Conference Agenda

Much of the research on principals has resulted in dominant leadership models (e.g., instructional leadership from Edmonds, 1979; transformational leadership from Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999; distributed leadership from Gronn, 2000; and transformative leadership from Shields, 2009). However, empirical evidence from the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) (e.g. Authors, 2024) over the last twenty years and an increasing body of leadership studies (e.g. Leithwood, 2023) shows that successful principals draw on a wide array of educationally and culturally responsive practices and that it is no longer enough to use generalised leadership models to conceptualise and understand what successful leaders actually do to enable all their students to enjoy high-quality academic and social learning and master the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in later life amidst multiple influences and rapid complex changes.

Conceptual Framing of Research on Educational Leadership

For centuries, sociologists and education theorists have provided explanations about the role of schools and education in society grounded in different worldviews or paradigm ranging, for example, from Weber’s (1978) view of schools as a means of producing and delivering high quality specialist services in a rationally based, open society (Ritzer, 1975, p. 632) to Parson’s (1939, 1959) views of education as a system for the development and maintenance of a democratic society to Freire’s (1970) theories that promote social change rather than reinforce existing inequities.

Human development psychologists (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1979) also attend to educational purposes and their meanings, focusing on the level of the child. In one seminal and relevant psychological theory, for example, from Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) perspective, human development is shaped by interactions within multiple layers of environment, from immediate family to broader cultural influences.

There is also growing interest in complexity theory (e.g., Morrison, 2010) to explain the dynamics within and between the influences on schools in society. From such perspective, organizations are conceptualized to be complex, creative, evolving, self-producing systems. Social Network Analysis methodology (SNA) has great potential to unveil the hidden structures and patterns of social interaction inside such systems. It provides information about both networks structural / organizational characteristics and actors’ positions and weights (including leaders). Leadership is defined as patterns of influence emerging of such social interactions (Daly, 2010; Liou & Daly, 2018).

Extant educational leadership studies resulting in various models (e.g., instructional leadership) have been grounded in disciplinary theories like organizational theory from sociology (e.g., Weber), distributed leadership from social network and capital theory, and culturally responsive leadership from critical sociology theories aimed at social change (e.g., Freire, Habermas) or social networks and capital theory to inform distributed leadership models (Spillane, 2005) with current studies in educational leadership frequently grounded in critical social theories (e.g., Freire, 1970; Habermas, 1984) aimed at social change toward equity and justice. While extant educational leadership frameworks with different underlying disciplinary theories and paradigms have provided important understandings to the field, we seek to go further with a new interdisciplinary, cross-paradigmatic framing for research on educational leadership of schools. This framing is informed by empirical evidence from ISSPP which considers schools as socially adaptive organizations and networks that play an instrumental role in shaping and realizing educational purposes for all children and young people in society. Our framing seeks to explain school leadership within the context of various dynamically interacting layers of social and ecological systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1995) and the related lens of complexity theory (e.g., Byrne & Callaghan, 2013; Morrison, 2010) which theorizes how interconnected social and ecological systems function and evolve together to contribute to student academic learning, wellbeing and quality of life mastery.

In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, many education systems anticipated a period of reinvention (Zhao & Watterston, 2021). Early analyses suggested that schooling might move away from narrow academic performance logics toward approaches that foreground student agency, wellbeing, engagement, and collective professional autonomy. Such shifts were widely framed as essential responses to an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world (Sahlberg, 2020; UNESCO, 2021).

However, emerging international evidence suggests that post-pandemic education policy trajectories have largely reverted to pre-COVID reform logics. Across contexts including Australia, England, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, policy responses have emphasised curriculum narrowing, intensified accountability, compliance with centrally defined improvement agendas, and tighter regulation of student behaviour and even outlooks. This reversion is occurring amid what has been described as a poly-crisis: intersecting pressures of declining student learning and wellbeing, growing workforce strain, eroding institutional trust, and widening social and educational inequalities (European Commission, 2025; OECD, 2023; 2025).

These conditions raise fundamental questions for educational leadership research. In particular, they invite reconsideration of how education system transformation is conceptualised, led, and evidenced under conditions of uncertainty. They also challenge dominant assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge for leading change at scale.

This paper addresses the following research question: How do education system leaders and educators make sense of, commit to, and enact alternative approaches to system transformation that deliberately depart from traditional accountability-driven reform logics in conditions of uncertainty?

The paper examines this question through an empirical system-level case from a small Catholic education system in Australia. During 2023–2024, this system undertook a co-designed strategic redesign that explicitly sought to reshape the underlying logic of school reform. Rather than intensifying traditional school improvement mechanisms, the strategy foregrounds relational trust, deeper collaboration, professional capital, and community confidence as core drivers of sustainable system transformation.

Theoretically, the study is informed by scholarship on educational change and leadership that critiques performative and compliance-oriented reform (e.g. accountability regimes and “what works” orthodoxies), and instead emphasises building professional capital, relational trust, systemness, and context-responsive leadership across the education ecosystem. It also draws on emerging leadership literature that conceptualises change as a process of sense-making and knowledge co-production under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, rather than technical implementation of pre-specified solutions (e.g. Ainscow & Chapman, 2025; Fullan, 2025; Hudson & Gurr, 2025).

Positioned as an illustrative case rather than a transferable model, the paper explores how system and school leaders navigate the tensions of leading reform in ways that diverge from dominant policy expectations. It asks what conditions enable or constrain such leadership, and what that reveals about alternative pathways to system transformation in contemporary education systems.

Empirically, the paper draws on data collected during the co-design phase (2024) and early implementation of the strategy (2025). Data sources include qualitative interviews with system leaders, principals, and teachers, alongside findings from a system-wide baseline survey administered in 2025. The survey captured educators’ perceptions of trust, collaboration, leadership, and readiness for change aligned with the strategy’s core pillars. Together, these data provide insight into both the lived experience of leadership and the organisational conditions shaping alternative reform efforts.

In doing so, the paper speaks directly to the ECER 2026 conference theme by examining how leadership knowledge is produced, mobilised, and enacted at system level in response to instability. It contributes to debates about the nature of evidence in educational leadership by foregrounding co-produced, relational, and practice-based knowledge as central to system transformation.