The Challenge to Change: Leading Schools beyond COVID-19

Abstract

This paper considers the articles presented in this Special Issue and argues that, in most developed education systems in Western countries, there have been four major shifts in how school education is understood and delivered over the course of human history, from a time when only the wealthy and privileged received an education to the present day. It tracks changes in school leadership since the 1980s, when a combination of efforts to improve the effectiveness of schools and efforts to decentralise schools led to self-managing schools and changed responsibilities for school leaders. It reflects on whether the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school communities may lead to a fifth major shift in school education. This article discusses four different school leadership approaches that have emerged in Western education since the 1980s, instructional leadership, transformational leadership, distributed leadership, and leadership for learning, and argues that of these four, leadership for learning would be the most appropriate leadership approach in a post-COVID-19 future.