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This paper draws from a review of the global literature on school leadership during the first 30 months of the pandemic (2020–2022), when educational leaders were faced with complexity on an unprecedented scale. COVID-19 challenged school leadership, providing opportunities to reflect on: leader-ship practice within and beyond school contexts; building relationships with wider communities and external stakeholders; established bureau-cratic systems and ways of working (Author et al. under review). School leaders’ reliance on organisational stability, hierarchy and standardised practice was also challenged: reflective practice was needed, whilst responding to complex and demanding situations. Increased teacher autonomy and agency was encouraged and embraced, with ‘profound collaboration borne out of necessity and urgency’ (p. 393), highlighting the fluid practice of leadership rather than the role specificities of a leader. As school systems return to the business of in-person schooling and further away from the shock of the pandemic, the article renews calls to learn from experience and innovation. Three aspects are discussed, for supporting the development of school leadership/leaders capable of navigating complex-ity: school leadership; informal professional learning; formal professional learning. Our analysis provides insights into advancing professional learning approaches: accounting for complexity; enhancing teaching and learning; strengthening educator empowerment.

In this chapter we describe and critically analyse the relationship between governance and educational leadership. The aim of making explicit such a relationship is to show the application and value of governance to the study of educational leadership. Taken in its widest sense, governance can be loosely characterized as a political and economic strategy aimed at perfecting the design of accountability relations and structures. Decreased government involvement in the running and monitoring of education provision means that public servants, be they school leaders or school governors, are called upon to make themselves accountable to stakeholders and evaluation and funding bodies, typically through horizontal and vertical relations of accountability that rely on performance benchmarking, external inspection and high-stakes testing. Governance (broadly conceived) concerns the extent to which these relations and structures of accountability function successfully within a narrow definition of rational self-management.

Dress for success. While the very idea of conforming to a singular standard of clothing may be subject to academic critique, it holds sway in professional practice. Trainee teachers are regularly told that learning their practice means learning how to manage their bodies – how to dress, speak, sit and stand as a teacher. The external impression given by a teaching self is said to be essential for gaining respect. The equation of personal dress and professional authority is even more pronounced for school leaders, whose formality of appearance and manner distinguishes them from other school staff.This chapter examines the entanglement of clothing, a manufactured woman leader self and contemporary leadership practices. We bring three possible theoretical lenses to our exploration of leadership, identity and wardrobes. Through the analysis of survey data, we argue that the performance and performativity of women’s leadership is manifest through their wardrobe work. The normative everyday a-sexual and quasi-corporate self is epitomised in “the blazer”; this is often experienced by women as a costumed identity that they remove at weekends and on holidays. We suggest, however, that the performative subjectivity of the job remains long after the suit jacket has been put away.

Tropes and tales of heroic leadership are a common feature of media analyses and discussions of education. In the UK, for example, we see this phenomenon in reports of the so-called ‘superheads’, who are parachuted in to ‘turn around’ what are deemed to be ‘failing’ schools and more latterly, in cases of schools that are forced into academisation and taken into an Academy Trust to be ‘managed’ towards improved performance. These instances reflect a cult of leadership and embody a widespread faith in the potential of 'transformational' or 'visionary' leaders to redeem our institutions and our society. In other words, the discourses surrounding leadership speak to our deeply cherished, if potentially conflicting, desires for knowledge, power, purpose, security, freedom and a better world. At the same time, however, a growing body of literature questions the existence of leadership as a phenomenon (Lakomski, Eacott, & Evers, 2016; Samier, 2016), insisting on its imaginary and rhetorical, rather than ‘real’, status. Against this background, the current chapter is based on an analysis of interviews conducted with the senior leadership of a medium-sized multi-academy trust (MAT) comprising a group of schools that have been forced by Government to join an academy as a result of being judged as poorly performing through inspection processes. The academy trust at the centre of this chapter explicitly seeks to offer a rounded form of education to those from backgrounds traditionally excluded from such circles. The MAT thus advocates a strong social justice agenda, seeking to attract schools judged to be problematic in terms of of performance, typically located in areas of socio-economic deprivation, the tensions between this agenda and the competitive logics underpinning government policy notwithstanding. Our analysis is based on interviews with three members of the trust leadership and explores the imaginary constructions of leadership identity generated by participants during the interviews. In particular, we highlight how the hierarchical, competitive symbolic regime of the current neoliberal education policy context inevitably intrudes into these leadership identities. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the implications of these insights for leadership studies and practices, as well as for educational policy at a time of neoliberal intensification.