How can we understand educational leadership for equity and learning?

Abstract

Despite a reasonably substantial research base suggesting those policy and practice steps that might be taken to achieve greater equity, progress is disappointing. Large disparities persist in the achievement of pupils which are not explicable by differences in innate ability or background. Gaps in attainment are widening. Discrimination is a daily experience for many students. In this context, this presentation considers how leaders and policy makers together might further develop the will to strive for greater equity and the capacity to achieve it.

In policy and practice there is a general trend to highlight groups of learners who are perceived as in deficit and consequently require remediation, and to use tightening accountability as a means to focus on these groups in order to reduce attainment disparities. This presentation argues that both of these strategies are fundamentally flawed.

Trying to change the situation is perceived to carry a risk of alienating many in the school community. Current national policies in many cases discourage radical action. Consequently the will to effect change to achieve greater equity is weak in many schools. Capacity is also lacking. Leaders' aims and practice are constrained by widely held cultural beliefs about learners and learning, detailed in the presentation. The cultural shift that is needed is one for which leaders are currently ill-prepared by their training.

To support school leaders to achieve equity and learning requires moral as well as technical effort from both policymakers and principals, transforming both beliefs and practice in multiple arenas including initial preparation programmes and the ongoing support given to leaders. Policymakers could lead in changing the dominant narrative that locates the cause of inequity with the deficit of various groups and focus attack on the causes of inequity in attitudes, structures and actions in education. School leaders might then be empowered to change schools in order to achieve greater equity and thereby to secure a valued social and economic future for all.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record