I'm professor Deborah Robinson and I welcome you all to this professorial evening. The orchestra
was such a lovely way to begin it and as I can see in the live event Q&A many people agree.
At the moment I work with other research colleagues in the inclusion and special
educational needs and disability, or SEND research cluster, in the Institute of Education. This
evening, as researchers, we've chosen to focus on a theoretical formulation we're working on for
effective inclusive school leadership for SEND and inclusion, which is actually one dimension,
within a larger project which we'll call here the city project
and this is being enacted among schools and school leaders in an opportunities area or OA
and honestly it's something we are so proud to be involved in. So as you see on the
screen at the moment, I acknowledge all of the excellent researchers involved in this project,
I also acknowledge professor Mel Anscow who I will mention later and the OA Executive Board who
funded this important project. So, I hear you ask, well I don't actually because it's all virtual,
but I'll just imagine it for now. So why is a theoretical formulation for effective
inclusive school leadership so important and why does it matter right now
and why have we chosen to speak of it on this September evening. Next slide please Nik.
So we actually have a very dramatic response to this question and we're not going to hold back
and I'm sure this isn't the only dramatic moment coming up this evening. So mass state education is
huge and almost inevitably it comes with complex systems of bureaucracy and regulation
and hence it does have a tendency towards intransigence rather than mutability, in fact,
intransigence and stability is something it probably prefers, but what it's challenged by
is an increasingly diverse learner population and an increasingly complex world and we have all been
experiencing that. However, we would argue that when the monolith of state education does move,
its default tendency is to skew towards those who already have advantage and already have privilege,
and in support of this claim, we don't have to look very far back do we to see the school playing
out in the context of the current crisis, the Covid pandemic. So for example, the procurement
and the subsequent claim and delivery systems for the distribution of laptops and free school
peaceful meal vouchers to the children who needed them was really slow and inefficient and we just
weren't geared up for a crisis situation and we weren't geared up for serving the most vulnerable
with resources in the quick way that they needed. In the case of laptops only a fraction of eligible
children and young people received them and you all know about, what's termed, the algorithm
debacle in a level grades where the most disadvantaged pupils seem to be disadvantaged
again. So public outrage in campaigning had turned some of that around but I think, we saw in the
crisis of the pandemic, systemic blind spots to disadvantage which were quite unceremoniously
exposed. So, when we recognize such innate skewing towards exclusion and marginalization
of the most vulnerable, we recognize the need for resistant action and actually the need to exert,
what we would call, an unrelenting and powerful pull of the system toward fairer
distribution and opportunity - and this is where the project we're showcasing tonight comes in.
So the project I'm about to showcase, is an example of stakeholders coming together to
exert this kind of pull on the system. With academics and researchers adding their weight
to this tug of war, so that the rights of children and young people with sense can
be better prioritized as a forethought and not an afterthought. Next slide please Nik.
Now to tell you a bit more about this citywide project of school improvement
for inclusion focused on leadership within an opportunities area. Next slide please.
I'll tell you the following: so in part we've been commissioned to do the evaluative work
for the city project and that's really important in itself, but we have wanted
to deepen our investigation beyond this, to do what as a research cluster we must do,
which is to contribute theorizations to our discipline. Actually for us, this is how we
express our intellectual curiosity, and so it's about also celebrating the project on a world
stage. Earlier I mentioned Professor Mel Anscow who some of you will know and Mel is an advisor
on equitable schooling for UNESCO and is very renowned worldwide, so we've deliberately engaged
him as a co-writer writer in our outputs because we know that he's the person who can help us
communicate the relevance of our work more broadly. Next slide please Nik.
So just a bit more about the city project. It's a 30 month long project which has been delayed by
COVID and as you see here it's got two key aims. They combined to ensure a change of culture,
such that pupils with sins and their outcomes, become a more central focus for the leaders
in the city and for their school improvement activities and I think it's really important
for you to know that in the city where this project is happening there are examples of good
and excellent practice but the reality is that pupils with special needs and disabilities have
not been faring as well as they have in other regions of the country, so the city project was
a genuine and honest expression of facing facts and striving to improve things so that pupils with
SEND were present participating and progressing in the city schools. Next slide please.
So the main focus for the data collection and the inquiry we're going to talk to you about,
in the slice of the research project I've just described, was a system of peer review,
called the SEND peer challenge. So this is a process where expert leaders support peers.
So school completes a self-evaluation template using a structure that's been endorsed by the
Department for Education, so after the school has completed a self-review of their send provision,
which to illustrate includes eight categories of criteria, so for example, eg how well parents are
involved in decision making. Peer challenger teams then go into the school and spend time
observing practice, talking to stakeholders to investigate provisional outcomes further,
and for example, by observing teaching, and this results in a school report on the strengths
weaknesses and recommendations for action for that individual school. Because this project
has been very well funded, it also involves continued relationship with the school by a lead
challenger, who helps the school to implement the recommendations that have been made. The project
does also have quite a sophisticated modus which I'll briefly illustrate. Next slide please Nik.
So, as you can see in this modus, the University does have a central role.
The project is about forming networks and coalitions of challenge and support
around SEND inclusion and its essence is collaboration. Next slide please Nik.
So, as researchers, we were completing our evaluative work and we completed an analysis
of the content of 24 school reports arising from 24 school challenges and we noticed interesting
patterns in the qualitative data, and we were really curious about what we saw. We
wondered whether the school reports were aggregating, to present a living theory
among peer challengers in the city, about what leaders should do and how they should do it,
in order to improve schools for inclusion and SEND,
so we pursued this with a deeper levelling of inquiry. Next slide please Nik.
What we were looking for in our extended study, was a theoretical formulation for effective
inclusive leadership, that is lived by those who are working close to the action of school
improvement for sending inclusion and we hope we would find some universal principles that
would be of use to our local practice and our research community. Next slide please Nik.
In our work we identified the following formulation for effective leadership of
school improvement for inclusion and it was active and relevant, both in the literature,
and in the sites that were close to the action that we studied. So this formulation we term
the integrated model. So here the integrated model of inclusive leadership is characterized by
the overall layering of the integration of three well-known leadership approaches which will have
a kind of social constructionist theory at heart. So the first is transformational leadership or TL
and this is a an approach that positions the school leader as a
leader of coalitions. So the role of the leader is culture change and it's about getting people
to coalesce around a set of shared values, which in this case, would be inclusion and equity,
and then directing action for school improvement around those
aims and it's based on a whole school vision a mission and a sense of shared commitment.
So the second element in this integrated model is distributed leadership or DL. So this is a
position that we find is about positioning a school leader as a leader of leaders so
power and hence responsibility is distributed. Responsibility is distributed but actually,
so is accountability, so DL is the approach that might be most directly linked to the idea that
all teachers are teachers of SEND so, therefore we don't pass off responsibilities for working
with those pupils, and that parents and pupils are partners and actually these ideas are really
prevalent in England's policy. So the third is instructional leadership and we see this as an
idea that the leader is a leader of learning and the emphasis in this approach this model is
on pedagogy learning and curriculum and, actually for example, it's the instructional presentation
of the school's commitment to inclusion. So the first time in the literature that we saw
these ideas integrated into a whole, is in the supporting inclusive leadership project from the
European Union and the work of the authors displayed. But what we found was that though
not named or explicitly formulated as such, the integrated model is almost
rampant in the literature and in descriptions and studies of inclusive schools and leadership and
there is evidence that when combined, these leadership approaches are associated with positive
pupil outcomes, including achievement and belonging. Next slide please Nik.
So, did this formulation emerge in the work of local peer challengers working in the context of
the city project? To find out we used qualitative content analysis as the basis
for our investigation. It was a good fit, though time consuming, has served our purposes well
and the sample that we use, the sample of text for the QCA, the qualitative content analysis,
is shown here and it included 24 school reports for the 24 schools
who had experienced this peer challenge as part of the project. Next slide please Nik.
So, in the process, these are the three frameworks we started with,
these are frameworks that schools use to self-evaluate and you can see they come
from the EU from, the US and from England. The third framework, was the framework
used in the city project, and it's important to note as you'll see shortly. Next slide please Nik.
So, here we show that we used a pretty traditional approach to QCA, where it started with
an inductive phase, which led to a coding agenda, which was then used deductively to
analyze the content of the whole sample and, in the spirit of trustworthiness and transparency,
which is part of the ethical spirit of any researcher, and in context of limited time,
we present the next two slides, for your later review. Next slide please Nik.
So here transparency for you in terms of our content categories for the QC,
enumerations proportion calculations and interpretations and next slide please.
and here to show the final reduction of the QCA to six dominant themes and these are
what combine to illustrate the living theory of leadership for inclusion across the sites studied.
Now to our research conclusions about theoretical formulations
for effective inclusive leadership in two parts and Nik is so in rhythm with me now, that he
changed the slides without me having to tell him. Thanks Nik. So here is part A of our conclusion.
We found that the integrated model is indeed prevalent in close to the action frameworks
for leader school self-evaluation for SEND and inclusion but, with the assumption, that
there's also going to be effective operational leadership and management of systems that support
distribution of responsibility accountability information sharing. Next slide please.
But it's really important for us to prepare, to tell you what part B conclusion was, so
we we can't use enumerations, the enumerations we developed in our work to test null hypotheses
in QCA, but we can look for patterns of prevalence and interpret from there
so you'll remember that evaluation framework three was the one used in the city project so you would
expect there to be some harmony in the content of the school reports and that evaluation framework.
You would expect to see some thematic similarity and some proportional similarity in the content
and presence of these themes and that was actually clearly evident. These two things were
closest in relationship but there were also some interesting differences which has allowed us to
make our emerging theory of effective leadership for inclusion
much more nuanced. So let's have a look at this. The content proportions in the school
reports emphasize distributive leadership indeed, so peer reviewers are emphasizing,
but they emphasized it much less than they did in framework, than it was in framework three.
The reports emphasized transformational leadership but emphasized it much less than in framework
three and the reports emphasized the importance of a well-structured leadership team, that managed
things well, much more than in framework three. So you can see that peer challenges on the ground
were choosing to emphasize things that went beyond the strictures of the original
evaluation template and this is what we found particularly interesting. Next slide please Nik.
So conclusion part two. The integrated model was present in the living theory of effective
leadership among this group of local actors. They were using an integrated model, but they were
placing emphasis on the role and responsibility of school leaders, rather than the responsibility for
distributed ownership across the school community, and if you remember, this does make sense, because
the ecology of the city project and its aims, also held that emphasis. So, as you remember,
in a context where there are examples of good practice and excellence, the city project was
about challenging and supporting leaders in taking responsibility for inclusion of pupils with SEND
and giving their outcomes much more attention. It's no surprise that the school reports emphasize
the responsibilities of leaders within an integrated model. So our conclusion is, is
that the integrated model as a formulation for effective leadership for inclusive practice
is alive, in local sites, but it's best understood ecologically. By which we mean,
that as a formulation, it has universal principles principles that are relevant
to all and many, but these principles are subject to local interpretation. Now, just to say,
we were joyful about this. So researchers are human aren't they and we get excited and happy
when we see positive things unfolded; this gave us hope. What we came to feel was admiration for
this challenged community. They were working on this project in a way that applied a kind
of consensus, a collective consensus, and it is an indication of how place-based collaborative,
and non-rivalrous activity, can add power to the tug of war against exclusion. Next slide please.
So here are the names of all the researchers involved.
Please do get in touch with any or all of us if you want to discuss our work
or better still collaborate with us. Thanks so much for listening.