Conference Agenda

Educational systems worldwide increasingly operate under conditions scholars describe as polycrisis, overlapping emergencies including health crises like COVID-19, climate-related disasters, school violence, forced migration, and deepening educational inequities. These interconnected crises fundamentally reshape the temporal, political, and ethical conditions under which school leaders must know and act. Yet educational leadership scholarship has historically undertheorized crisis as a central leadership phenomenon, often relegating it to technical emergency planning rather than core, equity-oriented leadership work. This gap becomes particularly problematic as crises grow more frequent, prolonged, and complex, demanding new conceptual frameworks that can guide both leadership practice and preparation. Thus, we ask, how, if at all, can crisis leadership in K-12 educational settings be conceptualized as an integrated, dynamic phenomenon that accounts for the interplay of foundational principles? How, if at all, do key practices, personal attributes, and contextual-temporal factors across diverse crisis types and school contexts influence school leadership?

This paper presents an empirically grounded framework that reconceptualizes crisis leadership as a complex mosaic, a set of interdependent elements that combine differently depending on crisis type, school context, and temporal dimensions. In our forthcoming handbook, we synthesize findings from multiple qualitative studies conducted across Australia, Cyprus, Fiji, New Zealand, Scotland, and the United States to develop a comprehensive model that moves crisis leadership from the periphery to the center of educational leadership theory and practice. Our objectives are threefold: first, to theorize crisis leadership as foundational rather than peripheral to educational leadership; second, to demonstrate how effective crisis leadership operates through the dynamic integration of principles, practices, and attributes; and third, to illuminate how context and time shape crisis leadership enactment.

Our framework builds on three theoretical foundations. First, we draw on contemporary crisis theory that recognizes temporal complexity, spatial dimensions, and gradations of severity (Boin, 2009; Boin et al., 2020). We engage specifically with concepts of transboundary crisis, creeping crisis, and polycrisis to capture how schools navigate overlapping, prolonged emergencies rather than discrete events. Second, we synthesize emerging educational leadership frameworks that position crisis as requiring distinct competencies. We build particularly on Mutch's (2015) three-factor model of dispositional, relational, and situational influences, while extending it to account for the dynamic, evolving nature of crisis leadership across extended timeframes. Third, we center educational equity scholarship, positioning justice as non-negotiable in crisis leadership. Drawing on critical perspectives, we theorize how crises reveal and intensify existing inequities, particularly for marginalized communities facing poverty, racialized oppression, and colonial legacies (Virella, 2023). The mosaic metaphor structures our conceptualization. Like a physical mosaic, crisis leadership comprises: (1) a foundation of three core principles, adaptive expertise, meaning-making, and equity-centered mindset, that provide stability and direction; (2) key practices that form the visible pattern, collaborative work, strategic foresight, technology use, communication, and care with emphasis varying by crisis demands; (3) personal attributes serving as adhesive (think empathy, emotional composure, and resilience) that bind practices into authentic leadership; and (4) contextual and temporal factors that shape how elements combine and evolve throughout crisis trajectories.

This research embodies international collaboration, synthesizing empirical work conducted across five countries and three continents. The framework addresses universal challenges facing school leaders globally while attending to contextual specificities. This comparative approach reveals both common patterns and important variations, advancing knowledge relevant to European educational contexts while contributing to global conversations about educational leadership under conditions of polycrisis.

School leaders play a crucial role in safeguarding the quality of our education system. The responsibilities of school leaders are highly complex: they face high expectations and must take numerous factors and stakeholders into account when carrying out their role (Fosco, 2022). Attrition among school leaders is high, and this in turn contributes to increased attrition among teachers (DeMatthews et al., 2022). This is an international problem occurring in many countries (e.g. Winters et al., 2023; Bush, 2025).

It is therefore essential to understand which factors school leaders experience as burdensome and which as energizing in order to prevent dropout. We conducted a quantitative study with 383 secondary school leaders in Flanders, based on the JD-R model, which posits that job characteristics and personal characteristics influence individuals’ stress and well‑being (Demerouti et al., 2001).

The well-established JD-R model (Demerouti et al., 2001) posits that job characteristics can have either positive or negative impacts on employee well-being. On the one hand, job demands are physical (e.g., unsafe work environments), psychological (e.g., work pressure), social (e.g., emotionally demanding interactions), or organisational (e.g., role ambiguity) aspects that require sustained physical and/or psychological effort and are linked to physiological and/or psychological costs. These demands encompass time pressures, heavy workloads, stressful work environments, role ambiguity, emotional labour, and poor relationships (Demerouti et al., 2001). On the other hand, job resources are defined as the physical, psychological, social, or organisational aspects of a job that help achieve work goals, reduce job demands and associated costs, and foster personal growth, learning, and development. These resources include autonomy, strong work relationships, opportunities for advancement, coaching and mentoring, and learning and development (Demerouti et al., 2001).

Since 2006, an increasing number of researchers have emphasised that the extent to which job demands lead to stress cannot be separated from the perceptual or interpretive act by the individual (Crawford et al., 2010; Le Fevre et al., 2006; Xanthopoulou et al., 2007). In other words, job demands are not inherently stressful, but stress results from the interaction between individual and environmental factors (Howard, 2008). This concept is also integrated into the JD-R model, which incorporates individual differences through personal resources (Taris & Schaufeli, 2015). Personal resources are defined as positive aspects of the self that contribute to resilience and an individual’s ability to effectively control their environment (Hobfoll et al., 2003).

In our quantitative study, we measured several job resources, job demands and personal resources of the participating school leaders in order to clarify the relationships of these variables with their wellbeing.

In this paper we reflect on the question,

‘To what degree has the rise of social triage in the English school system led to the need for leaders who act as stoic sages?’

A core aspect of the rise of the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) has been a development of extensive accountability systems and the requirement for schools to take on ever wider responsibilities beyond their core business of teaching children. Whilst this pattern has spread across many countries, for example in Poland, where headteachers are expected to fulfil an ever wider series of tasks (Slowik & Zubik, 2023), this pattern is especially true of England where the development of a responsibility for child safeguarding, the totalising impact of student outcome measures which do not take into account context and a focus on all children reaching their potential regardless of personal challenges have led to leadership being a complex, intense and often unsustainable process. In a study we conducted during the COVID pandemic we identified an emerging process in schools serving deprived areas which we called ‘social triage’, a process which we subsequently tracked into the post-pandemic education system (Wood and Quickfall, 2024). This concept captures the impact of government austerity since 2010, leaving the public sector fragmented and unable to act in a coherent fashion. This has led to school leaders being required to fill the gaps this social collapse has left, constantly making decisions regarding support for their children in areas they have not been trained in or for which they have resource. Thus, it is our contention that the work of leaders in school has become increasingly unsustainable as they are often only one of a few public servants who offer easy contact with their communities; consequently, schools are increasingly dealing with social, health and economic problems within their communities. And leaders need to engage with this wide spectrum of problems in a calm and measured manner, whilst still ensuring that the educational needs of the children in their care are able to learn effective.

Here, we begin by outlining some of the main outcomes from our social triage research (Quickfall and Wood, 2024; Wood and Quickfall, 2024) before exploring the new inspection framework developed by Ofsted (2025) which characterises official expectations of leaders in their roles. With the issues and tensions which emerge from these two data sources, we argue that the system has developed an expected leadership style, that of the stoic sage, as characterised by Sharpe (2021, p. 47)

‘the continuing realities of human frailty, mortality, epistemic finitude, and subjection to catastrophes like COVID-19 and other, less dramatic reversals of fortune, all prescribe the wisdom of people seeking out systems of understanding and action which fortify us to bear up to the difficult aspects of existence. The ideal of a person able to respond with maximal reasonableness, given their limited powers, and characterized by inner freedom (autarkeia), tranquility (ataraxia), and constancy is surely attractive.’

Thus, the system demands that in a system increasingly characterised by pressure, stress and extreme work, leaders should be willing and able to meet such unsustainable contexts with calm, reason and tranquillity. To what degree is this expectation for leaders to fulfil the role of stoic sage realistic and a sound foundation for the continued sustainability of a national education system?