Building pictures of the field through research overviews

Abstract

Happy New Year and welcome to volume 43 of Educational Management Administration & Leadership (EMAL). The literature on educational leadership and management is growing but it tends to be characterised by individual papers that are often important but rarely build to create a sense of ‘where we are now’. In reporting research from all parts of the world, authors connect their findings to a narrow range of relevant literature but less often ‘step back’ to reflect on the collective significance of broad aspects of the field. Philip Hallinger has been a leading figure in the world of educational leadership and management for more than 30 years and his opening paper in this issue, with JunJun Chen, makes a significant contribution to mapping the field. The article reports the outcomes of a review of research on this theme in Asia between 1995 and 2011. The authors reviewed 478 papers in eight ‘core’ journals, including EMAL. They conclude that Asian scholarship in this field remains in the early stages of development and that knowledge production is uneven, with only a few pockets of research excellence. They also note a sharp increase of quantitative studies since 2006, and this is certainly a feature of papers submitted to this journal by Asian authors. There has been a significant growth in manuscripts about Asian education, accepted for publication in EMAL, and I plan to prepare a special themed issue of papers from this continent later this year. The second paper extends Jacky Lumby’s important work on leadership diversity. In this article, she analyses interview data from 54 school principals in South Africa to explore how women position their identities in relation to their gender, ethnicity and other characteristics, an approach often labelled as inter-sectionality. She concludes that women are ‘caught in a web of discrimination’, with sexism being further embedded, and only limited gains for women leaders. The next three articles all report research on aspects of policy change in England. One such change is the move away from the once-cherished notion of schools as individual units, to a range of linkages between schools. Christopher Chapman focuses on the nature and impact of federations and chains, drawing on a programme of research including a quantitative study of the impact of federations on student outcomes and a longitudinal qualitative project. He criticises the initiation of federations ‘through top-down directives’, a timely warning, and concludes that schools should ‘exercise caution before entering into any form of collaborative arrangement without a clear, shared purpose’. In the next paper, Sue Swaffield examines the role and impact of school improvement partners (SIPs) from the perspective of school principals. SIPs were a feature of the English system from 2008 to 2011. Drawing on a survey of principals, preceded and followed by interviews, the author notes that attitudes to SIPS varied and that much depended on the SIP’s expertise and conduct. She notes that about half of all heads appreciated the contributions of their SIPs and concludes that the policy ‘could be viewed as a brief experiment that did not have long enough to develop or mature’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership 2015, Vol. 43(1) 3–4 a The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1741143214563455 emal.sagepub.com