Conference Agenda

This symposium examines substantial challenges in the principals’ role that have been further exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic, drawing on research into the principalship conducted in England, Sweden, Australia, and Finland. The rationale for this examination is that internationally, schooling systems are facing a principal recruitment and retention crisis (Riley et al., 2021, Heffernan & Pierpoint, 2022). In nations such as Australia, England, and Sweden, stress and burnout, due to increasingly complex social conditions and workload intensification, is leading to an exodus of school leaders and a reluctance from teachers to apply for the principalship. In Sweden, for example, heavy workloads and stress appear to be the main reasons why Swedish principals quit (Thelin & Lund, 2023). In Australia, an annual survey of principals’ occupational health, safety and wellbeing reported 29 per cent of principals were at significant risk of burnout and self-harm - the highest level since the survey commenced in 2011 (See et al., 2022).

Quality educational leadership is instrumental in achieving nations’ aims for fairer, more democratic and socially cohesive societies. The attraction and retention of high-quality educators into the principalship and lower turnover has been shown to accrue significant social benefits: positively impacting teacher retention, school-community engagement and students’ outcomes, particularly for pupils from more marginalised backgrounds (Bartanen et al., 2019; Kelchtermans, 2017). The impact of a principal attraction and retention crisis is significant for students and communities from disadvantaged backgrounds and schools.

Principals’ work historically has been stressful, involving a constant juggle of often-conflicting demands of multiple stakeholders. However, what is new and what this symposium will address are increasing challenges in the role exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic. Each paper addresses different aspects of these challenges, drawing on a range of theoretical tools and methods. Papers cover a range of topics: The English study draws on a three-phase research project on school leaders’ work during and after lockdown. This research shows that during the pandemic there were considerable affective costs on school staff, with care leadership roles (pastoral, welfare and safeguarding) extended with increasing poverty, unrecognised, and disproportionately experienced by female members of staff.

A Swedish research team is studying how community-context-related particularities and challenges contribute to shaping the leadership of principals in schools in urban low socioeconomic status communities, with a particular focus on aspects concerning the principals’ emotional labour. The study also aims to explain principals’ emotional labour in light of the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements that frame their leading practices.

The Australian research examines the emotional labour of educational leading in socially volatile times. Employing the theory of practice architectures, it draws on critical incident testimonies contributed by Australian principals in 2023-2024 in which they reflected on the incident’s emotional impact and key learnings. The paper aims to build new knowledge about the heightened emotional dynamics shaping principals’ work; the dialectical interactions between these emotional dimensions and the contextual and systemic arrangements that influence principals’ labour.

A Finnish research team sheds light on principals’ job crafting, which emerged as a potent strategy helping educators to navigate the contemporary educational terrain marked by increasing uncertainty. Specifically, this study seeks to explore the potential of job crafting in increasing occupational well-being through fostering the development of crucial personal resources, such as curiosity and resilience.

In sum, the objective of this symposium is to collectively explore “the challenges, uncertainties and unstable ground that characterises” the principals’ role and bring to light unrecognised and crucial aspects of their roles whilst also examining how such an exploration can “assist us in addressing current and future needs, challenges and opportunities” (ECER 2024 Call).

Demand for care work intensified and extended during the pandemic and continues to the current day.' Care work’ refers to everything that schools do to support children’s emotional, social and physical well-being. Care-full leadership also covers support for staff in safe and professionally generative and rewarding workplaces. We understand care-full leadership, following Tronto (1998, 2015), to be work which combines (1) attentiveness, becoming aware of need; (2) responsibility, being willing to respond and take care of need; (3) competence, having the skills and knowledge to provide effective care; and (4) responsiveness, considering how others see their position and recognising the potential for the responsibilities of caring to be violated (1993). Our paper draws on a three-phase research project on school leaders’ work during and after lockdown (Greany et al., 2021, 2022, 2023). Our data includes two surveys (n=1491 and n=6057), leader interviews (n=101), stakeholder roundtables (n=9), and analysis of job advertisements. This research shows that during the pandemic there were considerable affective costs on school staff, with care leadership roles (pastoral, welfare and safeguarding) extended and disproportionately experienced by female members of staff. The situation is now critical. Escalating poverty has meant that care demands on schools serving poor communities have further increased, while a youth mental health crisis coupled with rising numbers of children with special needs places unprecedented demands on all schools. Our current four UK nations study of the sustainability of school leadership (https://sustainableschoolleadership.uk) suggests that the English performative and marketised education policy agenda is “care-less” rather than care-full (see Grummell et al., 2009, Lynch, 2010). Leaders must focus on teaching/learning and support students to excel in tests/exams and their school to excel in inspections. Escalating leader vacancies suggest that the predictions made in pandemic research – up to one in three of serving leaders in our studies – are now reality. Leaders argue that government needs to trust them and provide support and resources so that they can continue exercising care-full leadership of students, staff and themselves. This would promote well-being and encourage them to stay. We argue this means policymakers adopting Tronto’s four interlinked care practices. Provocatively, we suggest that the system could well learn about care-full leadership from its school leaders.

Greany, T., Thomson, P. & Bernardes, E., 2023. Still leading after lockdown? Recommendations for enhancing how senior school leaders in England are recruited, trained and sustained: University of Nottingham School of Education. Greany, T., Thomson, P., Cousin, S. & Martindale, N., 2021. Leading in lockdown. Research on school leaders’ work, well-being and career intentions https://schoolleadersworkandwellbeing.files.wordpress.com/2021/12/leading-in-lockdown-final-report.pdf: University of Nottingham School of Education. Greany, T., Thomson, P., Cousin, S. & Martindale, N., 2022. Leading after lockdown. Research on school leaders’ work. well-being and career intentions. Phase 2 findings https://schoolleadersworkandwellbeing.files.wordpress.com/2022/06/leading-after-lockdown-final-report-2-2.pdf: University of Nottingham School of Education. Grummell, B., Devine, D. & Lynch, K., 2009. The care‐less manager: gender, care and new managerialism in higher education. Gender and Education, 21, 191-208. Lynch, K., 2010. Carelessness. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 9, 54-67. Tronto, J., 1993. Moral boundaries. A political argument for an ethic of care London: Routledge. Tronto, J., 1998. An ethic of care. Generations. Journal of the American Society on Aging, 22, 15-20. Tronto, J., 2015. Who cares? How to reshape a democratic politics Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.

This paper examines principals’ emotional, and often invisible, work (Hochschild, 1983; cf. Wilkinson, 2021). Recent studies undertaken in a long-term network collaboration between school principals in low socioeconomic status Swedish communities and educational researchers, show how leadership is learned and shaped in and by context specific circumstances, entailing several challenges. The most prominent challenges are connected to a) high population mobility, b) comprehensive linguistic and cultural diversity, c) comprehensive knowledge diversity, and d) an intense problem complexity, i.e., a dense flow of extraordinary incidents in and around the schools (Hirsh et al., 2023). Although not explicitly elaborated on in these studies, the results also indicate that emotions are a prominent, albeit often unspoken, part of the principals' work. In this study, we re-analyse the same data that led to the above-mentioned findings, with specific interest directed towards finding discursive manifestations of emotional labour. Additionally, the new analysis is directed towards understanding and explaining principals’ emotional labour through a practice architectures lens. Principals’ leading is explored as a practice that consists of sayings, doings and relatings conditioning and conditioned by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2014). The empirical data underlying this study consists of five audio-recorded peer group dialogues between principals (N=20), conducted within the framework of the longitudinal R&D collaboration mentioned above. Our preliminary results show that some site-specific conditions in particular involve emotional labor: Work intensification, clearly connected to the context-related challenges that the previous study made visible and navigating the local policy context. We suggest that understanding emotional labor as an essential and demanding aspect of principals' work is necessary for the building of support structures around them, which in the long run can counter the impact of work intensification. Preliminary analysis also makes visible how the intertwined site-specific arrangements condition the principals' leading practices, and how they navigate and learn 'how to go on' based in the emotional labor. This suggests that emotional labor can be understood as conditions for educational leading practices, sometimes perceived as a burden for the individual but indeed also as important, site-based practice knowledge that gives principals’ work joy and meaning. Further, the methodological approach in the R&D collaboration, i.e., the peer-dialogues, seem to empower the principals and trigger agentive action in terms of proposing and initiating educational and workplace changes (cf. Hirsh et al, 2023).

Hirsh, Å., Liljenberg, M., Jahnke, A., & Karlsson Perez Å. (2023). Far from the generalised norm: Recognising the interplay between contextual particularities and principals’ leadership in schools in low-socio-economic status communities. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 1-18. DOI: 10.1177/17411432231187349 Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, Changing education. Springer. Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational leadership through a practice lens: Practice matters. Springer.

As an intrinsically caring profession, emotions matter in educating and educational leading. Managing one’s emotions and that of others is a key part of the largely invisible labour of the principalship (Hochschild, 2012). Moreover, educational practices such as caring, disciplining, influencing, administering and managing people and their emotions are crucial sites of knowing in the principalship (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016). From a practice theory lens then, emotions as sites of knowing are not the property of individuals. Rather, the emotionality of a practice such as leadership forms part of the collective know how or taken-for-granted understandings of ‘how we do things around here’. Moreover, in relation to practices such as managing, administering and leading a school, this practice-specific emotionality consists of knowing both what to do and how to do it (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016; Wilkinson, 2021). In this paper, we adopt a practice approach – the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) to examine the practice-specific emotionality (Reckwitz, 2002) of practices of educational leading. In order to render visible this tacit knowledge, we draw on testimonies contributed by Australian principals in 2023-2024 (N=201) in which they narrated a critical incident that had occurred under their leadership and reflected on its emotional impact and key learnings. The data forms part of a three-year, Australian Research Council study examining the emotional labour of Australian principals in socially and politically volatile times (https://www.monash.edu/education/research/projects/school-principals-emotional-labour-in-volatile-times). In keeping with the practice lens adopted in this paper, critical incident as a method was selected for such incidents disrupt ‘normalcy’ to illuminate “underlying trends, motives, and structures that have a more general meaning and indicate something of importance” in the “wider context” of Australian society (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016, p. 272). In analysing these incidents through a practice architectures lens, we ask: What is the work these emotions and practices are doing/performing? What are the broader discursive, material and social arrangements that make certain practices and emotions more or less likely to emerge in this site, rather than that one? What are the implications of this analysis for the broader project and praxis of educational leading? A practice lens thus adds new knowledge about the heightened emotional dynamics shaping principals’ work; the dialectical interactions between these emotional dimensions and principals’ individual demographics; and how emotional labour unfolds over time.

Gherardi, S., & Rodeschini, G. (2016). Caring as a collective, knowledgeable doing: About concern and being concerned. Management Learning, 47(3), 266-284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615610030 Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (3rd ed.). The University of California Press. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, Changing education. Springer. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243-263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432 Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational leadership through a practice lens: Practice matters. Springer.

The well-being of school principals is paramount, as they play a central role in school operations and education (Beausaert et al., 2023). According to Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), job characteristics (job demands and resources) and employees’ personal characteristics (personal resources) are key determinants of employees’ well-being. Within this framework, job crafting is proposed as an employee-driven job design approach, by which employees proactively seek an optimal equilibrium between job demands and job resources. Through strategies such as increasing structural or social resources, increasing challenging job demands, or decreasing hindering demands, employees can proactively redesign their jobs, potentially resulting in enhanced occupational well-being (Tims et al., 2013). Research has demonstrated that job crafting indeed changes job characteristics in the intended direction, ultimately leading to improved occupational well-being (Tims et al., 2013). However, less is known about how job crafting affects personal resources, and how it, in turn, influences occupational well-being. Drawing on JD-R theory and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll et al., 2018), this study argues that job crafting fosters the development of curiosity and resilience (Toyama et al., 2023), which, in turn, predicts positive changes in work-related well-being, such as work engagement, job satisfaction, and burnout, over time. Longitudinal data from 257 Finnish school principals collected at two time points one year apart (2022 and 2023) were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results showed that increasing challenging job demands was the only job crafting strategy significantly predicting an increase in curiosity and resilience. No job crafting strategies directly predicted change in work-related well-being. Instead, the change in resilience predicted an increase in work engagement and job satisfaction and a decrease in burnout, and the change in curiosity predicted an increase in work engagement and job satisfaction. Curiosity fully mediated the effect of increasing challenging job demands on a change in work engagement and job satisfaction. Resilience also fully mediated the effect of increasing challenging job demands on a change in work engagement and burnout yet failed to mediate the effect of the job crafting strategy on job satisfaction. These results highlight increasing challenging job demands as a central job crafting strategy in predicting positive changes in work-related well-being through the development of personal resources. Overall, this study advances our understanding of job crafting by providing new insights into the mechanisms by which job crafting affects work-related well-being through personal resources.

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2017). Job demands–resources theory: Taking stock and looking forward. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 273–285. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000056 Beausaert, S., Froehlich, D. E., Riley, P., & Gallant, A. (2023). What about school principals’ well-being? The role of social capital. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 51(2), 405-421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143221991853 Hobfoll, S. E., Halbesleben, J., Neveu, J. -P., & Westman, M. (2018). Conservation of resources in the organizational context: The reality of resources and their consequences. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104640 Tims, M., Bakker, A. B., & Derks, D. (2013). The impact of job crafting on job demands, job resources, and well-being. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 18(2), 230–240. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032141 Toyama, H., Upadyaya, K., Hietajärvi, L., & Salmela-Aro, K. (2023). Job crafting among school principals before and during COVID-19: Investigating the associations with work-related well-being and personal resources using variable- and person-oriented approaches. European Management Journal, in press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2023.07.006