Conference Agenda

School leader associations and researchers across the UK and Europe generally agree that school leadership faces a sustainability crisis (Greany et al., 2023; Heffernan & Pierpont, 2020; Tiulowitski et al., 2019). Persistent evidence of work overload, work intensification, poor wellbeing and early departures (Brown et al., 2023; Heffernan et al., 2022), compounded in the recent pandemic, suggests the role has become increasingly difficult (Rogers et al., 2025; Thomson & Greany, 2025). Recent research has argued that leaders must do invisible, emotional labour (Wilkinson et al., 2025) to continue in the role; we offer a complementary analysis focusing on identity work.

The results of our mixed-methods study across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (called Researching Sustainable School Leadership – ReSSLe) show that the most consistently identified draining issues identified by interviewees were relentless workload and the cumulative effect of pressures and the felt burden of responsibility (Greany et al., 2025). Survey data similarly showed that poor work-life balance and the weight of leadership were significant drains across all three UK contexts (Perry et al., 2025). Staffing issues, reflecting the intense relational nature of leadership, were identified by over half of respondents. Significant place-based variation emerged: English leaders were far more likely to cite external accountability pressures as draining, while Northern Irish leaders emphasized operational burdens.

However, the themes that sustain leaders are more consistent: three-quarters of leaders surveyed identified students' learning growth and success as sustaining. Relationships within schools were cited by two-thirds of respondents, highlighting the centrality of relational networks. Making a difference, job variety and core values and moral purpose also scored highly. Northern Irish leaders were notably more likely to include community engagement as sustaining, revealing some differential availability of narrative resources across contexts.

This paper draws on Jerome Bruner’s theory of narrative identity (Bruner, 1991, 2003) to explain these results. Research (Crow & Møller, 2017; Showunmi, 2021) shows that school leaders’ professional identities are constructed from unique biographies, they are also shaped by global/national policy contexts and the specificities of their school. They are also always in formation and subject to change. Bruner’s narrative identity theory approach illuminates the project data, suggesting that leaders enter headship with sustaining canonical narratives about transformational, instructional leadership and educational purpose.

However, “drains” (relentless workload, staffing conflicts, resource constraints, accountability pressures) create breaches requiring exhausting narrative repair work. Although sustaining factors (relationships, student achievement, making a difference) which provide narrative resources enabling leaders to construct and maintain coherent, positive professional identities, these are not always able to stretch to cover current challenging everyday realities. When “drains” function as violations of canonical and contextual-biographic narratives about headship, leaders are forced into exceptional narratives that require continuous explanation and justification. Producing exceptional narratives result in strains - the narrative challenge of struggling to tell coherent stories which reconcile who leaders signed up to be with who circumstances demand them to become.

The ReSSLE research shows that the current conditions under which leaders work demands continuous identity reconstruction, and can lead to narrative and emotional depletion arising from unrelenting narrative labour – identity work (Brown, 2014). Leaders who are seriously considering leaving their position often experience narrative bankruptcy, states where narrative possibilities are foreclosed and coherent and positive professional identity construction becomes too difficult. This identity work is emotional, ethical and intellectual.

This analysis reframes sustainable leadership as not only requiring manageable workload but also sustainable narrative conditions - the cultures, structures, and relationships that provide resources for identity stories worth living.

Educational leadership is widely promoted as a lever for school improvement and system change (Fullan, 2016; Hallinger, 2003). Yet this promise harbours a persistent paradox: in complex educational systems, leadership cannot deterministically steer teaching and learning (Luhmann, 2006). Its influence is indirect and contingent, operating through conditions rather than commands. This paper responds to that paradox by reconceptualising educational leadership as communicative practice that mediates between global reform scripts (Sahlberg, 2016; Steiner-Khamsi, 2021/2025) and Nordic traditions of democratic professionalism, high trust and pedagogical autonomy (Qvortrup & Rasmussen, 2022; Rasmussen, 2020a, Gunnulfsen & Møller, 2017; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017).

The study addresses two questions: (1) How is educational leadership conceptualised in current international scholarship? (2) How is leadership enacted narratively and interactionally in high-trust Nordic school cultures facing pressures of competitiveness, reform implementation and learning gains?

Conceptually, the paper synthesises strands of instructional, transformational and distributed leadership (Hallinger, 2003; Robinson, 2011; Rasmussen, 2020b) with systems-theoretical insights (Rasmussen, 2020a; Luhmann, 2006), treating schools as communicative organisations that operate through decision premises and meaning-making. Three temporal distinctions orient the analysis: (a) the illusion of control—leadership can only shape conditions under which teaching and learning become more likely; (b) the relation between experience and expectation; and (c) the prognosis of future—collective imaginaries that authorise action under uncertainty (Luhmann, 2006; Koselleck, 2004). Organisational storytelling provides the analytic bridge (Boje, 1991; Czarniawska, 1997, 2014), viewing schools as polyphonic networks of narratives through which identities and futures are continuously retold.

Empirically, the paper revisits a qualitative corpus generated in 2020 and re-reads it within an international conceptual landscape. Two Danish upper secondary schools were studied through interviews, observations and organisational artefacts. All participating leaders have since left their posts, signalling the fragility of leadership under a persistent wave of reforms and accountability (Verger & Lubienski, 2021). Across cases, three practice-proximal organisational stories are reconstructed: (1) identity work in a merged campus where a prestigious academic programme negotiates its place within a multi-programme institution framed by regional competitiveness; (2) governance redesign that shrinks deliberative arenas (e.g., a once-central pedagogical council) to accelerate decision cycles in the name of efficiency and student-centred planning (James et al., 2020); and (3) opportunity-driven pragmatism privileging initiative and speed over formal procedures to improve learning conditions, at the cost of opaqueness for some staff.

Findings show that leadership does not implement reform or raise outcomes through direct control; rather, it performs narrative negotiations that selectively retain traditions while translating external expectations into locally legitimate routines (Salo et al., 2015; Heikonen & Ahtiainen, 2025). Where leadership groups act coherently in line with shared values and invite genuine participation, schools report clearer goals, practices for assessing progress and stronger shared responsibility (Rasmussen, 2020a). Conversely, reliance on hard influence tactics reduces readiness for change and increases turnover risk (Gamelin & Berkovich, 2025).

The paper argues for hybrid, reflexive leadership cultures that protect dialogic infrastructures—spaces, routines and soft influence—while acknowledging reform pressures. Conceptually, these reframing positions leadership as communicative, temporal and prognostic practice attuned to complexity. Practically, it offers design principles for culturally translated strategies that balance agility with legitimacy in Nordic and comparable high-trust contexts. Policy implications are immediate: treat leadership as communicative craft rather than deterministic technology; invest in structures that sustain trust under reform pressure; and make prognoses of future visible and revisable. Ultimately, leadership can configure conditions for teaching and learning but cannot command outcomes. Its sustainability hinges on mediating paradoxes, materialising expectations without erasing experience, and cultivating professional capital in ways attuned to Nordic—and broadly European—contexts.

School leaders face a diverse range of complex and demanding tasks, with organizational, personnel, and instructional development posing particular challenges. These challenges are often fuzzy, are understood differently by different people within the school, usually have a multitude of root causes, and most solutions do not only affect one phenomenon, but a multitude of phenonema (e. g., Yurkofsky, 2022). School improvement thus is a highly complex task.

In Germany, this complexity is met with institutional characteristics that add to the difficulty of leadership in school improvement: Schools are characterized by extremely flat hierarchies and high teacher autonomy. When teachers choose not to participate in change processes, they can easily withdraw from them, which frequently forces school leaders to focus on balancing interests and fostering participation rather than working towards sustainable change.

At the same time, many German school leaders lack formal training for managing complex development processes and feel particularly burdened and insufficiently qualified in areas such as organizational and personnel development (Klein & Schwanenberg, 2022). This raises the question of how school leaders can be prepared to deal with the demands to their practice professionally and effectively – both regarding the complexity of school improvement itself, and the development of a professional role that enables them to assume effective leadership in the challenging context of school improvement in German schools.

Hericks et al. (2018) define professionalization as a biographical process whereby professionals acquire necessary competencies by mastering developmental tasks (Entwicklungsaufgaben) that transform their skills, beliefs, and professional identity. For school leaders, school improvement itself represents a key environment for developmental tasks, encompassing role formation, leading people, strategic planning, and managing change.

Research in German-speaking contexts suggests that traditional training courses or mentoring have limited impact on this form of professional growth, probably because they lack the element of actively engaging with and mastering a particular challenge. In contrast, more extensive workshop formats that connect directly to principals’ practical challenges appear to yield more promising results (e. g., Meyer & Richter, 2024). These workshops should be designed to offer meaningful opportunities for leaders to develop and hone their skills around challenges in their own practice, while providing them with tools that make the complexity of school improvement more manageable and help them take on a leadership role.

One such approach is Design-Based School Improvement (DBSI; Mintrop, 2016). DBSI offers an array of practical tools that support schools in collaboratively diagnosing a “problem of practice”, designing and testing interventions, and using data to measure the effects. Regarding the professionalization of leaders, the approach helps leaders to transform abstract problems into concrete, actionable chunks and thus reduces the complexity of the task; it encourages participatory leadership within flat hierarchies and supports role development; and it facilitates the coordination of diverse interests through targeted tools.

To analyze the opportunities and challenges of this approach for the professionalization of school leaders, this paper reports the results of an interview study with school leaders who participated in a longitudinal DBSI workshop. In the workshop, which lasted 2.5 years, school leaders reported a particular problem of practice that they wanted to solve at their schools, and then were taught how to apply the DBSI approach to that problem. Participants attended five in-person workshop meetings, but implemented DBSI independently at their schools between the meetings.

The goal of this paper is to describe how participants of the workshop perceived the development process and, based on this, to analyze whether participation in the workshop contributed to their professionalization and strengthening of strategic leadership skills.