The Challenge to Change: Leading Schools beyond COVID-19

Abstract

This paper considers the articles presented in this Special Issue and argues that, in most developed education systems in Western countries, there have been four major shifts in how school education is understood and delivered over the course of human history, from a time when only the wealthy and privileged received an education to the present day. It tracks changes in school leadership since the 1980s, when a combination of efforts to improve the effectiveness of schools and efforts to decentralise schools led to self-managing schools and changed responsibilities for school leaders. It reflects on whether the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school communities may lead to a fifth major shift in school education. This article discusses four different school leadership approaches that have emerged in Western education since the 1980s, instructional leadership, transformational leadership, distributed leadership, and leadership for learning, and argues that of these four, leadership for learning would be the most appropriate leadership approach in a post-COVID-19 future.

1. Introduction

The articles of this Special Issue represent authors from Europe, Asia, the United States, and Australia. Although trends in school change are well researched in Western countries, the impact of changes to school leadership made in the west also impact on many other countries across the world. Terms such as “school self-management” and “instructional leadership” are freely used in many countries, and the impact of international comparisons of student achievement (such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS)), by which many countries judge the health of their education systems, has led to countries from widely different social and cultural demographics using similar approaches to improve opportunities for students.

The overview of this Special Issue [1] considered how our understanding of leadership, educational leadership, and especially school leadership has changed historically. From ancient times, until around the 1970s and 1980s, those who led schools could be seen as middle managers, following the decisions made by those above them to ensure those decisions were implemented faithfully by those below them [2,3]. Most decisions were made by centralised departments of education that were themselves tasked with implementing policies made by governments: decisions about curriculum, about teaching standards, about assessment, about school facilities, and about financing. However, in the 1970s, changes in society created the impetus for schools to change [4,5]. Typical of monolithic structures, it took some time for the impetus for change to become action for change. What followed was an environment when two opposites, articulated by the same words, “the Challenge to Change”, created both problems and possibilities for those who led schools. On the one hand, school leaders were “challenged to change” their understandings and practices of leading, but on the other hand, many people challenged the need for change at all, thus slowing progress somewhat. But over time, change happened anyway. It could be said that in recent times, those in education have been experiencing something that brings two concepts together: the impact of change [6] and the rapidity of change [7]. Drucker ([6], p. 1) once argued:

Every few hundred years in western history there occurs a sharp transformation. We cross… a divide. Within a few short decades society rearranges itself, its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there appears a new world.

Phillips [8] talked about how transformations occur. New products or innovations are first accepted by a few “early adopters”, followed by the “early majority”, the “late majority”, and then the “laggards”. Cumulatively, when graphed, the proportions of the population that have accepted the innovation over time form an S-curve. In education terms, the role of school leaders in the process is to be “early adopters” and to help those they work with to move from the old curve to the new one. To do this, the leader must become a learner before leading others.

The history of successive transformations over time can be depicted by a series of overlapping S-curves. But also, now more than fifty years ago, Toffler [7] defined “future shock” as being people’s psychological response to too much change in too little a time. It was his response to the fact that the amount of time between when something was invented and it becoming commonplace was diminishing. An example would be the transformation of telephones, from analogue phones at home (invented around the 1850s, and patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1869) to mobile phones (with the first in the 1970s being the size of a brick), to smart phones (Palm Pilot and Nokia in the 1990s and the first iPhone in 2007), to what we have today—mobile access to text, photographic, and video data, instantaneously, from anywhere in the world. Whereas moving from a stationery analogue telephone to the mobile phone took around 100 years, with another 25 years to develop a smart phone, the developments since that time in terms of personal communication devices have been nothing short of astounding.

Education moved from one S-curve (centralised command and control), a product of centralised school systems from the 1880s, to the next S-curve (decentralisation of some decisions related to school activity) in the 1970s and 1980s, a “sharp transformation”, in Drucker’s terms, with different education systems, in different parts of the world, experiencing decentralisation, but with some experiencing it more than others (see Caldwell [9] in this Special Issue). It could also be argued that since that time, with increasing rapidity, other transformations to school leadership have occurred. From the principal being responsible for implementing the decisions made by others, to having to make critical instructional decisions themselves, to being solely responsible for transforming the school, from the principal being a singular leader, to leadership teams, to distributed leadership.

It might also be argued that the latest S-curve to impact school leadership came with the COVID-19 pandemic. All of what we knew about leading schools had to be reassessed as students were unable to attend schools for extended periods, teachers had to develop an online presence almost overnight, parents were now tasked with teaching their children, and many parents and teachers not only had to support their own children’s learning at home, but also had their own work to do. This created stresses on those in schools in ways that had not been experienced before and school leaders were tasked with not only overseeing the learning, but also the wellbeing of their whole school community, in ways that had had not even been considered just a few months before. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have changed education again. Parveen et al. ([10], p. 10) conducted a literature review identifying the leadership challenges brought about by the disruption caused by the pandemic. They found that the most significant challenges related to “(1) self-care, wellbeing, and safe school opening; (2) learning continuity and quality of education; (3) ensuring distributive leadership; (4) emotional and mental health; (5) equity gaps; (6) digital divides; and (7) cyber security of online education”. A report by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) [11] suggests a “Three T’s framework” comprising triage, transition, and transform as a means for helping principals to understand and respond to challenges. Triage is an “initial sorting process on the basis of urgency…to separate the now from later”. Transition focuses on increasing “stability and reducing uncertainty for teachers, other school staff, students and their families”. Transform “may be less about minimising the loss of student learning time and more about the role schools play in emotional and social recovery”.

We cannot yet make judgements about whether this is just a brief interruption to regular programming or will have a long-term impact on how school leaders view their role into the future; however, recent reports, in many parts of the world, suggest that school systems are having difficulty finding school leaders. An Australian report [12] suggests that one in three principals is facing stress and burnout.

This special issue focused on transforming educational leadership and looked at both a specific practice (transformational leadership), but also considered how educational leadership has transformed itself over time. Using the articles in this Special Issue, the current paper considers the changes made to school leadership during the S-curve that we might call the era of decentralisation, and then makes some tentative comments about how school leadership might need to further transform to adapt to the new S-curve, which might be called the post-COVID-19 era.

2. Educational Change since the 1980s

The introductory article [1] in this Special Issue traced our understanding of educational leadership, and its connections to business administration, from ancient times until around 50 years ago. It argued that those involved in educational leadership, like business leadership, perhaps fell into three categories: those who made decisions (administrators), those who were tasked with implementing those decisions (managers), and those who produced the outcomes required (workers). Within an educational framework, governments would be the administrators, education departments (and those that worked in them at central or regional levels) would be the managers, and those at schools would be the workers. So, for most of history, school leaders (principals, headteachers) within government education systems would just be seen as workers. Boggs argued [2] that principals were seen as “odd-job and clerical workers whose business it is to keep the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running while other people perform the higher professional functions” (p 10). As such, historian Kate Rousmaniere [3] argued that the “principalship is missing from both the political history of school administration and the social history of schools. It’s as if the principal did not exist at all” (p. 4).

In the first half of the 20th century, most Western countries had focused successfully on increasing the proportion of their populations having access to schools, both through compulsory education laws and by increasing the number and locality of schools. As well, students were encouraged to stay at school for more years by increasing curriculum offerings. After a period of rapid population growth in the 1950s and 1960s after the Second World War, a downturn in birth rates in the 1970s in many parts of the Western world followed, and countries turned their attention away from expanding education towards assessing the quality of what was offered. But as Bisschoff and Rhodes argued [13], not all countries have had similar histories when it comes to how education was developed and structured. Some countries have had compulsory education for around 150 years, but for others, an education system was not created until the 1970s or even later. Some countries did not have a single university until the 1990s. The current article focuses on changes in the Western world, considered by authors in the current Special Issue. Although other countries (such as Malaysia—[14] in the current Special Issue) have not had the same lengthy history, they have attempted to reach the same levels of performance in much shorter time periods. In this sense, what was trialled by the Western countries was often taken up by other countries as well.

Research that considered how schools affected the equality of educational outcomes emerged in various countries in the 1960s and 1970s, with reports such as those by Coleman et al. [15] in the United States, Plowden [16] in the United Kingdom, and the Karmel Report [17] in Australia being influential. The Coleman Report, which investigated the relationship between the equality of educational outcomes and school effectiveness, has been identified as a key report in the development of early school effectiveness research in the United States. The conclusion of this report can be summed up by the following paragraph ([15], p. 325):

Schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context… this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighbourhood and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school. For equality of educational opportunity must imply a strong effect of schools that is independent of the child’s immediate environment, and that strong independence is not present in American schools.

Coleman found that schools accounted for only a small part of the variance in pupil achievement, a finding that was replicated by other large-scale studies such as those by Jencks et al. [18] and Thorndike [19].

Despite changes being argued for in many parts of the world, the formal centralised relationship between government and schools lasted until the 1980s, when arguments to encourage higher levels of local participation in the governance of schools started to take hold. In Australia, the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission ([17], p. 10) had argued for “less rather than more centralised control over the operation of schools. Responsibility should be devolved as far as possible upon the people involved in the actual task of schooling, in consultation with the parents of the pupils whom they teach and, at senior levels, with the students themselves”.

Such arguments led to real moves connecting the quality of education with how schools would be structured, managed, and led later in the 1970s. Governmental concerns for school effectiveness in the United Kingdom and the United States of America were exacerbated in the 1980s by these countries having a diminished status as economic superpowers of the world, when other countries such as Japan and West Germany attracted increased economic and political status in world affairs. In the United Kingdom, works in the 1960s such as The Home and the School [20] and Parents and Teachers: Partners or Rivals [21] considered the relationship between family background and success at school. When these were followed up in the 1970s by such documents as The Crisis in Education [4] and Black Paper 1977 [22], the standard of students’ academic performance in the United Kingdom became a critical issue. The British Government’s response to these concerns was the establishment of the Assessment of Performance Unit within the Department of Education and Science in 1974.

In the USA, formal 1980s reports such as A Nation at Risk [5], Education and Economic Progress [23], Investing in Our Children [24], and Who Will Teach Our Children? [25] indicated the level of government and public concern about the issue and created a climate in which the relationship between education and economic competitiveness on the international market became inextricably linked. This led to the situation where schools were charged with turning out, in the most cost effective way, the maximum number of graduates with the “right” skills and knowledge as possible. As Chapman ([26], p. 5) pointed out, “such pressures have forced educational authorities to reassess educational needs both qualitatively and quantitatively”.

It could be argued that the US standards movement actually started when A Nation at Risk was published. Comments by the lead author, James J. Harvey, such as “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people” and “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” set the tone for reform. Bogotch, Townsend, and Acker-Hocevar ([27], p. 130) reported:

It is interesting to note that in the 1980s and 1990s, when discussions of the changing nature of leadership were at their height, the most innovative activities that emerged were driven from the top down. During this period the intervention of government into the knowledge and management issues surrounding schools led to perhaps the greatest period of change in school history.

One example of this top-down change happened in Victoria, Australia ([28], p. 4), when the new government of 1982 changed the responsibilities of school councils to promote higher levels of decision-making at the school level, with parents and the local community involved, with the system providing support, but also overseeing issues related to effectiveness and equity issues for educational outcomes. Previously, school councils had been advisory bodies to the principal (who, in turn, was charged with implementing decisions made by the centre) and supported the school in fundraising for additional buildings and keeping the school grounds tidy. Now, they had real decisions to make about the directions the school would take. This changed the role of both the council and the principal and further government decisions led to the strengthening of both roles.

By 1992, a new conservative state government had implemented the Schools of the Future program [29], where the key features included increased responsibilities for decision-making in the areas of curriculum, financial management, staffing, and policy for school councils and principals at the school site. The major implication of this development was a substantial increase in the role of the principal to lead, rather than just manage, the school. Townsend ([30], p. 5) argued that the underlying rationale for Schools of the Future was “that quality outcomes of schooling can only be assured when decision making takes place at the local level”. The introduction of a school charter as the central accountability document provided schools themselves with “the opportunity to determine the future character and goals of the school”.

Part of the argument for changing the way schools were managed was that in doing so, schools would become more effective. However, as Caldwell pointed out ([31], p. ii), there were other reasons as well.

Forces which have shaped current and emerging patterns of school management include a concern for efficiency in the management of public education, effects of the recession and financial crisis, complexity in the provision of education, empowerment of teachers and parents, the need for flexibility and responsiveness, the search for school effectiveness and school improvement, interest in choice and market forces in schooling, the politics of education, the establishment of new frameworks for industrial relations and the emergence of a national imperative.

However, there was substantial criticism about the reason why decentralisation was occurring (for instance, Bell [32] argued that the main thrust of the legislative changes in the United Kingdom in the late 80s and early 90s was to create a “centrally controlled national curriculum that gives children an entitlement to specific curriculum content and enables direct comparisons to be made between all schools through national assessment… Quality here is conceptualised in terms of specific outcomes, test results, and efficient use of resources rather than of processes or relative achievements” (p. 3)). This might be seen as an instance where “devolution of responsibility” could be considered as a “displacement of blame” [33] that reflected a “naive confidence in schools’ ability to effect change without support” ([34], p. 189). However, the use of the school effectiveness research to justify moves toward a greater degree of decentralization was a powerful argument [35]:

…when we do look at schools that have improved, or if we look at schools that are so-called effective schools, we’ve seen that in all cases, people have taken the initiative to make decisions for themselves, to solve their own problems, to set their own priorities. They’ve usually been schools that have been able to select their own staff in some way. So the characteristics of improving schools one can find in a system of self-managing schools.

However, later, Caldwell, who had been instrumental in theorising self-managing schools [36], admitted “There is also no doubt that evidence of a direct cause-and-effect relationship between self-management and improved outcomes is minimal”. But the school effectiveness research since the late 1980s has been very influential. It is to this research that we now turn.

2.1. Fifty Years of Educational Research: Effectiveness, Improvement, and Innovation

The early reports of Coleman et al. [15] and Jencks et al. [18] stimulated a large body of research on both sides of the Atlantic that attempted to establish that schools themselves, in addition to family or social backgrounds, made a difference to the educational achievements of the students passing through them. The early school effectiveness research focused on two main issues: achievement and social justice. Edmonds brought these two things together when he argued the following ([37], p. 16):

Specifically, I require that an effective school bring the children of the poor to those minimal masteries of basic school skills that now describe minimally successful pupil performance for the children of the middle class.

Results from research in the 1980s clearly established that schools did make a difference, and that pupil achievement was not just a product of socioeconomic background. In fact, Murphy ([38], pp. 166–168) argued that there are four factors that can be considered as the legacy of school effectiveness. The most fundamental of the four is that “given appropriate conditions, all children can learn”. Others were a rejection of the historical perspective that good schools and bad schools could be identified by the socioeconomic status of the area in which they were located; a rejection of the view that “poor academic performance and deviant behaviour have been defined as problems of individual children or their families”; and that “the better schools are more tightly linked—structurally, symbolically and culturally—than the less effective ones”.

Reynolds and colleagues [39] identified four phases of school effectiveness research, the first being the reaction to the seminal studies of Coleman et al. and Jencks et al. Subsequent phases came about as methodologies and research objectives became more nuanced. Phase two saw the use of multilevel methodologies [40] and methodologically sophisticated studies that considered differential effects upon students of different background characteristics, their size, and their impact in the long term. Phase three started to explore why schools had different effects, where “the black box of what happens in schools is opened” ([41], p. 66) and research started to consider “input/process/output” of what happened at school, rather than just “input-output”. The fourth phase saw increasing internationalisation of the field and collaboration between school effectiveness and school improvement researchers. During this phase, international collections of research were published (for example, [42,43]), demonstrating that the school effectiveness movement was something happening in many countries simultaneously and led to an understanding that schools perhaps should be judged by their own progress over time rather than being compared to other schools that may have very different circumstances facing them.

However, like the move towards school self-management, the school effectiveness research was not without its critics. The early research was the topic for a debate at the American Educational Research Association conference in April 2000 between proponents and detractors of school effectiveness research. Four papers [44,45,46,47] were presented. The three main issues that were raised as criticisms of the research were “the overclaiming of SER; the continued under-theorising of SER and the inability of SER to control political use of its findings” ([48], p. 115).

These criticisms brought into focus three areas for consideration: whether or not the definition of “school effectiveness” was broad enough, either in terms of the range of activity that it included or the students that it served (put simply “effectiveness for what?” and “effectiveness for whom?”, elaborated later in [49]); whether the methodologies used by school effectiveness researchers and their analyses justified their conclusions on differential student outcomes; and whether the relationship between school effectiveness research findings and the political use of these to change education systems and educational practice could be justified. What these criticisms did was flag the need for considerations related to school culture, relationships, multiple outcomes, and the development of self, to be included within the concept of effectiveness, which, over time, saw multiple changes in the way in which “effectiveness” was defined.

One important shift in effectiveness research was the move from considering “school effectiveness” to considering “educational effectiveness”, where the research saw “a dynamic, not static, set of relationships and moved away from seeing education in particular as an inherently stable set of arrangements towards one that sees the various ‘levels’ of the educational system interacting and achieving variable outcomes” [50].

Because the dynamic model of educational effectiveness recognised that the influences on student achievement are multilevel, the model is multilevel as well (see [50], p. 295). There are four different levels: student characteristics; teacher and classroom factors; the school level; and the system level. This suggests that there needs to be not only support (through leadership development) for school leaders, but some consideration needs to be given to the possibility of providing training programs for system leaders, at regional or central office, as well. Just as principals need the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to lead teachers and their school communities, there may also be knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes required for system leaders whose task is to support a team of principals.

The movement towards an international use of the term “educational effectiveness” was confirmed with the publication of The International Handbook of Educational Effectiveness and Improvement: Research Policy and Practice [51]. When research of effectiveness is undertaken in the future, there is an expectation that the research will go beyond what happens in classrooms and at the school level and will consider the ways in which systems support what happens at the school as well. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, we will stop talking about effective schools and start talking about effective school systems.

2.2. From School Effectiveness to School Improvement

Connecting theory to practice is not easy to do. It is hard to scale up improvements from a specific set of schools undertaking a sponsored research and development program to a whole system ([52], p. 2):

…reformers have invariably found that it is difficult to improve learning in a sustained way across more than a handful of schools at any one time.

Brian Caldwell became a key player in the movement towards self-managing schools internationally. His work with Jim Spinks proposed a system of self-managing schools [53]. The Victorian Schools of the Future program created a system where the schools were self-managing but were framed by a state-approved curriculum and standards framework. Schools were given their own budgets, and they developed a school charter that embodied both state and local priorities as a framework for accountability. The charter’s goals and objectives were assessed over a three-year period, when a new charter that built upon previous school achievements would be created [54].

The concept of school-self management was necessarily accompanied by the concept of school self-evaluation. MacBeath and McGlynn [55] argued “while the evaluation of schools’ performance has traditionally been the work of government inspectors and other external agencies, it is now widely believed that schools should also evaluate themselves”. The Scottish government took up the challenge of inviting schools to evaluate themselves and supported them with the document How good is our school? [56]. They identified the relationship between school effectiveness and school improvement as an “inwards (knowing ourselves inside out), outwards (learning from what happens elsewhere), forwards (exploring what the future might hold and planning how to get there)” approach. They argued for a triangulation of evidence: quantitative data, direct observation, and people’s views when engaging with specific self-evaluation questions.

One thing that has been consistent, over all the years and forms of research, is that leadership has been identified as a key element for the development of any school effectiveness or school improvement process. The key to ensuring that the need for the school to improve over time is focused upon, and that school goals are hopefully achieved over time, is the leadership shown by the principal, the school council or board, and others in the leadership team. An effective school will have effective school leadership, and it is to this that we now turn.

3. Leadership and School Effectiveness in a Time of Self-Managing Schools

Late into the 1970s, leadership (or management) of schools was system-based and hierarchical. Ministers of education made decisions that were implemented by education departments. The fidelity of the implementations was ensured by inspectors or superintendents who oversaw the work of school principals. School principals’ responsibilities were to implement (faithfully) the decisions made by others and to ensure that teachers followed the requirements related to their employment. The 1980s and 1990s saw that hierarchical approach start to change as more and more responsibilities were shifted from the system level to the school level. This was brought about, in part, when business leadership terminologies entered educational conversations.

An OECD report ([57], p. 4) argued:

As countries struggle to transform their educational systems to prepare all young people with the knowledge and skills needed to function in a rapidly changing world, the roles and expectations for school leaders have changed radically. They are no longer expected to be merely good managers but leaders of schools as learning organizations. Effective school leadership is increasingly viewed as key to large-scale education reform and to improved educational outcomes.

The standards movement, the school effectiveness research, and moves toward school self-management changed the responsibilities of the person in charge at school. There have been multiple studies over the years that have highlighted the importance of school leadership for the effectiveness of schools. From the early research of Edmonds [37], to the dynamic approach to educational effectiveness [50], right through to Dempster, et al.’s [58] and Grissom et al.’s [59] reviews of the impact of principals on student learning and school effectiveness, the evidence is clear. The school leader has always been seen as a critical, if not the main, identified component of school improvement.

In 2006, the National College of School Leadership (NCSL) sponsored a meta-analysis titled “Seven Strong Claims about School Leadership” [60]. This study was reviewed and updated by Day et al. [61], who identified ten strong claims, but with a great deal of overlap. Later, Leithwood et al. [62] revisited their original seven claims. The seven claims identified the importance of school leadership for teaching and learning by influencing what happened in the classrooms, that there were certain things that all good leaders did, that how a leader acted was as important as what the leader did, that distributed leadership was important, but so too were the “personal leadership resources” that the school leader was able to use.

The decade long International Successful Principalship Project (ISPP) produced more than 100 case studies of successful principal leadership [63,64,65]. The I SPP confirmed that leadership by successful principals comprised the four core dimensions of setting direction, developing people, redesigning the organisation, and managing the instructional programme previously articulated by Leithwood and colleagues [60,66] but there were additional practices such as strategic problem solving, articulating a set of core values, building trust and being visible in the school, building a safe and secure environment, introducing productive forms of instruction to staff, and coalition-building [67].

Grissom et al. ([59], Foreword) argued that “the impact of an effective principal has likely been understated”. Using six studies as the data base for their findings, they concluded that the effect of an above-average principal was about the same as the effect of an above-average teacher, much more than had been previously assumed in Leithwood, et al. [60]. However, they also argued that “principals’ effects on students come largely through their effects on teachers, including how principals hire, retain, develop, and encourage teachers and create appropriate conditions for teaching and learning” (p. xiv). They further argued that “how principals approach school leadership directly affects schools’ outcomes” (p. xv).

This suggests that school leaders in the modern world need to go beyond simply knowing a series of specific steps to follow and now need to consider the context in which those steps will be taken. Any list of what a principal must do in itself does not take into account the differences brought about by geography and culture. The school effectiveness research has shown us that context matters. As Hopkins [68] points out, leading a poorly performing school is different to leading one that is doing well. So, simply implementing the list of expectations handed down by departments in the same way but in different schools does not work. It is not only what we know that is important, but how we use that knowledge—how we implement it in practice—that becomes critical, especially when it comes to the task of education.

Bogotch and Townsend ([69], p. 3) argued:

Educational leadership, like many other facets of human life, can be looked at from two different points of view. We have chosen to call these points of view the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. The ‘what’ in this instance is the knowledge required to do the job well. It is ‘knowing’ about curriculum, about management, about human relations and about the various factors, both inside and outside the school, that are required to keep those within the school, students, teachers, and others, safe and productive. However, it is only when this ‘knowing’ is joined by the ‘how’ that school leadership is successful. The ‘how’ in this instance is the set of processes used by the school leader to communicate, implement, evaluate, and relate the knowledge base to those with whom the leader interacts, together with the attitudes and values that are shared between both leader and followers. We would argue that the practice of educational leadership is artistry, when these two factors come together in a way that promotes both simultaneously.

The what of school leadership is to a large extent determined by the standards of school leadership identified by governments or departments of education as a means for providing consistency across the system. In some parts of the world, departments of education adopted a market approach to education [70], similar in nature to what some large corporations were doing. In business, each individual office within a corporation needed to demonstrate its profitability or be closed; departments of education now needed each self-managing school to be “successful” or face some form of intervention. In the most extreme case, in the United States, schools were reconstituted [71], where school leaders and staff were all fired over the summer and students arrived in the new school year to a totally new regime. Such situations placed an enormous burden on school leaders and increased their responsibilities.

In [72], Townsend compared what key western countries suggest are important leadership and managerial skills for school leaders within their systems. These are the standards by which good school leadership can be judged.

Table 1. National principal/head teacher standards in selected countries.

Australia	New Zealand	England and Wales	USA	Canada (Alberta)
Leading teaching and learning	Pedagogy	Teaching	Curriculum, instruction, and assessment	Providing instructional leadership
		Curriculum and assessment		Supporting the application of foundational knowledge about First Nations people
		Behaviour	Community of care and support for students
		Additional and special educational needs
Developing self and others	Culture	Professional development	Ethics and professional norms	Fostering effective relationships
			Professional community for teachers and staff	Embodying visionary leadership
			Professional capacity of school personnel	Developing leadership capacity
Leading improvement, innovation and change		School improvement	Mission, vision, and core values	Modelling a commitment to professional learning
			School improvement	Leading a learning community
Leading the management of the school	Systems	Organisational management	Operations and management	Managing school operations and resources
		Governance and accountability
Engaging and working with the community	Partnerships and networks	Working in partnership	Meaningful engagement of families and community	Understanding and responding to the larger societal context
			Equity and cultural responsiveness

(from ([72], p. 6)) compares five jurisdictions with similar national standards for school leadership professional practices. All are Western countries, and it might be assumed that other countries may apply different or additional standards for school leadership. However, Yokota’s article [73] in this Special Issue suggests that the standards identified below form a basis for those adopted in other countries.

What Table 1 demonstrates is that in a generic sense, all jurisdictions place emphasis on similar professional practices. They are teaching and learning, development of people and culture, improvement and accountability, school management, and community engagement. However, each of the jurisdictions uses different terminology and seems to place emphasis on different areas based perhaps on structural circumstances, which differ from country to country. This leads to the position that, although countries may have similar overall approaches, each one will have their own unique focus and agenda. For instance, where New Zealand focuses on building school culture, the United Kingdom identifies professional development, and the United States considers professional ethics and capacity-building. In the current Special Issue, Cheng [74] argued that leaders must lead and facilitate “multiple school functions (such as technological functions, economic functions, social functions, political functions, cultural functions and learning functions) … in a new era of multiplicities and complexities in education” (p. 1). This seems to be another list of what school leaders need to do but is still similar to that identified in Table 1. What Table 1 and Cheng’s list show is the contested nature of not only education, but what school leaders must do.

The main dilemma for school leaders into the future, however, is that it is likely that all six forms of leadership discussed by Cheng [74] might be expected at once, something that might be beyond any individual. It is here that transformational leadership, where the charismatic leader takes responsibility for everything, suffers from the concerns identified in this Special Issue by English and Ehrich [75] and previously by Gronn [76]. The heroic leader is no longer a viable concept and the need for other forms of leadership, such as distributed leadership or leadership for learning—both of which refer to the importance of sharing leadership (and sharing accountability)—might need to be considered. But as Townsend and Bogotch ([77], p. 215) argue: “…when state mandates, educational laws, leadership standards, ministerial pronouncements, curricular designs and professional development programs are presented as ready-made answers to be delivered by school administrators to teachers and students then we are failing to make education come alive in ourselves and in others”.

Bogotch and Townsend [69] argued that the how of school leadership was just as important as the what of school leadership. The movement of responsibility from the system level to the school level in many school systems around the world in the 1980s and 1990s changed the way in which the administration of schools was undertaken. This movement has accelerated over the past 30 years to the point where we now see school leadership in a different light. Three major theories about the role of school leaders occurred in the literature subsequent to the development of instructional leadership, transformational leadership [78], distributed leadership [79,80,81], and leadership for learning [82], and these resulted in new understandings of leadership in schools.

These shifts in understanding are discussed in Townsend ([83], p. 6): The first shift is that leadership previously was seen as being the sole responsibility of a single person. There is now an acceptance that leadership is a collective activity, as the increasingly complex environment that schools face cannot be addressed by a single person for an extended length of time, no matter how skilled and committed that person is. The second shift is that leadership previously was seen as being positional. Principals were the leaders because they were the principal. Now, we see leadership as being an activity. Principals now must understand how to lead other people and have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enables them to do so. The third shift is that we used to think that leadership was generic. If you could lead in one place, you could lead anywhere. We now recognise that leadership is context and purpose specific and that leading a school that is successful is not the same as leading a school that is not. Leading a small rural school is not the same as leading a large inner-city comprehensive school. Leaders must know why they are leading and be sure to build a common, moral purpose within the school community if they are to be successful.

Attempts at identifying the how of school leadership are often connected to establishing strong learning in that most basic of skills, literacy. Hill and Crevola ([84], p. 13) identified eight activities that a school should focus on when trying to promote whole school improvement: beliefs and understandings; leadership and coordination; standards and targets; monitoring and assessment; classroom teaching strategies; professional learning teams; school and class organisation; intervention and special assistance; and home, school, and community partnerships. However, underpinning the other seven was the category of “Beliefs and understandings” (to the extent that in the graphic design of the model beliefs and understandings was the central point around which the other seven “spokes” revolved). They argued, “It is important, for example, that there is a belief in the capacity of all students to achieve high standards given sufficient time and support” (p. 2) and “Beliefs that enable effective teaching to occur need to be accompanied by expert knowledge. Effective teachers are professionals who are able to articulate what they do and why they teach the way they do” (p. 3). Townsend [85] suggested that beliefs and understandings were connected and interacted in a continuous way, so that first, teachers needed to believe that all students could learn, which then involved developing an understanding of why some students were not learning. This leads to teachers developing an understanding of what they need to learn (and do) to enable students to start learning, and be supported in ways that help them learn, which then required teachers to have the belief that they (the teachers) could do this. It could be argued that beliefs and understandings together make up our moral purpose. In this case, the school leader’s task is to have shared beliefs and understandings around the moral purpose of the school [86,87].

Since the 1980s, leadership theories have been used to describe what “good” leaders are and do. Many of them focused on specific characteristics (moral leadership, team leadership, and authentic leadership, among others), but others, it might be suggested, encompassed a much more broadly based consideration. An investigation of four of the theories of school leadership that have attained some prominence over the past four decades may be instructive when looking at the how of school leadership.

3.1. Instructional Leadership

Instructional leadership emerged in the early 1980s and was researched and conceptualised by Hallinger and Murphy [88]. The authors proposed three main dimensions—defining the school mission, managing the educational program, and promoting a positive school learning climate—with eleven specific tasks that are undertaken within those dimensions. However, the terminology used when identifying the specific tasks show that the principal is expected to do the heavy lifting when it comes to decision-making and managing implementation. The two responsibilities within “defining the school’s mission” are framing the school’s goals and communicating the school’s goals; “managing the instructional program” identifies three leadership functions: supervising and evaluating instruction, coordinating the curriculum, and monitoring student progress; and “promoting a positive school learning climate” includes protecting instructional time, providing incentives for teachers, providing incentives for learning (students), promoting professional development, and maintaining high visibility. Each of these verbs indicate actions from a dominant position. Ng ([89], p. 17) argues that for “managing the instructional program”, “This dimension is broader in scope and intent than the other two. It conforms to the notion that effective schools create an ‘academic press’ through developing high standards and expectations and a culture of continuous improvement”. With the principal being in charge of providing incentives for both teachers and students, it could be argued that this is a classic example of management (transactional leadership) in practice. Clearly, the principal is the one that makes all the critical decisions within the school. Such a leadership approach fits very well into the “command and control” model that had existed in education departments around the world for most of school history. It was also evident that the American system continued to maintain this form of control when other school systems were starting to investigate other forms of leadership within their schools. For Hallinger, “effective instructional leadership results when leaders align both instructional and managerial roles with their personal values”.

The managerial approach of instructional leadership as it was originally conceptualised might be considered as a form of transactional leadership, where schools, principals, and teachers are rewarded for following successfully the requirements set down by the system but in other cases are punished if the required standards of student achievement are not met. Schools that had been “reconstituted”, showed little academic improvement but came at a substantial human cost (see, for instance, [70] above).

Leithwood ([78], p. 8) argued that instructional leadership had been an idea that served many schools well in the 1980s and early 1990s, but that restructuring initiatives (by then happening in many countries) suggested that this form of leadership “no longer appears to capture the heart of what school administration will have to become”. This supported Sarason [90], who blamed “the predictable failure of educational reform” on the relationships between each of the players in schools: administrators, teachers, students, and parents. Leithwood proposed transformational leadership as “a more appropriate range of practices” than instructional leadership and argued that “it ought to subsume instructional leadership as the dominant image of school administration, at least during the 1990s”.

Although a focus on teaching to ensure certain student outcomes still maintains a strong position for leadership practice, whether school systems are centralised or not, there is a tendency for other terms, such as “learning-centred leadership” to now be associated with the instructional leadership focus. A second change of approach in more recent times has been the consideration that other school leaders are now more actively involved in the processes of instructional leadership, which originally focused solely on the work of the principal.

3.2. Transformational Leadership

The overarching theme of transformational leadership is the need to build relationships with teachers in ways that would support their working together, rather than simply managing and supervising what they did as individuals. Leithwood argued that school administrators needed to focus their attention on “using facilitative power to make second-order changes in their schools” ([78], p. 9). Leithwood’s early research proposed three fundamental goals: helping staff develop and maintain a collaborative, professional school culture [91]; fostering teacher development [92]; and helping them to solve problems together more effectively [93]. Later in their review of transformational leadership studies, Leithwood and Jantzi [94] argued that four conclusions about transformational leadership were warranted: effects on perceptions of organizational effectiveness are significant and large, and although less well documented and uniform, they are nevertheless modestly positive but significant; that evidence about its effect on student outcomes is promising though limited in amount; and effects on student engagement in school are also positive, but modest. These findings suggest that Leithwood is prepared to accept that the results from the research are moderate.

In this Special Issue, Wilson Heenan, Lafferty, and McNamara [95] provided a practical example of how transformational leadership is perceived by primary principals. They found that transformational leadership was seen “as a sustainable model” (pp. 14–15) but that “Practical day-to-day challenges of leadership positions in schools were regarded as hampering the feasibility of enactment given administration overload, with the importance of sharing leadership responsibility” (p. 18). Also in this Special Issue, Yokota argued ([73], p. 6): “transformational leadership itself cannot evade its own limitations of focusing the role of a single visionary, and sometimes charismatic, leader”. This point of view supports English and Ehrich’s argument in the current Special Issue [75] that “the mythologies, battles, trials and triumphs of the heroes of ancient, medieval, and modern times… all bear a striking resemblance to current portraits of the transformational leader” (p. 1). English and Ehrich argue that scientific analysis cannot prove or disprove the effectiveness of this form of leadership and suggest that, instead, an aesthetic lens would enable researchers to collect “subjective knowledge about leadership in a range of contexts, including educational leadership” (p. 11).

It is clear that the main issue with transformational leadership is the critical focus on the leader as central to any and all development (“the hero”). It would seem that a charismatic leader that focuses on the development of staff in ways that will support improvement in student learning is one step further on from instructional leadership, but is still not enough for the rapidly changing, complex times we are currently living in. The suggestion that the addition of distributed leadership to transformational leadership indicates a need to review this form of school leadership as well.

3.3. Distributed Leadership

The two major conceptual discussions of distributed leadership, rooted in activity theory [96] and distributed cognition, [97] come from Gronn [76,98] in Australia and Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond [80,81] in the United States. Gronn [76] suggested:

The first known reference to distributed leadership was in the field of social psychology in the early-1950s. The concept then lay dormant for more than three decades until it surfaced briefly once again in social psychology, and then again in the early-1990s in organisation theory.

Gronn described distributed leadership as “emergent work-related influence” (p. 17) that encouraged a shift in focus from the traits and roles of “leaders” to the shared activities and functions of “leadership”. He further argued that distributed leadership was not about adding leaders to the system but aimed to facilitate pluralistic engagement to generate concerted action. Gronn used the activity theory of Engestrom [96] as a tool to establish a bridge between agency and structure leading to where the product of a group of people working together is greater than the sum of their individual actions.

Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond [80] argued that distributed leadership was actually a new way of thinking about leadership. Later, Spillane ([99], p. 144) explained:

Distributed leadership is first and foremost about leadership practice rather than leaders or their roles, functions, routines, and structures… A distributed perspective frames leadership practice in a particular way; leadership practice is viewed as a product of the interactions of school leaders, followers, and their situation.

Spillane and his colleagues argue that distributed leadership is leadership stretched over a group of individuals and that the tasks are accomplished through interaction between multiple leaders. It is a practice that is distributed over leaders, followers, and their situations, and incorporates multiple activities.

However, some scholars have suggested that distributed leadership remains a somewhat fuzzy concept that cannot be clearly connected to practice. Bogotch and Shields [100], when considering how educational leadership impacted on social justice, identified one of the key issues with distributed leadership—although education systems might promote distributed leadership as part of a policy framework, in practice, it relied on the dispositions of the principal for it to happen at the school level.

By the late 1990s, academic leadership theory in education was moving from images of heroic leaders at the top of a hierarchy to the notion of leadership as distributed across multiple members of an organization [79,81]. While diffuse notions of leadership among school professionals became popular, such diffusion typically ended at the school door.

Leithwood et al. ([101], p. 280) were even more negative about the impact of distributed leadership, suggesting that the proponents of distributed leadership had failed…

…to assess the contribution of greater leadership distribution to the long list of desirable outcomes typically invoked by advocates—greater student learning, more democratic practices, greater commitment by staffs to the mission of the organization, increased professional development for a wider range of organizational members, better use of intelligence distributed throughout the organization outside those in formal roles, and the like.

All three leadership theories already mentioned have had critics suggest that ultimately each one cannot stand on its own as a totally effective leadership practice. With instructional leadership, the focus is solely on student outcomes, and the leader’s role is to “manage” teachers and the school environment so that everything is focused on these outcomes. This could be considered as a remainder from the “command and control” version of leadership. The modesty of the impact of transformational leadership practice on both student outcomes and engagement, together with the view that transformational leadership contains an underlying perception of the leader as a “hero”, suggests that although it may have positive effects on leader–follower relations, it cannot be considered as being a leadership model that answers all the questions about school leadership. Distributed leadership, with its focus on leadership practice, by connecting leaders, followers, and situations, and with it focusing on how leadership is distributed rather than what elements of leadership are shared or undertaken by followers, has little focus on what outcomes this has for students. This suggests that it might not be as theoretically powerful as either instructional leadership or transformational leadership, both of which have a strong focus on student achievement. In this Special Issue, Wilson Heenan, Lafferty, and McNamara argued for a “hybrid model of transformational and distributed school leadership” ([95], p. 32). It might be argued that taking the positive elements of all three theories to create something different might be the way to go.

The three leadership theories mentioned above had the benefit of having powerful research groups in North America that were able to generate many publications related to each (although Peter Gronn from Australia was influential in theorising distributed leadership). One thing that was common however to all three was that many of the citations (up to 90% of the citations within any particular article) in the early research also used North American sources. It might be argued that North America, with its somewhat unique system structure where national, state, and district policies all impacted on schools, together with large amounts of financial support, and the academic strength and influence of its research, created the conditions where these three approaches gained acceptance in other countries as well. Instructional leadership in particular has maintained a prominent position across many American states [102]. However, as can be seen from the above, none of the theories has gained universal acceptance, again reflecting the idea that anything about education is “essentially contested”.

In the United Kingdom, with far less research influence, and a very different educational structure (national, local authority, school), a different theory, leadership for learning, that seems to encompass many of the strengths of the other three, was being developed. The relative importance of this theory can be seen from the fact that both Hallinger (with Heck) [103] and Murphy (with others) [104] have used the term “leadership for learning” in more recent times. However, Ref. [103] suggests that leadership for learning “…represents a blend of two earlier leadership conceptualizations: instructional leadership and transformational leadership” (p. 237). In addition, seven of the eight factors that describe [104]’s version of leadership for learning neatly fit into the original three main leadership responsibilities identified two decades previously in instructional leadership. The one new criterion seems to relate to the leader’s need to be able to find and use resources that support learning.

However, an investigation of leadership for learning is warranted, to establish how it might be similar to the three other mainstream leadership theories, and how it might be different, in our search for a leadership approach that will support schools into the future.

3.4. Leadership for Learning

Leadership for learning was developed by the University of Cambridge through its Carpe Diem project [82]. Leadership for learning describes five leadership principles: a focus on learning (but for everyone in the school, not just students), focusing on the conditions that support learning, engaging in dialogue about learning, shared leadership, and shared accountability. In this sense, it might be considered to have a focus on student achievement similar to instructional leadership, but as MacBeath and Townsend ([105], pp. 1245–1246) point out:

Whereas much of the instructional leadership literature reduces learning to ‘outcomes’, leadership for learning embraces a much wider, developmental view of learning. Nor is its focus exclusively on student achievement. It sees things through a wide angle lens, embracing professional, organisational and leadership learning. It understands the vitality of their interconnections and the climate they create for exploration, inquiry and creativity. Its concern is for all of those who are part of a learning community.

A similar argument might be made as to the differences between transformational leadership and leadership for learning. The focus of transformational leadership is squarely on the leader, although there are some similarities in the attempt to transform schools into learning organisations. Leadership for learning has shared leadership similarities to distributed leadership, but uses a different approach to leading, inasmuch as the leader is to be seen, through dialogue, as part of a team of leaders ”embracing professional, organisational and leadership learning”. What leadership for learning provided was the opportunity to consider associated forms of leadership that extended and added detail to the understanding of leadership that was designed to transform schools and to encourage school leaders to become much more than managers of others.

Dempster [106] responded a to a question posed in [107]: “Are instructional leadership and leadership for learning two sides of the same coin or are they two very different approaches to leading school improvement?” (p. 403). He argued that “leadership for learning (LfL) is very different from the more widely known and more frequently cited concept, instructional leadership” but that “there are discernible elements of instructional leadership resident in leadership for learning”. Instructional leadership “was individualist in perspective with power vested in the principal, reinforcing leadership as supervision”, a position that has changed over the years since “to shared instructional leadership (Marks and Printy, 2003), to transformational leadership (Bass and Avolio, 1994; Leithwood, 1992), to integrated leadership (Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe, 2008), to distributed and networked leadership (Harris and Spillane, 2008; Johnson, Dempster, and Wheeley, 2016; Spillane, 2006)”.

He identified seven themes associated with leadership for learning:

• Embracing moral purpose;
• Listening to student voice;
• Promoting learning and pedagogy;
• Engaging people;
• Downplaying hierarchy;
• Networking leadership for collective impact;
• Understanding context;

and concluded:

…we have come a long way from the three dimensions and ten functions Hallinger arrived at in a review of instructional leadership in 2005. While (a) defining the school’s mission, (b) managing the instructional programme and (c) promoting a positive school learning climate are observable in leadership for learning practice today, they are there, not as an unmodified mantra for principals, but as elements embedded in a much more comprehensive view of what it takes to lead learning for student and school improvement…leadership for learning, seen in this light, is much more than instructional leadership. It relies less on positional power and more on principals, teachers, students, and community agents exercising autonomy in collective actions committed to making a difference in the life journey of learners.

([106], pp. 417–418)

Both Leithwood and Dempster have suggested that Instructional Leadership might be seen as a successful school leadership approach for its time, but that its time has passed.

One way of looking at the issue might be to ask school leaders: “At the end of your career would you like to be known as a leader of instruction, or a leader for learning?”. How they answer that question would have implications for how they would go about leading their school. While the various principal standards indicate what we expect from school leaders, in some cases, at various levels of proficiency depending on principals’ level of experience, the best practice research looks at how school leaders go about their business. In some cases, these align, but in other cases, they do not, as knowing what needs to be accomplished is not the same as knowing how you go about accomplishing it.

What we might conclude from recent research into school leadership is the movement towards higher levels of decision-making and responsibility at the school level has rapidly and substantially changed the role of the school leader, from one that manages the implementation of decisions made by others to one that leads their school community to make and implement decisions that will support a wide range of student learning. Research also tells us that leadership does have a positive impact on student achievement, but that leadership is not the sole province of the school principal. We could suggest that the principal might be seen as being something like the conductor of an orchestra, with each of the players having their own very important role to play if a symphony, rather than just noise, is to emerge. What we now have to accept is that each of the players in a school setting has to be a leader in their own right.

4. Leadership in Post-COVID-19 Times

It is clear that COVID-19 impacted on the quality of education able to be offered for millions of students around the world, but it may also have identified a new step that needs to be taken if the goal of having a quality system for all people is to be achieved. It may also be useful to reflect on what type of educational leadership might be needed to achieve that goal.

McLeod and Dulsky ([108], p. 1) suggested “most school leaders have little, to no, training in crisis leadership, nor have they dealt with a crisis of this scale and this scope for this long”. They found that an emphasis on vision and values; communication and family community engagement; staff care, instructional leadership, and organizational capacity-building; equity-oriented leadership practices; and recognition of potential future opportunities were the major themes identified in their study of 43 school organisations around the world.

Freed [109] argued that COVID-19 has changed the game and put caring for employees’ wellbeing front and centre—post-COVID-19, the trend for leadership practices includes communicating and interacting with courage, compassion, and empathy with all employees. Nash (in [109]) argued that “Styles such as command and control are not effective for organizations in the 21st century. Organizations are ambiguous and complex environments. Leaders must shift their mindset and place people and relationships before projects and tasks.” Carucci (in [109]) suggested that “Leaders have had to learn to be vulnerable and realize it is not possible to have all of the answers. For some leaders, COVID-19 has been a crash course in empathy and compassion… I hope they won’t put these skills back on the shelf when the crisis is over”. Behar (in [109]) suggested that “the understanding that a leader’s primary role is to help people achieve what they want in their lives—to help them grow as human beings. When you do that well, they want to help you and the organization achieve and grow”.

Thornton [110] interviewed 18 secondary school principals about their experiences in responding to the COVID-19 situation and found three common factors—relational leadership, distributed leadership, and networking and collaboration—but concluded: “While it has been suggested that the school leadership practice in times of crisis differs from that which is needed in usual times [111], this research suggests that it may be just the emphasis that needs to change… it reflects the findings of other research highlighting effective leadership practices in time of crisis.” (p. 37).

Independent Schools Victoria commissioned Monash University to undertake a study of the impact of the pandemic on 42 school leaders in independent schools. The report ([112], p. 5) found that principals adapted their priorities and leadership approaches, with relational leadership being the dominant style. Many principals saw their role as shifting from the leader of the school to the leader of the community. It was necessary to shift their focus to mental health and wellbeing during the pandemic. Principals had felt high levels of stress and anxiety themselves, but some saw the opportunity for the school to grow. Others felt that it was important to embrace uncertainty and to show vulnerability to encourage a growth mindset to encourage disruptive innovation. Overall, principals performed a delicate balancing act of making decisions without fully knowing the consequences, while often dealing with financial pressures and questions about school sustainability. The report focused on the need for agile leadership and asked school leaders to be flexible, be concerned, be strategic, focus on community building, be self-reflective and use research, and embrace the uncertainty and use the technology, findings that support the need for leaders to have many facets simultaneously, supporting Cheng’s [74] argument.

The issue of relational learning is addressed by Otero [113,114], where he suggests a pathway for professional development for school leaders: “Instead of looking at families and communities through the lens of the school, leaders are then immersed in a multitude of communities, seeing firsthand what life is like for others and what education means to a variety of families and communities, both modern and traditional” ([114], p. 15). Clearly, the pandemic has changed, perhaps forever, the ways in which school leaders must lead their schools. It might also be argued that if such strategies work “in a crisis” and that many recent reports suggest that schools have been in crisis (lack of staff, inability to achieve learning objectives, etc.) for some time, then perhaps the use of many of these strategies might need to be built into “normal operations”.

Some arguments suggest that what has happened in the past forty or so years may just be a precursor to what needs to come. Even prior to COVID-19, Richard Elmore [115] made the argument that:

Education alone has remained more or less in its original institutional structure, dominated by traditional policy and governance structures, composed of highly interest-based constituencies and massively complex pluralist political alliances, heavy monopolistic control through finance and accountability structures, human resource models relying on old-form industrial organisation and labour relations practices, and a ground-level delivery structure composed of atomised, self-contained physical structures—designed as much for custody and control of the youth population as for the cultivation of learning.

If we adopt the S-curve terminology to consider the major changes in education over history, there seems to have been five eras, of different lengths of time. In the first era, from ancient history until around the 1880s, only the rich or privileged were given what we would today consider to be a quality education. For the next hundred or so years, in the second era, most education was managed by centralised education systems. Only a small proportion of the students who started school completed a full school education and an even smaller proportion went on to higher education. School leaders at this time were managers who implemented decisions made by others. By the 1980s, moves towards decentralisation brought about the third era and this was accompanied by higher proportions of students completing school. School leaders were now responsible for engaging teachers and focused on student performance, reflecting an instructional leadership approach. The adoption of a market approach to education in the mid-1990s could be considered a fourth era, when schools were rewarded (or punished) based on the performance of their students. The task of the leader was to transform their school into a productive organisation. A fifth era emerged around 2000, when recognition that the task of leading a school became too complex for a single school leader to be successful, so we started to see leadership teams and widely distributed leadership approaches in many school systems. Each of the above can be identified by both the effectiveness of education during that time and the style of leadership that was dominant for the circumstances. It might be argued that a new S-curve for education and school leadership may have emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic years, where school leaders now must support families and the community as a way of ensuring the best possible education for students in the school.

5. From Improvement to Innovation

Just as the term “educational effectiveness” is starting to supplant “school effectiveness”, the term “innovation” is now starting to appear whenever we talk about school improvement. It is a recognition that leaders of schools have to manage the circumstances brought about by rapid and disruptive changes within the community. It is now common for any statement of professional standards for school leaders to include the terms “innovation” and “change”. For instance, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) identifies five leadership professional practices [116]:

• Leading teaching and learning;
• Developing self and others;
• Leading improvement, innovation, and change;
• Leading the management of the school;
• Engaging and working with the community.

The Centre for Strategic Education published a series of monographs [117,118,119] that considered the future of education and educational leadership. Hannan and Mackay ([117], p. 3) identified both the problems and possibilities that school leaders now face: “Leadership is more important than ever but is faced with profound challenges: the legacy of health-related disruption; unacceptable and unsustainable growth in inequality; mental health problems amongst learners and teachers; leadership burnout; and difficulties in recruitment. At the same time, the rapid development of convergent technologies and the awakening of new sensibilities, taken together with new sources of power, offer the most astounding opportunities for humankind”.

They identify what they call five intertwined signposts to the future: the need to create a new education narrative; the need to lead within ecosystems of education “which are dynamic, evolving, and enable greater diversity (p. 9); the need to lead for equity (p. 13); and leading for innovation through agile leadership (p. 17). They argue (p. 16) “The task is no longer one of improvement of the existing paradigm; and certainly not one of systems maintenance. It has been observed that we need not just innovative solutions, but system innovation”. Finally, they argue for leading for futures literacy to “enable a culture that supports the freedom to think and plan in non-linear ways, and views uncertainty as a material to build with, not as a risk to be mitigated” (p. 19). This last comment suggests a major revision of current curriculum to ensure that what students learn today will be relevant for them tomorrow and into the future.

In the third monograph, Hannan and Mackay ([119], p. 3) argue “debates about the future direction of education have, for the last 30 years, been dominated by narratives of reform and improvement”. They argue that this has largely failed the education system and those within it and argue that “we need to be in the space of transformation, and not merely improvement of the old model” (p. 4). They identify what they call a 20th-century paradigm of education, one that largely serves the society and the economy and compare it to a 21st-century paradigm where education focuses on empowering the individual and argue that while “educators increasingly are adopting the 21st century paradigm, politicians almost invariably speak in the language of the former” (p. 6). They argue there are a series of misalignments, where politicians are bound by the time between elections, but where transforming factors that support learning sometimes take much longer; where many politicians might be seen as some of the successful graduates of the current education system and fail to work through some of the issues for those that are not as successful; and that most politicians focus of the next election and what they might do to get re-elected, rather than on a long-term agenda.

They suggest that it is unachievable to disassociate education from politics and argue that a different type of alignment, a strategic alignment, be employed to identify and then use lessons that might be drawn from the campaign to address the climate crisis in a way that influences politicians “…to be key actors in shaping a Learning Future of meaning and hope for all humanity” (p. 35).

Conigrave and Mackay ([119], p. 4) argue that “To effectively lead the adaptive challenge of delivering transformative learning for all, leaders need to prepare to step into the place of not knowing [120], letting go of the ego [121] to engage in the learning required to ‘work out what’s really going on’ [122]” and that “Leading this transformation will require leaders to take a system perspective of their adaptive challenge” (p. 5). They argue that those that will lead transformation will need to build their self-awareness about what they know and do not know and what they can do or not do, but also recognise that others can (and should) be involved in this process; they will need to know and make sense of the environment in which they work and connect with key stakeholders; and then use good transformative leadership theories to develop practice.

Clearly, if we consider future moves towards higher levels of learning for all students within every system, then innovation might replace transformation and improvement as the terms we use. We then need to consider the role of the school leader when school innovation is the goal. de Jong et al. [123] focused their attention on the behaviours associated with collaborative innovation in Dutch schools. They interviewed 22 primary, secondary, and vocational principals where the same collaborative innovation program had been implemented, one that aimed at enhancing collaboration between teachers and school principals. They identified 11 leadership practices (bottom-up, involvement, facilitation, top-down, motivation, vision focus, progress, role model, student focus, transparency, and connect), with student focus and transparency being identified as comparatively new additions to the suite of leadership practices. They identified two main leadership patterns, team player and facilitator, that were seen as appropriate, whereas the other pattern, key player, was seen as being less useful when innovation was the goal.

Kenayathulla, Ghani, and Radzi [14] in this Special Issue echoed Cheng’s [74] view that “school leaders are expected to embrace multiple school functions” (p. 1) and reported on three waves in the Malaysian Education Development Plan [124], which aimed to improve the selection of principals and head teachers, improve career paths and leadership distribution, and create a culture of professional excellence. After investigating the progress made, they recommended further steps be taken to identify “potential school leaders among senior assistant teachers” and then to provide them with professional development prior to appointment and, subsequently, ongoing support. Such efforts are needed if school leaders are to move from being competent in the present to being innovative in the future. One way of doing this is to consider what it means to move beyond competence and towards capability.

Lewis [125], when elaborating on the Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL) Capability Framework, argued:

…that influential leaders require more than leadership knowledge and competencies to engage in developmental, empowering, and inspirational ways with colleagues in the workplace. There is considerable critique of competency-based models of leadership development in the literature. Critics, such as Kaplan & Norton [1996] and Onsman [2003], question the idea of fragmenting leadership into key result areas, competencies, and performance indicators.

Lewis referred to Stephenson who had pointed to a distinction between leadership capabilities and leadership competencies.

Capability depends much more on our confidence that we can effectively use and develop our skills in complex and changing circumstances than on our mere possession of those skills.

([126], p. 1)

Capable leaders have confidence in their ability to “take effective and appropriate action within unfamiliar and changing circumstances” ([127], p. 2).

Competency is about delivering the present based on past performance; capability is about imagining the future and bringing it about. Competency is about control; capability is about learning and development. Competency is about fitness for (usually other people’s) purpose; capability is about judging fitness of the purpose itself.

([127], p. 4)

This movement from competence to capability suggests the need for school leaders to be strategic in their practices. Pisapia [128] argued that the “complex and changing circumstances” referred to by Stephenson could be also characterised as the period of overlap in the S-curves referred to previously, that period where what was previously accepted as practice is gradually replaced by a new innovation. This creates a period of confusion when we are unsure whether to use the old or the new and creates dilemmas about what the next steps might be. Pisapia argued that the task of the strategic leader in times of confusion is to anticipate changes, challenges, and opportunities in the internal and external environments (anticipating); create and articulate common values and the broad general direction of agreed development (articulating); establish the social capital necessary to mobilise others (aligning); and build the capacity of the organisation by anchoring new learning through engaged, self-managed teams of followers (assuring) (adapted from [128], p. 14).

For Pisapia, these four activities continue to repeat themselves over time, creating what he calls the leader’s wheel. Driving this wheel forward are two strategic leadership skills that he calls agility and artistry.

Agility, highlighted as part of innovative leadership in [117], refers to a strategic mindset that uses a set of three cognitive skills—reflection, reframing, and systems thinking—that “allows leaders to be successful in many different contexts and under conditions of ambiguity, complexity and chaos” ([128], p. 16). In Pisapia, this is known as strategic thinking and is a precondition for the actual actions taken by a strategic leader. Artistry, a term also used by Bogotch and Townsend in [69], or strategic execution, comes from being able to select from a range of leadership actions to guide the organisation forward. For Pisapia, traditional leaders “used a limited set of leader actions and employed a command and control, task and relationships, transformational or transactional style” but “…as artists, strategic leaders are flexible and able to adapt to different circumstances and conditions” ([128], p. 15).

But it is now clear that the school leader is just one piece in the puzzle that leads to a complete picture of successful student learning. As Creemers and Kyriakides [50] argued, the move from school effectiveness to educational effectiveness has to not only consider the impact of factors at the student level (for instance, aptitude, SES, gender, motivation) and the quality of teaching (environment, assessment, questioning, structuring, and application of lessons), but also to consider school policy and how that might be improved through evaluation, as well as regional and national policies and how they are improved over time, together with the overall environment for education within this framework—how systems support teachers and school leaders and how the public perceive the importance of education affect what happens within schools.

The connection between how school systems support school leaders in challenging and rapidly changing circumstances will be one of the critical issues associated with improving student learning in the future. Caldwell, in this Special Issue [9], considers how the work environment for school leaders in Australia has changed in recent times, how this has impacted on the role of the school leader, whether any deterioration in the work environment is associated with recent moves towards decentralisation, and how school systems might better support school leaders. He identified three connected themes—intensification–intimidation; autonomy–accountability; and system–support—that were related to changes in school leaders’ work environment and provided six recommendations for future directions that suggested, among others, that school leaders have greater control and less reporting about their work environment, that new practices should replace older ones, rather than just being added, and the use of AI. These factors would all release school leaders from tasks that take time, time that could then be used to enable leaders to engage in deep thinking about the future of schools.

Perhaps one possible way forward for improving the quality of school leadership is considered by Huber and Pruitt [129] in this Special Issue. They argue that “the goal is to develop problem-solving, creative, self-renewing schools that have sometimes been described as learning organizations” (p. 3).

To enable this to occur, “holistic approaches (not only content instruction but also promotion of motivation and reflection), personal development instead of training for a role, orientation towards the school’s core purpose, from knowledge acquisition to creation and development of knowledge, experience and application orientation, multi-method using more different ways of learning, e.g., workshops and the workplace” (p. 4).

They researched interventions combining multiple approaches for the development of and support for school leadership and concluded that to “transform education leadership for the sake of securing and improving the quality of education and the school quality, a professional, profound and persistent combination of multiple approaches for the development of and support for school leadership is needed” (p. 22) and highlighted the importance of coaching as it “helps to overcome the missing link from theory into practice” but argued that “further research is needed to determine what factors…create a stronger impact on the changes in school quality” (p. 23).

If schools as learning organisations might be seen as the future post-COVID-19, then leadership for learning might be the way forward. With its focus on learning, for everyone in the school, and thinking about the resources required to enable this, using dialogue to support learning, and by having an acceptance that both shared leadership and shared accountability will lead to the school becoming a learning organisation, leadership for learning is a leadership approach that is appropriate for a time of crisis. It effectively takes key elements of other leadership styles (instructional, transformational, and distributed), but also considers the whole school community as the place for learning.

To help us understand how new forms of leadership can impact on school communities within this new post-COVID-19 S-curve experience, we might need to heed Bogotch’s challenge in this Special Issue [130] for a “lever for radical changes in how and with whom we should conduct research publicly and democratically” (p. 5), which creates a further challenge that involves “…remaking the enterprise of conducting research into a collective endeavor instead of a private and privileged practice: (p. 11).

6. Towards the Future: School Transformation or Just Changing the Toys around in the Toy Box?

The arguments above might suggest that there has been substantial and rapid change over the past fifty years in schools, but the big question is “Has the experience of school for an individual student changed in that time?” One might argue that the actual experience of students in big picture terms has not changed all that much. Moore Johnson [131] argued that fifty years ago, Tyack [132], among others, “…depicted the school as an organizational ‘egg crate’, where teachers work in the isolation of their classroom. In egg-crate schools, teachers focus on their own students largely to the exclusion of others, and they interact minimally and intermittently with their colleagues”. Twenty-five years ago, Beare ([133], p. 1) posed the question:

If, as an educational planner, you were presented with a greenfields site on which a new town or suburb was to be built to accommodate dwellings for approximately 22,000 people, what schools or educational buildings would you offer the developer?

He argued that there are some things that you would not have, including the egg-crate classrooms and long corridors; the notion of set class groups based on age–grade structures; the division of the school day into standard slabs of time; the linear curriculum parcelled into step-by-step gradations; the parcelling of human knowledge into predetermined boxes called “subjects”; the division of staff by subject specialisation; the allocation of most school tasks to the person called “teacher”; the assumption that learning takes place in a place called “school”; the artificial walls that barricade school from home and community; the notion of a standalone school isolated from other schools; the notion of a school system bounded by a locality such as a state or even country; and the limitation of “formal schooling” to twelve years and between the ages of five and eighteen.

Now, we might ask ourselves, which of the items identified above can we say is now different to 1997 when Beare asked the question? The old story that if a surgeon from 1924 walked into an operating theatre of 2024, he would not know where to start, but if a teacher from 1924 walked into a classroom of 2024, she would feel right at home, may no longer be totally true, but the point could still be made. Can we say the same for the school principal? Twenty-five years after Beare, despite attempts by education systems all around the world, one could argue that changes to education for students, and perhaps teachers, still remain somewhat cosmetic, rather than having the fundamental shifts proposed by Beare. Around the turn of the millennium, views on what schools would become varied widely, from “…the formal education system could be said to be in its last throes” ([134], p. 1) to “… the most probable state of schools in 2007 is that they will be much the same as they are now” ([135], p. 1). Neither is wholly true.

Townsend, Clarke, and Ainscow [136] considered how schools might need to be reconstructed to enable students to develop what they called third-millennium skills. They identified what they called second-millennium thinking and proposed third-millennium thinking to enable schools to cope with what Townsend and Otero [137] called “rapid pervasive change” and “increasing global interconnectedness”. They suggested changes needed to be made in how we thought about curriculum and how it is delivered, technology, the role of teachers, governance, and measures of success.

What the movement towards self-management of schools did was change the relationships between the centre and schools. Schools were seen as individual enterprises that remained part of a broader corporation (the education system). In 2000, Hedley Beare [138] used a series of metaphors for education that reflected the S-curve view of change mentioned above and suggested that we had moved through the pre-industrial age (where education was for the few who were rich and privileged) and the post-industrial age (where we saw schools as factories) to what was then the current enterprise-based system of education (where we saw schools as businesses), as a way of describing how the provision of education had changed. Townsend saw this slightly differently, but added a caveat [139]:

We have conquered the challenge of moving from a quality education system for a few people to having a quality education system for most people. Our challenge now is to move from having a quality education system for most people to having a quality education system for all people.

This Special Issue has mostly focused on how educational leadership has transformed itself over many decades of development. We have looked into the distant and recent past, we have considered where we are now, and we have taken some tentative steps to look into the future. Educational leadership has moved from using a transactional, command and control approach to managing schools, through many alternative styles identified in the past few decades. We have used research that has promoted one leadership style or another, with this research sometimes suggesting that some leadership styles have passed their use-by date or did not meet the exacting standards that education systems now require. Perhaps the one thing we might agree on is, if there is a magic formula that would ensure that all students—whatever their personal, community, social, and national backgrounds—receive high-quality education that provides them with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to enter their society with a positive outlook for their future, but also provides them with what is required to keep changing and learning as society makes new and different turns, then we have not yet found it.

It is clear that resorting to a system that considers the gold, silver, and bronze view of society of ancient Greece, referred to in [1], is no longer viable. Perhaps two concepts are critical. The first relates to the concept “school” itself and how we may need to transform our understandings of how we can create a system that guarantees what we hope to achieve. Perhaps the critical question would be to ask, to paraphrase Beare [135]: If schools did not exist right now and we wanted to create a system that ensured successful learning of the knowledge necessary for all people to thrive, knowing all the things we have at our disposal right now, what would that system look like? Perhaps “school” might not be the result.

The second concept relates to the people who are in the school, families, students, teachers, support staff, and school leaders (and maybe communities as well). Is there something that we could suggest might be our aim for these people? It is clear that schools, or whatever might replace them, will still need to be led. The person or persons involved in this process will need imagination to create a shared vision, artistry to use all the leadership tools available in ways that will support increasingly diverse and complex populations and situations, and resilience to enable leaders of the future to survive and thrive, with their communities, for extended periods of time. If we are to reassess what the term “school” means, we might also need to reconsider what the term “school leadership” encompasses. For me, the most effective and successful school would be one where everyone that is involved in the school is a learner (is motivated to continuously learn), is a teacher (freely shares what they know with others), and is a leader (supports others to be the best they can be). If we adopted this position in schools as they currently exist, then the next step to transforming schools would be for school leaders to be the lead learner to support others in the school, and teachers would be the lead learner to support others in their classroom, with the end purpose of enabling students to become leaders of their own learning. Ultimately, this is what leadership for learning aims to do.