Conference Agenda

This paper aims to develop a conceptual understanding of the professional learning needs of novice school principals, positioning these needs as a key prerequisite for quality development of both individuals and their schools. The transition into the principalship represents a critical phase in leadership development, with substantial implications for school quality, organizational stability, and educational outcomes. Research across education systems underscores the pivotal role of school leadership in shaping institutional effectiveness and learning quality (Leksy et al., 2024). In decentralized education systems, including the Czech Republic, principals hold primary responsibility for school governance and educational provision (Act No. 561/2004 Coll.). Principals participate in approximately 70% of decisions influencing school quality (MEYS, 2025, p. 6). At the same time, they face a substantial administrative burden and rank among the most overloaded actors in the education system. This accumulation of responsibility and workload constrains principals’ capacity not only for instructional and strategic leadership, but also for their own professional learning, which remains essential for sustained quality of schools and continuous improvement.

In practice, principals´ professional learning does not unfold as a linear or pre-planned process, instead it emerges from context-specific learning needs shaped by everyday leadership challenges. These include the development of their professional, managerial, and legal competencies, as well as psychosocial and emotional capacities linked to role transition and leadership identity formation (Johnson et al., 2020). While some needs are identified early, others surface through engagement with concrete leadership dilemmas and high-stakes decisions (Evans, 2019). Their fulfillment is achieved not only through formal professional development, but also through experiential learning, professional dialogue, informal networks, and supportive relationships (Eraut, 2004).

The initial phase of headship is particularly demanding. Pol et al. (2009) define a novice principal as an individual serving within the first two years of their appointment, a period referred to as the entry into the principalship. During this phase, principals experience the sudden assumption of full institutional responsibility, described by Spillane and Lee (2014) as a “responsibility shock.” Concurrently, novice principals are required to navigate a highly complex leadership role that encompasses instructional leadership, human resource management, administration, finance, and legal accountability (Czech School Inspectorate, 2024). This period is frequently associated with high levels of stress, uncertainty, and emotional strain, particularly in contexts of limited systemic support and insufficient prior leadership experience (Spillane and Lee, 2014).

Within this context, professional learning emerges as a central mechanism through which novice principals build leadership capacity, respond to role demands, and actively maintain and enhance school quality. The literature conceptualizes professional learning as a multidimensional, active, and reflective process embedded in everyday practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Evans, 2019; Keay et al., 2019; Salo et al., 2024). Mockler (2020, 2022) emphasizes individual agency, highlighting how professionals shape learning in interaction with organizational, relational, institutional, and systemic conditions. For principals, learning occurs not only through formal preparation and induction, but also through daily leadership practice, professional interaction, informal networks, and peer support. Prior research shows that high-quality principal professional learning enhances leadership competence, teacher development, and student learning, strengthening overall school effectiveness (Darling-Hammond et al., 2022; Leithwood et al., 2020). Adopting qualitative research design, the study examines how early-career principals interpret their emerging learning priorities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the governance, leadership, and delivery of secondary education across the UK (Adams & Thompson, 2025). While schools are experimenting with AI in teaching, learning, and assessment (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2025), mechanisms for oversight, inclusion, and accountability are not evolving at the same pace (Gökçe, 2025). Despite increasing AI experimentation at school level, there is currently no systematic review that explores how school leaders decide which AI technologies to adopt, how they manage risk, or how they ensure equity. Furthermore, the ways in which school inspectorates engage with and evaluate AI use remains under-examined—despite being pivotal in shaping school policy and leadership decisions around AI integration.

Thus, our review was guided by the following resarch questions:

1. How is AI used by school leaders to streamline administrative tasks such as reporting, stakeholder communication, or resource development?
2. How do school leaders support staff in the use of AI for improving teaching and learning?
3. What challenges do school leaders face in aligning AI strategies with national policy?
4. What guidance are inspectorates developing regarding AI use, and how is AI addressed in evaluation processes?
5. What are the differences or gaps between inspection practices in the four UK nations when it comes to evaluating AI use?

Our research reveals that while some school leaders and inspectorates are moving forward with confidence, others face significant barriers due to the lack of clear policy guidance, infrastructure, and capacity (Shrestha & Baxter, 2026, in press). This systematic literature review draws on 40 sources published between 2020 and 2026, combining peer-reviewed literature, government policy documents, blog posts, and professional commentaries. A cross-national comparative lens is applied to examine developments across the four UK nations.

Preliminary findings demonstrate an absence of coherent, system-wide strategies for AI adoption in education leadership and inspection. For example, England’s Department for Education has produced an AI toolkit for school leaders (Department for Education, 2025), yet comparable resources are missing in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Even in England, major inspection guidance documents (Ofsted, 2025a; 2025b) make no reference to AI use, despite extensive engagement with school leadership and governance. As Hedlund (2025) notes, inspectorates face challenges in adapting traditional processes to account for AI integration.

Policy documents across all four nations (Education Scotland, 2023; Estyn, n.d.; Holmes, 2025; Ofsted, 2025c) lack detailed criteria for evaluating AI in schools, leaving school leaders, inspectors, and policymakers exposed to risk. The evidence underscores the need for a rigorous, comparative, and policy-informed investigation into how AI is adopted, used, and evaluated within school leadership and inspection frameworks. Such inquiry is critical to identifying system-level interventions that can support ethical, equitable, and effective use of AI in education.

This review contributes to emerging discussions around digital transformation in education by interrogating the readiness of school leadership and inspection systems to engage with GenAI. It offers timely insights for policy and practice, especially in the context of widening digital inequalities and growing pressures for innovation in school governance.

The science of learning or “learning sciences” refer[s] to a multidisciplinary field of research that incorporates evidence-based practices from child neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioural development, and cognitive learning (Chambers, 2020). Insights from the science of learning such as Cognitive Load Theory (see Sweller et al., 2019) and retrieval practice (e.g., Agarwal et al., 2021) provide strong rationales for instructional approaches that are broadly under-utilised in primary and secondary schools in Australia. Despite this, school principals seeking to adopt a whole-school, science of learning approach do so in a contested environment in which some argue whether these ‘evidence-based’ instructional approaches can be universally applied (Sawyer & Hattam, 2025). Therefore, a principal or school leadership team’s decision to adopt such approaches take place in a uniquely political change management space and those contemplating science of learning approaches must be strategic in how they introduce and approach such change. Drawing upon Dynamic Capabilities (DC), this study examines how school principals and leaders recognise the need for change and begin to strategically engage and seize opportunities, mitigating threats, and then begin the reconfiguration of teaching and leadership practices in their schools.

This project is a four-year longitudinal investigation into the change processes undertaken by 63 primary and secondary schools that adopt instructional models aligned with the science of learning. The goal is to understand the mechanisms that best support schools in transitioning to these instructional models, and how such changes impact the schools and their students. This multi-stage approach included structured professional learning (PL) content, a visit to a school who had well-established practices and a system of tracking progress over time (e.g., identification of school leader and teacher goals, alongside reflections on their practices). This presentation focuses on interview data collected from principals and school leaders from 50 primary and secondary schools in the state of Victoria in Australia prior to the multi-staged approach and focuses on principal’s perceptions about whole-school change, highlighting their reasons for pursuing change and their insights into the change journey process. For the purpose of this presentation, principal interview data were analysed to address the following research question: How do school leaders sense, seize, and reconfigure teaching and learning practices when engaging with instructional practice reform?

Dynamic Capabilities (DC), originating in strategic management, has been widely used to explain how organisations adapt and innovate in changing environments (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997; Teece, 2007). At its core, DC describes an organisation’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure resources, routines, and competencies to sustain performance in changing contexts. Teece (2007) further disaggregates DC into three microfoundations: the capacity to (1) sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) seize opportunities, and (3) maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting and, when necessary, reconfiguring resources and routines (p. 1319).

Applying DC to school leaders’ decision-making and experiences offers a distinctive theoretical contribution because schools increasingly confront system-level, pedagogical, and workforce pressures (e.g., declining student achievement outcomes, teacher satisfaction and teacher turnover, and shifts toward school-wide instructional approaches), yet the mechanisms through which schools successfully adapt remain under-examined. While research on professional learning (PL) and instructional reform has emphasised the importance of gaining new knowledge, behaviours, skills and practices (Sims et al., 2021), it has offered limited insight into how schools build the internal capabilities required for sustained instructional transformation. DC provides a powerful lens to examine these processes.

We conceptualise schools not merely as instructional sites, but as organisational actors capable of developing adaptive capacity. For international readers, this aligns with global debates on whole-school instructional practice (e.g., structured literacy, explicit instruction, cognitive load theory) and how school reform is successfully managed.

In Europe, as in other parts of the world, data use is key to informing decision-making for school improvement initiatives (Lasater et al, 2019; Meyers et al, 2022). Schildkamp, Karbautzki, and Vanhoof (2014) conducted a comparative study to examine the purposes for which data are used in five European countries (Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom). Concerning the use of data for school and instructional improvement, respondents in all countries reported using data for policy development, school improvement planning, teacher development, and instructional improvement. However, in all countries except the United Kingdom, data use appeared to remain at a very superficial level, not moving beyond the monitoring phase (Schildkamp, Karbautzki, & Vanhoof, 2014, p. 22). Against this backdrop, it is relevant to provide evidence on the purposes for which school leaders in Chilean high schools use data. Chile is widely known for an education system characterized by strong accountability mechanisms and extensive use of standardized testing (SIMCE), which influences the purposes of data use (Falabella, 2020; Silva et al., 2022).

According to Schildkamp and Kuiper (2010), data use is the process of systematically analyzing the information sources available within schools and applying the results of this analysis to innovate in teaching, curriculum management, and evaluation of these innovations. Through the effective use of diverse data, school leadership teams and teachers can generate knowledge and organizational learning (Lasater et al 2019). School leaders and teachers can use data for different purposes, including school development, instruction, and accountability (Schildkamp, Lai, and Earl, 2013). School leaders play a central role in shaping teachers’ data-use culture and purposes, as well as in establishing a shared vision, norms, and goals for data use in schools. Examining how they understand the purpose of data provides insights into how school practitioners enact assessment policies and how data is used for students learning opportunities Prior studies have shown that school leaders put these purposes into practice by (1) monitoring progress and identifying areas of need, (2) developing and planning policy, (3) evaluating teachers’ performance and supporting teacher collaboration, (4) public relations, and (5) meeting accountability demands (Shildkamp & Kuiper, 2010).

The accountability purpose is highly consequential in Chile because the state can close schools if they remain in the Insufficient category for four consecutive years. In Chile’s quasi-market model, standardized test scores (SIMCE) are used by schools to compete for parents' school choice. A voucher system based on enrollment and daily attendance serves as an incentive to use SIMCE results as a marketing tool.

The current study was guided by the following research question: For what purposes do school leaders use student assessment data?