Research into the Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes: Policy and Research Contexts

This paper extends the introduction to the authors’ study of successful school leadership and how it influences pupil outcomes begun in the Editorial introduction. Critical to an appreciation especially of the external validity of their results is an understanding of the policy context in which the English leaders in their study found themselves; this is a policy context dominated by concerns for external accountability and increases in the academic performance of pupils. In addition to describing this context, the paper summarises the conceptual and methodological framework that guided the early stage of their research and outlines their mixed-methods research design.

Leadership in Improving Schools: A Qualitative Perspective

This article reports early case-study data gathered from 20 schools involved in the ‘Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes’ project. We present and discuss the perceptions of headteachers and other school leaders regarding leadership factors that directly and indirectly affect pupil outcomes in these improving schools. Included are issues relating to the pivotal role played by the headteacher in setting and communicating a strategic vision for the school; models of distributed leadership; and the building of leadership capacity so as to build a collective responsibility for the improvement of pupil outcomes.

The Impact of School Leadership on Parental Engagement: a Study of Inclusion and Cohesion

This article focuses on the role played by principals in enhancing parental involvement in primary schools. The schools involved in this research were characterised by a high presence of ethnic minority children and were located in a neighbourhood of low social and economic status in the Midlands region of the United Kingdom. Qualitative methods were employed in order to explore the influence of strong leadership on engagement of the parents. The study spanned a period of four years, giving an opportunity to examine sustainability of the activities introduced by the principals and staff. The findings reported are based on data collected from an Infant and Junior School involved in a number of extra-curricular and curriculum-enhancing projects. It argues that strong leadership fosters engagement of parents in school activities and thus academic achievement of pupils improved over time. The findings bring evidence that the role of the school principal is crucial in the introduction, implementation and sustainability of solutions focused on parental involvement, as well as bringing benefits to the social cohesion of the local community. Full Text:

Local strategic partnerships in England: the continuing search for collaborative advantage, leadership and strategy in urban governance

Local Strategic Partnerships are being established in England to provide an inclusive, collaborative and strategic focus to regeneration strategies at the local level. They are also required to rationalise the proliferation of local and micro-partnerships set up by a succession of funding initiatives over the last 25 years. This article explores their remit, resources and membership and discusses how this initiative relates to theoretical work on urban governance, community engagement and leadership. It concludes by debating whether urban policy in England is now entering a new and more advanced phase based on inter-organisational networks with a strategic purpose. But questions remain about whether the institutional capacity is sufficient to deliver strong local leadership, accountability and community engagement.

'It's Almost Like Talking to a Person': Student Discolsure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Setting

Online chatbots (also known as pedagogical agents or virtual assistants) are becoming embedded into the fabric of technology, both in educational and commercial settings. Yet understanding of these technologies is inchoate and often untheorised, influenced by individuals’ willingness to trust technologies, aesthetic appearance of the chatbot and technical literacy, among other factors. This paper draws upon data from two research studies that evaluated students’ experiences of using pedagogical agents in education using responsive evaluation. The findings suggest that emotional connections with pedagogical agents were intrinsic to the user’s sense of trust and therefore likely to affect levels of truthfulness and engagement. They also indicate that the topic of the pedagogical agent-student interaction is key to the student’s experience. The implications of these studies are that truthfulness, personalisation and emotional engagement are all vital components in using pedagogical agents to enhance online learning.

Beyond Robotic Wastelands of Time: Abandoned Pedagogical Agents and New Pedalled Pedagogies

Chatbots, known as pedagogical agents in educational settings, have a long history of use, beginning with Alan Turing’s work. Since then online chatbots have become embedded into the fabric of technology. Yet understandings of these technologies are inchoate and often untheorised. Integration of chatbots into educational settings over the past five years suggests an increase in interest in the ways in which chatbots might be adopted and adapted for teaching and learning. This article draws on historical literature and theories that to date have largely been ignored in order to (re)contextualise two studies that used responsive evaluation to examine the use of pedagogical agents in education. Findings suggest that emotional interactions with pedagogical agents are intrinsic to a user’s sense of trust, and that truthfulness, personalisation and emotional engagement are vital when using pedagogical agents to enhance online learning. Such findings need to be considered in the light of ways in which notions of learning are being redefined in the academy and the extent to which new literacies and new technologies are being pedalled as pedagogies in ways that undermine what higher education is, is for, and what learning means.

Leading as designing: how educational developers in leadership and management studies can use architectural design to facilitate student learning about delivering innovation

This paper describes a qualitative observational study of how a work based learning masters leadership development programme for middle managers in health and social care in the UK introduced students to key aspects of delivering innovation, through a formative assignment on contemporary architectural design. Action learning and activity theoretical approaches were used to enable students to explore common principles of leading the delivery of innovation. Between 2001 and 2013 a total of 89 students in 7 cohorts completed the assignment. Evaluation lent support for the view that the assignment provided a powerful learning experience for many. Several students found the creativity, determination and dedication of architects, designers and structural engineers inspirational in their ability to translate a creative idea into a completed artefact, deploy resources and negotiate complex demands of stakeholders. Others expressed varying levels of self-empowerment as regards their capacity for fostering an equivalent creativity in self and others. Theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory, including Engeström’s concepts of stabilisation knowledge and possibility knowledge, are discussed to explain these differing outcomes and to clarify the challenges and opportunities for educational developers seeking to utilise cross-disciplinary, creative approaches in curriculum design.

Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism

The following discussion is intended as a critical intervention into recent debates about the “crisis of the humanities,” reading the symptomaticity of crisis in the medical sense of a turning point. It does so from the perspective of the work of Walter Benjamin, whose own transdisciplinary practice of thought has been characterized as a “philosophy directed against philosophy” and a “philosophizing beyond philosophy,” and stands as a model for the kind of intellectual and para-academic activity evoked here. Historically re-situating Benjamin’s famous allegory of the Angel of History from the twentieth-century context of the “crisis of culture” to the contemporary “crisis of education,” it attempts to reconstruct a dialectical understanding of pedagogization within Benjamin’s work, which is used to sketch out the contours of a critically reimagined pedagogy of the Inhumanities.

Flexibility in a Stackelberg leadership with differentiated goods

We study the effects of product differentiation in a Stackelberg model with demand uncertainty for the first mover. We do an ex-ante and ex-post analysis of the profits of the leader and of the follower firms in terms of product differentiation and of the demand uncertainty. We show that even with small uncertainty about the demand, the follower firm can achieve greater profits than the leader, if their products are sufficiently differentiated. We also compute the probability of the second firm having higher profit than the leading firm, subsequently showing the advantages and disadvantages of being either the leader or the follower firm.

Simultaneous decisions or leadership in an international competition

In this paper, we study an international market with demand uncertainty. The model has two stages. In the first stage, the home government chooses an import tariff to maximize the revenue. Then, the firms engage in a Cournot or in a Stackelberg competition. The uncertainty is resolved between the decisions made by the home government and by the firms. We compare the results obtained in the three different ways of moving on the decision make of the firms.