Conference Agenda

This paper asks: how can school leaders facilitate school environments that help school populations to respond ethically to shared challenges?

The purpose of this paper is to explore how leaders can enact their agency to create school environments which are emotionally supportive, ethically aware and relationship focused, in ways that enable both staff and young people to lead and participate.

Learning to live together well is a present-day ethical imperative, in the global context of growing inequalities, the climate crisis and increasing polarisation of political beliefs (Booth, 2018; Samanani, 2022a; UNEP, 2021; World Health Organisation, 2021; IEA, 2022). School environments can function as important learning spaces, within which this imperative can be addressed. They can also function as invaluable sources of emotional support and relationship growth, for both staff and students. However, reports of discontent, alienation and disconnect in English state secondary schools bely the limited realisation of these functions at present, and indicate the need for an ethical recalibration.

Dewey theorises a vision for school environments as ‘miniature communities’: spaces of joint activity and shared learning, that are co-constructed and continually renegotiated (1941). This paper draws upon my first year of doctoral study, in which I critiqued and combined agency, care and community, to introduce an agential ethic of care as a promising ethical bedrock for participatory school environments. In addition to adult-led caring services, this research considered how, or why, we might encourage all members of the school population to act in care. Moreover, by exploring the relationship between care and agency, this research also problematised the material conditions of caring, paternalistic caring practices and ethical orientations within the English education system at present.

This paper will then draw upon initial findings from the first term of a participatory action research project in a school in England. This project has been designed to create a participatory opportunity to learn from lived experiences of care, agency and community within schools. By re-framing caring as a collaborative, non-hierarchical, agential practice, this project has been designed to make a unique contribution to urgent discussions of how we can learn to live together well – while making a substantial contribution to education and care theory.

The initial findings will help school leaders to understand barriers to and opportunities for co-creating community within their schools. Significantly, they will offer bottom-up rather than top-down lessons for leadership: learning from the practices, perceptions and experiences of care and agency amongst staff and students within their schools. This research responds to calls for an urgent transformation of our education system, in light of global challenges (Higham, 2021; Tannock, 2021; UNESCO, 2021; Bajaj, 2018; Jerome and Starkey, 2022). The discussions generated by this paper will help researchers, leaders and policymakers to imagine school environments that enable and empower school populations to live, care, and act together.

Schools with better leadership practices achieve better results. Yet, limited evidence exists on how to improve these practices, especially in low- and middle-income countries (Global School Leaders, 2020; Leithwood et al., 2008). To address this gap, and fitting with the ICSEI network on “Methods of Researching Educational Effectiveness and Improvement (MoREI)”, we carried out a study on a large-scale school leadership programme for head teachers in public schools in Rwanda using a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) and a Differences-in-Difference (DiD) design.

The school leadership programme aims to enhance the leadership skills and practices of school leaders, with the goal of improving the teaching environment and ultimately boosting student abilities and test scores. In this study, we analyse the programme’s impact on student test scores of primary school leavers, as well as identify which school characteristics have a greater influence on the effectiveness of the programme. Through our study, we aim to provide evidence on how school leadership professional development can positively affect student and community education outcomes.

Low and middle-income countries face challenges in terms of school leadership quality and student learning outcomes (Bloom et al., 2015; Lemos et al., 2021). To address this issue, school leadership programmes have gained attention in recent years, with a growing body of literature examining their impact on student scores. These programs aim to increase knowledge and skills of school leaders, in particular in areas such as leadership, management and communication. A recent systematic review by Anand et al. (2023) analyses 14 studies on school leadership and management programmes from emerging countries. Whilst the average effect is positive, the majority of individual studies had statistically insignificant effects, highlighting the importance of large sample sizes to be able to measure small but still economically meaningful effect sizes. Further, just three studies were conducted in a low-income country, highlighting the value of new evidence from such low resource contexts.

Our study contributes to this literature by providing evidence on a large-scale school leadership programme. The programme targeted over 2,000 headteachers and deputy headteachers, aiming at improving student outcomes in Rwanda. We compare test scores of students across 350 schools, where school leaders from about 175 were randomly assigned to receive training. We make use of three years of national test scores, including a total of 90 000 students. Our paper will also be the first to look at the impact of the school leadership programme after the COVID-19 pandemic. Did trained school leaders successfully respond to the challenges of COVID?

With the unique character of Hong Kong in a postcolonial context, where eastern philosophies and approaches meet those of the west, it could be presumed that it is an ideal system for generating innovative ideas and practices (Lu & Campbell 2021; Bautista et al. 2022). However, understanding the role, influence, and impact of teacher education as a career-long pursuit in Hong Kong remains both contested and under theorised (Bautista et al. 2022). While Hong Kong enjoys a complex and sophisticated teacher education infrastructure which includes a range of opportunities and legislated time to dedicate to the varied forms of teacher education throughout a teachers’ career, such opportunities are frequently reported on as a being too demanding, rigid, or unrelated to practice (Lu & Campbell 2021; Pang et al. 2016). Drawing upon critical policy analysis and key informant interviews, the questions driving this study are:

• How are the forms and purposes of teacher education in Hong Kong understood in the domains of research, policy and practice?

• What is the role of the historical and contemporary socio-political context in understanding the effectiveness and future possibilities of teacher education in Hong Kong?

Drawing upon postcolonialism as an interdisciplinary political, theoretical and historical academic toolkit, this paper argues that colonial rule, and the aftermath of it, paved the way for international influence in education in Hong Kong, with significant implications for how the purposes and underpinning values of education are understood, and how this is reflected in teacher education. With this arises tensions in the extent to which this does, could, and should reflect the complex and unique character of Hong Kong (Lu & Campbell 2021; Bautista et al. 2022).

This paper illuminates the complex and wide-ranging expertise that teachers develop and draw upon in and through their practice, and how new forms of teacher education in a complex socio-political context might support this. Through the development of more varied forms of teacher education in Hong Kong, focused on making sense of the complex influences and drivers of the varied forms teacher learning and education can take, more relevant forms of teacher education may be able to emerge and be sustained through formal and informal means (Ho & Lu 2019). In the policy context, further critical analysis of how teachers are positioned in the system, how this relates to the forms and purposes of teacher education, and whether or not this relates to shifting demands placed upon teachers and schools, is needed (Lu & Campbell 2021). Consideration is also needed of the means through which various groups with a stake in teacher education in Hong Kong are able to come together in order to build a more sophisticated understanding of the varied and emerging professional learning needs of teachers, and how this can and should influence the development of teacher education in the SAR.

School leadership is a largely unknown or poorly understood among French principals and policy-makers (Normand, 2021a, b). The aim of this action research was to transfer the main findings of the international research on school leadership to practitioners by involving them in a 3-year Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme. (Huber, 2009; Moos & oth., 2011) The research was inspired by systematic reviews of the research literature showing the conditions for effective CPD (Cordingley, 2006, 2008, Timperley, 2008, 2011). Practitioners were expected to reflect collectively and change their representations and practices in their daily work in secondary schools.

Workshops were used to develop peer learning and mentoring activities (Hall, 2008). The CPD programme focused on the iterative, reflective and projective dimension of professional knowledge hybridised with scientific knowledge. The production of shared professional knowledge was fostered by exchanges and interactions between peers, while principals were expected to move away from their bureaucratic stance and culture and to expore margins of autonomy away from top-down prescriptions and rules from the Ministry of Education and State local authorities (Normand, 2021c).

At the end of the Continuous Professional Development programme on school leadership, interviews were conducted with participants. The aim was to gather their accounts of training sessions, as well as their experiences in changing their outlook and practices as principals, by testing their ability to develop (or to reflect on) leadership in their schools. 20 interviews were conducted over a period of 12 months.

Principals were then invited to share their experiences by writing a 30-page paper on French-style leadership. This action research is important in the French context because it is the first time that practitioners had access to international research on school leadership. It also led to the organisation of the first European symposium on school leadership, organised by the Advanced Institute for Education and Training (French MoE), which is responsible for all initial and in-service training for principals in France. The trained practitioners were also involved in the organisation of parallel workshops within this European conference.

The research findings show the importance of informal leadership practices of French principals, even if those are not recognised and visible by their hierarchy and State local authorities. It is proved how specific features in the French culture, the bureaucratic environment, and lack of training prevent them from appropriating and using some disseminated concepts such as instructional and transformational leadership and their related research findings.