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Chapter 2: Critical perspectives in and approaches to educational leadership in England

Ruth McGinity (University College London, UK( and Kay Fuller (University of Nottingham, UK)


What is the problem? How does the chapter support your thinking about the problem?

The key issue for this chapter is understanding the multiplicity of being, doing and conceptualizing educational leadership. The distinction between these is integral to the way we come to understand the field using critical perspectives and approaches. As we argue in the chapter, to make sense of how critical perspectives construct and conceptualise professional practice within England, it is necessary to locate analyses in the bigger picture of how policy plays out in localised contexts. The chapter provides a case study of headteacher protests against funding cuts to exemplify that. We ask you to think alongside the case study to consider what it means to be a headteacher and what headteachers do. We invite you to use a multilevel perspective to examine individual and collective actions and their influence on identity and vice versa. We ask you to consider how we might draw on critical perspectives to conceptualise what is happening in the English or another education system. Critical scholarship has a tradition in developing analyses of the relationship between structure and agency to consider the operation of power that privileges or marginalises, advantages or disadvantages. Particular sets of identities and practices are produced to be theorised through a framework of equity. 


What are other ways to think about this? Where can I go next to follow these up?

Beyond protests against funding cuts

The case study revealed headteachers’ willingness to speak back to policy-makers about the underfunding of schools in England. More recently, during the Covid-19 global pandemic, headteachers have featured regularly in news reports as resistors of education policy during a time of crisis.

BBC (2020) Primary schools reopening: Call for remote learning as Covid cases rise https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55511662

Media resources such as this show headteachers’ willingness to take legal action against the government. There is willingness to speak publicly about the severity of the challenges being faced in schools at the time.

Beyond structure and agency

Structure and agency and the relationship between the two is a useful heuristic to think about how both context and practice intersect to produce different perspectives on what it means to do educational leadership and be educational leaders and the way in which power can be theorized and understood in relation to this. There are many other ways that context and practice can be conceptualised and understood in the critical part of the field. For example, you might follow up with scholars who develop schema for considering how identity is understood and researched in relation to critical perspectives and approaches. Here is a reference that illuminates such an approach:

Niesche, R., and Heffernan, A. (2020) (Eds). Researching identity and subjectivity in educational leadership. Routledge: London.

This collection provides a number of contributions in which the authors take ctivity formation of educational leaders.

Theorising critical perspectives and approaches:

In addition to thinking with and beyond structure and agency in relation to educational leadership, a major area of enquiry that the critical field engages with is social theory. There are many theorists, theories and critiques to engage with if you are interested in developing your knowledge base and understanding of how theory helps to make sense of and extend discussion about educational leadership. A good starting place for this would be the following edited collection:

Courtney, S., McGinity, R., & Gunter, H. (2017). Educational leadership: Theorising professional practice in neoliberal times. Routledge.

Contributors employ a range of theories in original and innovate ways in order to reveal the lived experiences of what it means to be an educational leader in an era of rapid modernisation and draw on some of the key policy frames as context as you found in this chapter.