Conference Agenda

In England, since 2022 the Department for Education has introduced the statutory requirement that all colleges of Further Education (FE) corporations and designated institutions (such as 6th form colleges) are required by the Department for Education to commission an external governance review (EGR) at least every three years. In Scotland, the Post-16 Education Act provides the legislative basis for college management, accountability, and effectiveness. The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) oversees these institutions and requires them to adhere to the Code of Good Governance for Scotland's Colleges which requires the same regime of review of boards.

3 years of reviews have been undertaken and a second phase of reviewing will begin in 2026. There is little to no empirical work that explores the efficacy or impact of the review requirements and as such little has been done to inform improvement or changes to the review frameworks for the second phase. This study, utilising a constructivist approach, combining documentary analysis, interviews with governance professionals, college chairs and principals, and governance reviewers is designed to co-construct an understanding of governance review processes and explore possible areas of impact and evidencable change within institutions resulting from engagement with mandated reviews.

The study is structured around three core research questions

1. Do governance reviews bring about measurable and impactful change in practice?
2. Who are the key actors within the review process and how do their roles impact outcomes and potential changes in practice?
3. What insights were gained by reviewers and how were these subsequently enacted within the governance framework of the reviewed institution?

Whilst located in the UK and primarily within 20 English colleges, the study aims to inform non-executive practices for institutional management and leadership for sectors outside that of UK based further education. Parallels can be drawn between 3^rd sector, charities, other education sectors (such as multi academy trusts and higher education) both locally and internationally. With several high profile cases of governance failure highlighted within the popular media and with government sanctioned investigations and reports (e.g. Gillies report, Scottish Funding Council, 2025), governance is now receiving unprecedented scrutiny and as such this research offers critical insights into the efficacy of those protective mechanisms. The study is potentially important for all sectors of education and has implications that are translatable to international contexts, especially within European settings with similar educational and public sector constructs and professional bodies with oversight functions and responsibilities.

This research views governance as a dynamic, strategic function rather than a static compliance exercise. The research assumes governance is an evolving practice requiring continuous improvement and responsiveness to external review. Drawing on change management and organisational learning theory, the study examines how external reviews lead to institutional change, highlighting the role of actors (governance professionals, chairs, chief executives) as change agents.

Relational and cultural perspectives on governance emphasis is placed on trust, collaboration, and board culture as critical factors influencing the enactment of recommendations and areas for continued study.

Global policy trends of marketization and decentralization followed by an emphasis on autonomy and evaluation placing accountability responsibilities for student achievement on educational leaders at different levels have intensified over recent decades (Ball, 2003; Moos et al., 2011; Niesche et al., 2023). Similarly in Sweden, local education authorities (LEAs) and principals are responsible for systematically evaluating, analyzing and improving education as well as allocating resources based on the diverse needs of students. However, compared to the stricter accountability models seen in many other countries (e.g. Datnow et al., 2020; Quilabert, 2024) the Swedish school system uses softer governance that gives LEAs and principals more freedom in their work (Nordholm et al., 2023).

After the Swedish school system was restructured in the 1990s and previous detailed state regulation was replaced by directives and results-focused management principles, LEAs and principals have a legally regulated, but not further specified, responsibility for conducting systematic quality work and based on its results, improving education. During the same time, achievement differences have expanded between schools and different student groups (Hansen & Gustafsson, 2019) which has contributed to some re-centralization measures and a high frequency of national reforms and policy initiatives directed towards hastening educational improvement (Nordholm & Adolfsson, 2024). These policy pressures and institutional arrangements of local responsibilities and greater autonomy, while at the same time having LEAs and principals operating schools in demographically and financially varied contexts, have led to extensive organizational heterogeneity among Swedish schools. Therefore, with this study, we want to contribute knowledge on how educational leaders in contemporary educational organizations navigate and negotiate challenges in an increasingly complex educational landscape.

Given that policies are not enacted independently but are fundamentally embedded within and shaped by contextual materialities (Braun et al., 2011), local capacity and sensemaking become essential for how policy mandates are enacted and transformed into practice. Research synthesizing and reviewing (Rorrer et al., 2008; Leithwood, 2010) focuses on improvement practices successful in increasing student achievement and has shown that it is central for educational leaders to invest in instructional leadership, align organizational structures and processes, support a collaborative learning culture, establish policy coherence, and maintain an equity focus. Moreover, educational leaders must pave the way for improvement based on respect for professional knowledge and collaboration across organizational levels.

The study relies on institutional theory, and our theoretical framework is based on a model developed by Diehl & Golann (2023). Their integrated model enables us, through a comprehensive approach, to explore organizational responses to external pressures, institutional logics and policy mandates in an increasingly complex educational landscape. They emphasize processes of filtering and local adaptation in relation to concepts of routines, sensemaking, and social networks to understand how organizations and their actors respond to their environment. To understand how LEAs and principals respond to the quality and improvement mandate given to them we combine this model with contextual materialities (i.e., situated, professional, material, and external), aiming to grasp how the specific contextual settings shape policy enactment and transformation into distinct practices in quality and improvement work in Swedish LEAs and schools compared to actual changes in outcomes across different student groups attending their schools.

The study is relevant to European educational research for several reasons. First, numerous governments are moving towards decentralization, combining autonomy and accountability, but research on how educational leaders at different levels navigate policy mandates and transform them into practice is still limited. Second, as educational improvement and equality are high on policy agendas in most countries, we need to learn more about how contextual conditions and organizational characteristics influence policy enactment and strategies for improvement.

Leading within and beyond the school is widely viewed as central to system change and improvement, with professional collaboration positioned as a key mechanism for sustaining system reform over time (Fullan, 2021). School leaders and teachers increasingly engage through networks, partnerships, and collaborative arrangements that support shared problem-solving and collective professional agency. System leadership has been one of the principal concepts and theoretical frameworks used to capture this shift. Rooted in systems thinking, system leadership emphasises interdependence and coordinated lateral action across schools and organisations to achieve system-level improvement (Senge, 1990). Early writing on system leadership promoted a vision of dynamic collaboration in which school leaders, at all levels, extended their influence beyond individual schools to take responsibility for system-wide improvement and innovation at scale (Hopkins & Higman, 2007). However, despite this initial momentum, interest in system leadership declined after 2010, partly due to shifting leadership trends and the search for new conceptual framings (Gumus et al., 2016; Harris et al., 2021). More recently, several core ideas associated with system leadership have re-emerged in contemporary scholarship, particularly through work on leading from the middle (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2020; Hargreaves, 2023), school-to-school networking and collaboration (Chapman, 2019), and leading for equity in education (Harris & Jones, 2019).

Against the above backdrop, this paper draws on a comparative empirical study across three European contexts: the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The study is guided by two overarching questions:

1. How is system leadership defined and understood within the discourses of policy and practice across these three jurisdictions?
2. What conditions and factors enable or constrain system leadership as a lever for educational improvement?

This paper positions system leadership as a relational, cultural, structural and dynamic process (Boylan, 2016; Fullan, 2021; Gorman et al., 2025; Harris et al., 2021). The theoretical framework is informed by four interconnected perspectives, namely professional capital, capacity building, system renewal, and complexity theory. Collectively, these perspectives reflect system leadership as a dynamic form of social practices.

Professional capital provides a foundational lens for understanding system leadership. As conceptualised by Hargreaves and Fullan (2012), professional capital comprises human, social, and decisional capital, emphasising the collective dimensions of expertise, relationships, and professional judgement. From this perspective, system leadership is concerned with strengthening trust, shared responsibility, and professional learning across schools and networks, rather than focussing on individual leadership performance (Fullan et al., 2015).

Closely aligned with professional capacity is the concept of capacity building, which foregrounds the deliberate development of collective capability to support improvement at scale (Fullan, 2023). From this perspective, system leadership involves creating the conditions for purposeful collaboration, sustained professional learning, and coherent instructional focus. Evidence suggests that capacity building is most effective when collaboration is intentional, evidence-informed, and supported by system-level infrastructure that enables ongoing professional engagement (Talbert, 2010).

System renewal extends this analysis by focusing on longer-term coherence and learning across the system. Drawing on the idea of education systems as learning organisations (Senge, 1990), system leadership is understood as supporting shared sense-making, reflection, and continuous improvement over time. Fullan’s critique of large-scale reform highlights how top-down, performance-driven approaches often undermine capacity, reinforcing the need for leadership that prioritises collaborative professionalism and collective responsibility as drivers of renewal (Fullan, 2021, 2023).

Finally, complexity theory provides a critical lens for understanding system leadership in contexts characterised by uncertainty, variation, and non-linear change (Strom & Viesca, 2020). Rather than delivering fixed solutions, system leaders engage in sense-making, support adaptation, and foster relational conditions that enable learning across contexts (Harris et al., 2021). From this perspective, change is achieved through relationships and professional commitment (Boylan, 2018).

European education systems are increasingly confronted with complex and persistent challenges such as educational inequality, digital transformation as well as poor academic achievement of students. Across Europe, these challenges unfold under conditions of intensified multi-level governance, growing accountability demands, and increasing expectations for evidence-informed coordination across system levels. While policy discourses emphasise cooperation, networking, and leadership as key levers for system development, education systems remain marked by institutional fragmentation and competing logics of action.

In Germany, these dynamics are particularly pronounced due to the strong division of responsibilities across administrative levels. This structure often generates coordination problems at both inter-institutional and intra-organisational interfaces (Reh & Scholz, 2019). Fragmentation may result in parallel structures, uncoordinated initiatives, limited transparency, and inefficient use of resources, thereby complicating responses to complex educational challenges. Comparable patterns of fragmentation and coordination deficits have been observed across Europa, pointing to a broader systemic condition rather than a nationally specific problem.

Against this background, recent research in educational system development increasingly conceptualises (system) coherence as a counter-horizon to fragmentation in multi-level education systems (Johnson et al., 2014; Spillane et al., 2022). Coherence-oriented approaches seek to align vertical interfaces between governance levels and horizontal interfaces across organisational domains to reduce contradictions and mitigate structural discontinuities (Emmerich, 2016). Cooperation is frequently identified as a central mechanism for fostering coherence, for instance through school networks or local education landscapes that connect actors from different institutional contexts around shared goals and joint problem-solving (Díaz-Gibson et al., 2014).

However, research demonstrates that expectations of cooperation are unmet. Cooperative arrangements may generate fractures when collaborative demands collide with established organisational routines, professional logics, or systemic conditions. Such tensions may lead to overload, frustration, or inflated expectations towards cooperative structures (Duveneck, 2022; Bremm et al., 2025; Kunze, 2024). These findings point to the need for a more nuanced understanding of coherence that goes beyond structural alignment and formal coordination.

This contribution therefore draws on the process-oriented framework of crafting coherence developed by Honig and Hatch (2004). In contrast to approaches that conceptualise coherence as an objective state of alignment between external demands and internal practices, Honig and Hatch define coherence as an ongoing, dynamic process of sense-making, negotiation, and strategic decision-making across system levels. Coherence is not given but produced through interaction.

This study focuses on Family of Schools (FoS), a form of inter-organisational professional learning network in the German primary school system that brings together principals and teachers from several schools with representatives of school supervision. Programmatically introduced as a coherence-oriented coordination instrument, FoS aim to improve student outcomes by reshaping patterns of collaboration, leadership, and knowledge use across levels (Sliwka & Klopsch, 2024).

Applied to professional learning networks such as FoS, the crafting coherence framework conceptualises coherence as a networked process of aligning system-level priorities with local school needs across organisational boundaries. Coherence is enacted, first, through the active contribution of school supervision, which brings system-level priorities and policy goals into the network’s discourse. Second, coherence is shaped through the joint articulation and ongoing refinement of shared network goals that translate system expectations into focal themes responsive to participating schools’ contexts. Third, networks function as arenas of collective sense-making in which schools interpret external demands and negotiate their selective coupling to local priorities (bridging) or deliberate decoupling to prevent overload and incoherence (buffering) (Honig & Hatch, 2004).

Based on this framework, the study addresses three research questions: (1) How is coherence enacted in FoS? (2) How are leadership relations, including processes of bridging and buffering, negotiated between schools and school supervision in FoS? (3) What changes can be identified over three years?