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This paper presents an account of a cross-sectorial study investigating whether shared understandings of practices might enhance continuity during transitions to school. Applying an ontological lens to cross-sectorial leading practices, the paper sheds light on the contextualised realities of transitions to school as a site specific lived experience. The paper begins with an overview of the ways transitions to school practices are understood, including emerging perspectives of transitions as continuity practices. Then, cross-sectorial concepts of leadership and leading are presented to highlight fundamental differences in the ways these practices are enacted across the sectors. The paper presents empirical evidence of the ways leading practices can work to establish shared understandings of transitions to school practices and policies. Given ‘little research has been done on the direct effects of leadership on transitions’ (OECD. [2017]. Starting Strong V: Transitions from Early Childhood Education and Care to Primary School. Paris: OECD Publications, 95) the paper contributes to emerging discourses that construct transitions to school as continuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on complex challenges facing education systems across the world. Topics include contributing to cross-cultural discourse and fertilisation around the importance of leadership during times of crisis; and school principals in a region enduring much turbulence and conflict and comparing them to international practices.

An editorial is presented on educators and education researchers. Topics include reflecting themes of leader autonomy, accountability, and leaders' experiences in a range of diverse cultural, historical, and economic contexts; exploring the impact of privatisation and commercialisation in education; and encouraging different ways of thinking about ongoing complexities of education and leadership.

Pedagogical leadership is increasingly emphasised in education policies and leadership standards. Yet conceptualisations of pedagogy and pedagogical leadership vary from a focus on compliance that operationalises the role of formal school leaders, through to notions of pedagogical leadership as a praxis-oriented practice. This paper focuses on pedagogical leading practices in school settings in Sweden and Australia. Utilising the theory of practice architectures, it explores how historical notions of pedagogical leadership have changed over time in the two countries. Findings show that there are different depths of pedagogical understanding and differences between understandings of individual and collective pedagogy in policy, school leadership and practice. Both cases raise questions about the state of educational leadership and pedagogical leadership globally and the decentring of pedagogy from students, the ultimate purpose of pedagogical practice. Properly understanding pedagogy is one way of decentring the popular role title 'pedagogical leader'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emergent strand within mainstream educational leadership scholarship is an engagement with notions of diversity. This is part of a belated recognition that in an increasingly globalising world the largely masculinist, white norms from which most accounts of leadership derive, lack sufficient explanatory power for educational systems. Utilising critical, black and Indigenous feminist work on the recognition of difference, as well as recent feminist scholarship deconstructing diversity discourses in educational leadership, this article outlines the origins of the key diversity discourses from which the educational leadership field draws. It then analyses recent articles on diversity and educational administration, noting how the various diversity discourses have been taken up and the subsequent implications for educational leadership theorising and practices. It concludes by arguing that critical feminist research about the politics of difference, amongst others, provides an important body of scholarship from which to develop self-reflexive and nuanced engagements with notions of diversity and leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]