Teachers leading enquiry

Despite the ebbing of COVID-19, the current educational context remains one of rapid and unrelenting change. The pressure on those leading schools is unlikely to recede any time soon and many headteachers are already voting with their feet. The recruitment and retention crisis remains acute in many education systems around the world. Leadership stability is now a real challenge in some schools. The question of how to sustain school performance, given the crisis in recruitment and retention within the profession is now front and centre. The substantial evidential base on school effectiveness and improvement underlines that sustaining performance depends, to a considerable degree, on the school’s internal capacity to maintain and support the daily work (Creemers, Peters, and Reynolds 2022). Recent research also highlights the centrality of distributed leadership practices that engage, and draw upon, the leadership capabilities of teachers (Printy and Liu 2021). The clear message, from the international evidence base is that sustaining school performance and improving it requires the leadership of the many rather than the few and that improvements in learning are more likely to be achieved when leadership is instructionally focused and located closest to the classroom (Liu, Bellibaş, and Gümüş 2021). The core implication, from this evidence, is that the leadership should be extended to teachers, not in a formal role-based way but through the creation of lateral opportunities for collaborative engagement, professional enquiry and active experimentation that are directly linked to improving learning and teaching. When authentic teacher leadership occurs within a school, the evidence from many countries shows that it not only has a positive impact on school culture but also has the potential to create the capacity for meaningful organisational change and improvement (Harris, Jones, and Huffman 2018).