The term ‘Educational Leadership’ covers such a wide range of understandings that it can be challenging to define the individuals or collectives to whom it refers. To them falls the responsibility of addressing global issues, ranging from the environment to inequality, racism, disease and a complex range of threats to democratic life. How do we help educational leaders identify and grasp the complexity on a global scale as well as closer to home? How can they respond imaginatively to needs of their constituent communities?  

Effective educational leaders have always grasped and met those challenges. But how can they play a part in ensuring that the educational system itself is both attuned to the emerging priorities in a fast-changing contemporary world? 

This panel presentation will share research findings, reflecting both on experience and on the literature deriving from that work across a number of years and a number of projects.  Reflection and meta-analysis, allows us as researchers and practitioners to revisit projects and data sets from various corners of the world. That reflection and analysis helps us to build a web of concepts, revisited in theoretical and practitioner-oriented literature, emanating in a theoretical framework - ‘Responsive Educational Leadership.’  Members of the panel will share examples from their research and initiatives that bring the framework into fuller view.

We claim that we need to support people in learning how to emancipate themselves from the very system that educated them. We claim that education should be designed in a way that it enables people to think about the limitations and problems of the society they inhabit.  Rebels with a cause.

Our main research question has been: what is the most appropriate model of educational leadership?  One which allows the development of learning-focused organisations in which everyone develops in ways which our communities and our society need?

The objectives and questions of the panel:

1. Why do we need education today? What are the most burning challenges that we may overcome thanks to education? 
2. Are we still optimists who believe that education helps to ensure the survival of society? 
3. If responsiveness is the goal, what are the necessary reforms of educational leadership that move us away from authoritarian or transactional bureaucracy and toward leadership in a participatory mode, that feels responsible for the children and adults in their institution and responsible for the society they all inhabit?
4. What can we learn from initiatives across Europe and around the world? Who are these leaders? How might educational leaders act in ways that move their communities, regions and countries in positive directions?
5. Finally, how do we define the role of responsive educational leaders and schools and democratic societies. Is it possible to propose and run democratic, inclusive and responsive education as one key aspect of democratic life?

We look at our data. We re-examine our experiences, working across the stages of our lives. We revisit early initiatives with curriculum development aimed at to improving democracy, and we explore the tensions between opportunity and the lack of simple solutions. We then describe various projects from around the world, including the problematics of European neoliberal initiatives which have adopted the business discourse of accountability and evaluation. 

We do this by arguing for the development of the “responsive school”. Responsive as in responsible, but not in the sense of blame, but responsive in the sense of feeling a sense of ownership, care, compassion, and concern for those who inhabit the communities of which we are a part. Responsive, as in a response to the context and challenges we face.

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