ABSTRACT Instructional leadership has been widely recognised as a central driver of teaching quality and student achievement. However, its enactment is often constrained by various factors, such as principals’ knowledge, limited time, and external context. This qualitative study explores how interpersonal dynamics within the teaching staff may also inhibit principals’ efforts to exercise instructional leadership. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 27 elementary school principals across Israel, the analysis identified three recurring patterns that hinder leadership practice. Non-instructional collegiality occurs when teachers prioritise personal relationships over professional collaboration, creating a culture in which social harmony displaces instructional dialogue. Teacher-controlled boundaries emerge when staff collectively restrict the principal's legitimacy to shape pedagogy, fostering conflict-avoidant norms that protect underperformance. Coordinated non-cooperation reflects instances where close teacher networks subtly or overtly resist leadership initiatives, offering surface-level compliance without meaningful engagement. Taken together, these dynamics illustrate how school micropolitics complicate the enactment of instructional leadership.

ABSTRACT This qualitative study investigates the impacts of mistrust in leadership on the professional experiences and practices of Vietnamese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lecturers. Situated in Vietnam, the study aims to illuminate how mistrust in educational leadership shapes various facets of academic life and practice. Utilising semi-structured interviews, data were collected from nine EFL lecturers. The findings reveal several key themes: a perceived disconnect between leadership and lecturer expectations, the impact of mistrust on job satisfaction, challenges in professional development, the influence of mistrust on classroom practices, and its impact on collegial relationships. These themes underscore the multifaceted effects of mistrust, extending from individual job satisfaction and professional growth to broader organizational culture and teaching practices. The study highlights the need for educational leaders to address the issue of mistrust and emphasises the importance of understanding the cultural nuances in trust dynamics within educational settings.

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the life of Sir David Normington. His career with the civil service is unusual in length (1973–2016) and location (three ministries – Employment, Education and Home Office – leading in the latter two for 10 and then 5 years as chief regulator of the service). Having outlined a three-level research approach the paper draws on a four-stage life-history model (making, becoming, being, leaving) to enable comparative analysis. Reflecting on the capabilities required of civil servants, Normington lists four strands – policy work, project management, human resource management, and ministerial support. What this means, can vary considerably between departments. Illustrating this, we focus on two issues. First the determination of policy on academy schools. Second, the management of problems relating to rapid turnovers in the tenure of ministers and civil servants. Against this background, the paper concludes with Normington's defence of the service he served for so long.

ABSTRACT This study uses the notion of ‘care paradox’ to examine how a care ethics generates paradoxes in aspiring for school leadership positions that have not been adequately theorised in existing scholarship. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with women in middle leadership at two separate Victorian Government Secondary schools in Australia, we present detailed case studies that illustrate how care paradoxes manifest in school contexts. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of care paradox: institutional, temporal, relational, and professional. These paradoxes create situations where women’s care ethics simultaneously prepares them for leadership while creating barriers to career advancement, where their caring dispositions are both valuable and devalued, and where caring responses generate conflicting ethical demands. The study contributes new theoretical understanding of how ethics of care mediate career sense-making, reveals the complex internal tensions that shape women’s career trajectories in education, and provides insights into how these tensions are navigated.

ABSTRACT Parent engagement is framed in Australian schooling as central to school improvement. Yet in affluent, high-choice contexts, such engagement is increasingly shaped by consumerist expectations that recast parents as clients and reposition partnership as oversight. This study examines how consumerism is experienced as reshaping the practice and emotional demands of school leadership. Drawing on Gadamerian hermeneutic phenomenology, it explores the lived experiences of two primary school leaders in an affluent school community, interpreting how parental scrutiny, escalation, and entitlement are understood as disrupting relational leadership and challenging professional legitimacy. Behaviour management was a particular flashpoint, generating conflict and reputational risk, while constant demands for accessibility intensified emotional strain. The study contributes to critical educational leadership and policy scholarship, arguing that neoliberal consumerism reconfigures leadership practice, trust, and wellbeing in schools, positions parental consumerism as a significant yet under-theorised source of emotional exhaustion, and prompts a rethinking of parent engagement.

ABSTRACT Professional learning in education policy should support school-based education leaders to engage critically with policy. Taking a broadly socially critical perspective on education leadership, we draw on theories of agentic leadership and Ball et al.’s (2011; 2012) typology of policy actors, including narrators, critics, and receivers to explore how leaders can reframe policy from a set of mandates into a flexible tool for equity and local responsiveness. Narratives from school-based senior and middle leaders who completed postgraduate policy courses reveal shifts in policy understanding and identity across four learning contexts: university, personal, work, and professional. While participants developed new perspectives and aspirations, their ability to enact policy was constrained by institutional hierarchies and cultures of compliance. The study highlights the need for professional learning that deepens policy knowledge and also supports leadership practice capable of reshaping policy engagement. It advocates for inclusive, collaborative, and contextually relevant approaches to policy work.

ABSTRACT This paper traces the emergence of workload as a central policy problem by analysing workforce survey data from the Australian College of Educators (ACE) and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Using Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach, it examines how shifts in survey design, question framing and policy responses over time have transformed workload into a measurable and governable issue. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that discourse constructs the objects of which it speaks, we argue that the codification of workload as a problem has been shaped by changing workforce surveillance. Through an analysis of survey instruments from the 1960s to the present, we demonstrate how workload became an object of policy concern via a discursive shift in how policy and the profession came to represent teachers’ and school leaders’ work. This discursive shift evident in the surveys, we argue, shows that teachers’ and school leaders’ experience of work has changed but also has created a workload concept that fails to adequately characterise those changes.