feature of the Irish school system is the high-level of involvement of the Catholic Church. The paper offers the perspective of an Irish researcher as part of a reflection on the lessons they have learned from their time researching education policy and leadership in Ireland.The author has researched a broad range of policy and leadership areas in Ireland and will share four key lessons learned from doing this work: it is important to pay close attention to context when doing research in education; it is possible that some interviewees are too interview ready; it can be very valuable treating researcher subjectivity as a key asset in your research; and you are not always listened to—being critical sometimes means being ignored. Although these lessons have been learned by the researcher in Ireland, their relevance and usefulness are not confined to this country. It is envisaged that these lessons will resonate with, bring reassurance to, and be of value to many others beyond Ireland.

Dolan, A. M. (2012). Reforming teacher education in the context of lifelong learning: the case of the BEd degree programme in Ireland. European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(4), 463-479. Drudy, S., and Lynch, K.(1993). Schools and Society in Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd. Harford, J. (2010). Teacher education policy in Ireland and the challenges of the twenty‐first century. European Journal of Teacher Education, 33(4), 349-360. McNamara, G., Skerritt, C., O’Hara, J., O’Brien, S., & Brown, M. (2022). For improvement, accountability, or the economy? Reflecting on the purpose (s) of school self-evaluation in Ireland. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 54(2), 158-173. Quinn, R. (2012). The future development of education in Ireland. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 101(402), 123-138.

This paper brings perspectives from Australia, drawing on experiences of researching educational leadership and policy from a critical perspective. Australia has been described as being ‘tangential’ to Europe, the UK, and the US as a site of knowledge production (Fahey & Kenway, 2010), and as being on the ‘semi-periphery’ of academia (Luczaj & Holy-Lucasz, 2022). As a result, Australian research has tended to bring ideas from outside. There is a significant presence of European theorists in Australian critical education research with, for example, a long history of Australian sociologists drawing on European and North American writing as part of their work (Connell, 2015). To provide important context for this paper, Australian educational leadership research is largely represented in two key paradigms, described by Niesche and Gowlett (2019) as mainstream and critical. Broadly speaking, mainstream leadership research tends to focus on ‘what works’ in educational leadership and efforts towards improving schools, whereas critical research tends to focus on questions of equity, social justice, and power. Niesche and Gowlett (2019) note the importance of critical perspectives in the current political and educational climate, which prizes solutions to the complex challenges facing schools and communities. The diverging approaches to research results in a real risk of knowledge being generated in silos, a notion previously explored by McGinity et al. (2022). More specifically, educational leadership as a field has faced critiques of the ways research has reproduced similar questions over time. In response to the ECER2023 focus on the value of diversity in education and educational research, this paper explores possibilities for a more diverse approach towards researching educational leaders. To do so, the paper draws upon the author’s experiences of undertaking educational leadership research in Australia. It responds to calls for rethinking and diversifying the dominant approaches in the field in relation to three key areas: theory (McGinity et al., 2022), methods (Thomson, 2017), and topics of focus (Lumby & Moorosi, 2022). To explore these areas, the paper draws upon examples of research that has explored women’s experiences of leadership; made use of different metaphors to understand leaders’ identities and practices; and has communicated research findings in diverse methods. Through analysing these wider projects and research practices, the paper argues for a diversification of research approaches, topics, and methods in order to ask different questions, hear different stories and perspectives from participants, and undertake research that benefits society while moving the field forward.

Connell, R. (2015). Setting sail: The making of sociology in Australia, 1955–75. Journal of Sociology, 51(2), 354–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783314532174 Fahey, J., & Kenway, J. (2010). Thinking in a ‘worldly’ way: Mobility, knowledge, power and geography. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31(5), 627–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2010.516943 Luczaj, K., & Holy-Luczaj, M. (2022). International academics in the peripheries. A qualitative meta-analysis across fifteen countries. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2021.2023322 McGinity, R., Heffernan, A., & Courtney, S. J. (2022). Mapping trends in educational-leadership research: A longitudinal examination of knowledge production, approaches and locations. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(2), 217-232. Niesche, R. & Gowlett, C. (2019). Critical perspectives in educational leadership: a new ‘theory turn’? In Niesche, R. & Gowlett, C. (2019). Social, Critical and Political Theories for Educational Leadership, 17-34. Singapore: Springer. Thomson, P. (2017). A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49(3), 215-230.

Educational-leadership research in England, as across the English-speaking world, arguably features insufficient methodological diversity (McGinity, Heffernan, & Courtney, 2022; Thomson, 2017). It tends to be epistemologically aligned with a functionalist, instrumental construction of leading (Gunter, 2016), and to investigate this construct through a positivist lens that privileges quantitative data (Thomson, 2017). Importantly, policymakers and practitioners draw upon such research to enact a ‘what-works’ agenda in educational leadership. For example, the UK government has renewed its funding commitment to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2022). The EEF is intended to be a “one-stop shop” regarding research evidence in education and aims explicitly to identify and disseminate “what works”. A recent example regarding leadership guidance concerns a systematic review of the characteristics of effective teacher professional development (Sims et al., 2021), where the methodological approach of a systematic review; the identification of characteristics (or traits) and the privileging of effectiveness all indicate a functionalist framing. This approach reproduces the conceptual collocation of educational leadership with an underpinning managerialist, performative and privatising discourse that de-contextualises and ignores questions of structural inequality and differential agency. England, I argue, constitutes an instantiation of the possible, since the discursive conditions that produced it are Europe-wide (Gunter, Grimaldi, Hall, & Serpieri, 2016). In response, I aim in this presentation to elucidate a worked methodological repudiation to functionalism from a recent research project: “Multi-academisation and its leadership”, which I offer to the field as a ‘lesson learned’ and so, an intellectual resource. I employ a novel methodology which I argue illuminates more profoundly than through functionalism the sociological meaning of “being” and “doing” educational leadership in a marketised English context. Specifically, I describe and reflect upon my recent experiences of rendering my interpretation of participants’ experiences of multi-academisation as Brechtian-inspired scripted drama (Courtney & McGinity, 2021). This enabled my co-author and me to be more literal through being more figurative, by transforming our charismatic, almost messianic participant leader explicitly into a Jesus-like character in our scripted analysis and thereby negating the need to explain his practice through a constructed lens of messianic leadership. This approach enables new interpretations of what constitutes valid forms of analysis, and how the role of imagination in qualitative research might be made more explicit and methodologically raised in status. It exemplifies an alternative methodological approach that better encompasses how social actors may be understood, compared to measurable, quantitative data regarding inputs and outputs.

Courtney, S. J., & McGinity, R. (2021). Turning Water into Wine: Scripting Multi-Academisation through Messianic Educational Leadership. In D. Mifsud (Ed.), Narratives of Educational Leadership: Representing Research via Creative Analytic Practices. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Education Endowment Foundation. (2022). New: Government confirms long-term funding for EEF. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-government-confirms-long-term-funding-for-eef Gunter, H. M. (2016). An intellectual history of school leadership practice and research. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Gunter, H. M., Grimaldi, E., Hall, D., & Serpieri, R. (2016). New Public Management and the Reform of Education: European lessons for policy and practice. (H. M. Gunter, E. Grimaldi, D. Hall, & R. Serpieri, Eds.). London: Routledge. McGinity, R., Heffernan, A., & Courtney, S. J. (2022). Mapping trends in educational-leadership research: A longitudinal examination of knowledge production, approaches and locations. Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 50(2), 217–232. Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J., & Anders, J. (2021). What are the Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development? A Systematic Review & Meta-analysis. London. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews/teacher-professional-development-characteristics Thomson, P. (2017). A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49(3), 215–230.