Leading Partnerships in Education: Practice, Policy, and System Change

Dear Colleagues,

Educational systems are increasingly being shaped by collaborative forms of work that span institutional, professional, and geographic boundaries. Partnerships are key to collaborative work of this nature: across both teaching and learning and research domains, partnerships are reshaping how knowledge is produced, mobilised, and enacted within and across systems. In turn, collaborative work stimulates and brokers new partnerships, creating social conditions conducive to solving the complex challenges facing education today and in the future.

From school–university partnerships to those that bring together those in the education sector with community and industry, policy and practice, or across the public and private sector, these partnerships set the conditions for engagement initiatives at local levels through to transnational education and global research collaborations. They are now central to how education is organised, delivered, and transformed; as such, leadership of and for partnerships deserves attention.

While partnerships are often positioned as mechanisms for collaboration and innovation, they are also embedded within broader relational ecologies of practice in which leadership is enacted and policy is interpreted, negotiated, and contested. These spaces are inherently dynamic, shaped by competing priorities, shifting accountabilities, and institutional constraints. Despite their growing prominence, the leadership of partnerships and their implications for policy and system change remain under-theorised.

This Special Issue seeks to advance the conceptual and empirical understanding of how partnerships in education are led across diverse contexts and purposes. We invite contributions that examine partnerships not simply as formalised structures, but as dynamic sites of practice where leadership, power, agency, and purpose intersect and where leadership both shapes and is shaped by policy in ways that contribute to system-level change.

We welcome submissions on partnerships and collaboration within, across, and beyond diverse educational contexts, including early childhood, schooling, higher education, and cross-sector collaborations.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• School–university partnerships;
• Higher education partnerships, including transnational education and global mobility;
• Research partnerships and collaborations across institutions, sectors, and national contexts;
• Community and industry partnerships in education;
• Policy enactment, governance, and accountability in partnership contexts;
• Networked and distributed leadership in partnership settings;
• Partnerships as mechanisms for workforce development and system reform;
• International and comparative perspectives on partnership work;
• Collaboration across informal, networked, and emergent contexts;
• Tensions, negotiations, and power dynamics within partnerships.

Types of contributions:

• Conceptual and theoretical papers;
• Empirical studies (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods);
• Policy analyses;
• Comparative and international studies.

Dr. Daniela Acquaro
Dr. Ondine Bradbury
Dr. Claire Sinnema
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• partnerships
• educational leadership
• school university partnerships
• higher education partnerships