This practitioner reflection examines the challenges inherent in middle leadership and explores how to overcome them. It posits that schools and middle leaders benefit from clearly defining roles and reporting lines and communicating effectively. The investment by schools in ensuring that middle leaders have sufficient time to perform their roles…

The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis and today's school principals are faced with more challenging circumstances than in any other time in our known history. The purpose of this paper is to explore school principals' management practices, their leadership styles, and the challenges they encounter in response to the coronavirus disease 2019…

In view of the growing emphasis by educational leadership and management (EDLM) scholars on diversifying the existing knowledge base in the field, this review of research analysed topics and conceptual models employed in 104 studies on school principals from the Arabian Gulf states published between 2000 and 2019. Systematic review methods were…

Geoff Barton was elected as General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) in Spring 2017. In the interview presented in this article, he talks to Chris Oates about how his career in education has shaped his thinking about leadership, his role at ASCL, and future aspirations for the organisation.

The nature of leadership and management in a school are key to achieving high-quality education for all pupils. Leadership theories and empirical research have sought to identify characteristics of leaders, aspects of the context in which they work and their relationships with others to identify features of successful school leadership. This…

This article considers the challenges encountered by a recently appointed assistant programme leader in establishing an identity as a leader of an EdD programme. In discussing literature on the development of the EdD, the article recognizes an existing concern with student identity but highlights a need to consider the development of the EdD…

Although participatory models of distributed leadership have gained traction across the higher education sector in the UK, it is also the case that forms of exclusion continue to defy aspirations for improving diversity in senior leadership across higher education. This article contends that an (undemocratic) participatory model of distributed…

Using intersectionality theory, the article presents constructions of successful leadership by three Black women school principals in three different contexts: England, South Africa and the United States. The article is premised on the overall shortage of literature on Black women in educational leadership, which leaves Black women's experiences…

Recent educational literature has produced a plethora of gendered experiences encountered by women working towards leadership positions in education. Gender plays a complex role that shapes the relationship between perceived ideals of womanhood and leadership. This paper focuses on the variations in leadership and management distributed in the…