School leadership is regarded as fundamental in ensuring that children with special educational needs (SEN) experience success in school (Mac Ruairc, Ottesen and Precey, 2013). While there are many different facets to leadership in the school context, in the SEN field the literature predominantly focuses on the centrality of leadership for bringing about ‘inclusion’ broadly (Morrissey, 2021). The emphasis on how leadership can be leveraged specifically towards ‘universalizing curricula’ (Norwich and Lewis 2007, p. 127) or at the very least making curricula more accessible for children with SEN is almost negligible. This dearth of data on curriculum leadership in the SEN sphere is reflective of the wider research landscape in education with Harris, Jones and Crick (2020, p.1) finding that curriculum leadership is ‘less well developed’ than other conceptualisations of educational leadership. This paper aims to address this gap in the scholarship, with a particular emphasis on special schools as a context for practice.  

Norwich’s (2010) theoretical framework for curriculum design underpinned this study, which formed part of a broader doctoral inquiry. As part of this framework, Norwich (2010, p.133) posits four basic ‘aspects’ as a structure for curricula:

• General principles and aims;
• Areas of learning (for example subject areas);
• Specific programmes of study;
• Teaching practices.

Modification to one or more of these aspects changes the accessibility level of the curriculum, in particular for those with SEN. Stemming from this, this paper aims to address the core question:

• What role does leadership play in complex curricular modification processes and how does this manifest itself to increase curricular accessibility?

A mandatory Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curricular programme in Ireland is used as the vehicle to probe this area. While focused specifically on leadership, the paper explores curriculum enactment in a lateral way, with Shawer’s (2010) curriculum approaches interrogated for their relevance in the SEN sphere. Essentially, the paper examines whether special education teachers are curriculum transmitters, curriculum developers or curriculum makers and scrutinises the mediating function that leadership plays in each of these different curricular roles.

Although rooted in Ireland, this paper will interest scholars in other European jurisdictions given the dearth of data on curriculum leadership and its importance in making curricula accessible for those with SEN. Schools across the continent are embracing inclusive schooling – curriculum leadership is fundamental towards ensuring that curricula are accessible to all learners (Norwich, 2010). Furthermore, this paper will showcase how external inspection, as a key influencer, can impinge on how curriculum leadership is enacted. This adds significantly to the paper’s relevance from a European perspective, as teachers and schools across Europe are subject to greater levels of regulation in order to operationalise, at the micro level, curricula that are introduced at the macro level (Priestley et al., 2021). This paper offers insights into how that operationalisation process takes place at classroom level in relation to one particular curricular programme in Irish special schools.

This inquiry was situated in the qualitative domain and took the form of a multi-site embedded case study, with three special schools selected as cases – a Mild General Learning Disability School, a Moderate General Learning Disability School and a Severe-Profound General Learning Disability School. A non-probability, purposive sampling technique was utilised. There were four units within each case:  Documentary analysis of the school’s SPHE policy;  Interview with the principal teacher;  Interview with the Health and Wellbeing Coordinator (part of the In-School Management Team of the school);  Focus group of three or four teachers. SPHE policies went through a rigorous linguistic and content analysis process, so that comparison could be made with the lived experiences of teachers in classroom-level curricular enactment. The recorded interviews with a cross-section of the teaching personnel (those who were in formal management positions and those who were not in formal management positions) facilitated an exploration of the extant ‘layers of positional leadership’ (MacBeath et al., 2018, p. 105) and their influence and interplay in relation to the curricular approach utilised. This enabled a probing of how curriculum leadership operated and how management and non-management leadership levels operated and dialogued within a broad framework. To enhance the trustworthiness of interview data, member-checking took place, with participants re-reading their interview transcripts to ensure that they accurately reflected their views (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011) Data collected from the different units in each case were inputted to Nvivo data analysis software. Braun and Clarke’s (2021) updated step-by-step guide for thematic analysis was used to structure the qualitative analytical procedure. Data coding was used to ascribe category labels to each piece of data. The resulting codes were then separated on the basis of their substance. Some codes were removed from the dataset because they ultimately proved either irrelevant or insignificant to the research objective. Other codes were combined and/or renamed on the basis of the fully coded dataset that emerged. When the codes were reaggregated according to the key points they addressed, six themes emerged, which were developed and further refined to two overarching themes: 1. Curriculum Enactment 2. Curriculum Leadership The predominant focus of this paper is on exploring the latter theme, although there is some overlap given the nature of the inquiry.

This paper refines the definition of what curriculum leadership is in a special education context. The findings illustrate the fault lines and ‘interactions’ (Harris and DeFlaminis, 2016, p. 143) that exist between the ‘levels of leadership’ (Gronn, 2009, p. 381) when curriculum leadership is exercised through a distributed leadership framework. Two ‘premia’ are deduced from the data that inflate the curriculum leadership potential of those in possession of one or both: 1. The Principal Premium The data illustrated that the formal positional status of the principals enabled them to exercise more influence over how the curriculum was enacted, in line with what the broader body of scholarship has established in respect of the power attached to the role (Lumby, 2016; King and Stevenson, 2017; Bush, 2018; Harris and Jones, 2018; MacBeath et al., 2018). The principal had the power to both cultivate and curtail teacher leadership depending on the organisational culture that he / she promoted in the school. 2. The Experience Premium The more years’ experience that teachers had in special education, the more credibility it provided them with in terms of the best curriculum approaches to adopt. This credibility brought influence among colleagues in terms of leading curriculum enactment at school-level. The data underscored how experienced teachers in the SEN sphere could utilise ‘horizontal’ relationships in school to channel their leadership potential over the curriculum (York‐Barr et al., 2005, p. 211), by adopting a dialogic approach (Nazareno, 2013). It is clear that both promoted and unpromoted teachers have a key role to play in curriculum leadership and this research showcases how the promoted-unpromoted leadership balance is different in each school. The case schools here offer signposts as to the benefits and challenges that different balances effectuate, in terms of curriculum innovation.

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