Closing the Sustainable School Leadership Survey at the end of January marked a significant milestone for our project. We have now completed all our planned data collection. The survey received a good response from leaders across the UK with over 1600 completing it and we’re now looking in detail at the responses with analysis well underway.
The end of the last stage of data collection marks a shift in our focus, as we are now concentrating more fully on analysis and developing the insights we’ve been forming up to this point. The study has used mixed methods (see here for an outline). We visited the last of the seven locality study areas in Autumn 2024. Across all seven areas we completed 111 interviews with a total of 132 participants. Analysis of those interviews and preparing detailed reports for each of the localities is also in progress.
The main challenge for us now is drawing out the big themes about leadership in schools offered by the different sources of evidence: policy interviews; the survey; the seven locality case studies; and the analysis of administrative data on schools and the workforce in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
We have been talking about our early findings with various groups and testing our thinking and understanding. This includes discussions with each of our three national advisory groups, which have been invaluable in shaping our thinking and work. We are also re-visiting the seven localities, running workshops with our interviewees in order to share and validate what we found and to explore possible implications and recommendations. More widely, we have shared and discussed findings with school leaders and staff at various workshops, conferences and meetings and have presented at a number of academic conferences over the last year (BELMAS, ECER, BERA, ICSEI).
The ICSEI conference was in Melbourne this year in February, so we all got to see some beaches and koalas! While in Australia, we took the opportunity to work together in person at Pat Thomson’s lovely house in Adelaide – thinking, talking and clarifying what we are finding. Pat has written a blogpost about our ‘deep research hangout’.
Another highlight in Australia was the day we spent in Melbourne working with a research team based at Monash and Deakin universities, led by Prof Jane Wilkinson and Prof Amanda Keddie. They are researching school principals’ emotional labour in Australia. It was a rich and useful day – we were struck by the similarities in the pressures leaders face in each context.
We now plan to publish a number of reports from the project: a report on the survey findings in the summer; three country reports in the autumn, which will include the locality studies; a report on the secondary analysis; and then the Final Report and recommendations in early 2026. We also have some academic papers and a book in the pipeline and will continue to post updates here, as well as some posts about our findings and thinking about sustainable leadership. So watch this space!
Featured Image: Eva Bronzini
Sustainable School Leadership 