When applying a critical realist approach to the decolonisation of the curriculum by drawing on the concept of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) that exposes the hierarchical fragility in educational organizations that maintains social injustice and inequalities. In my contribution to a collection of proclamation and provocations about decolonising the curriculum, I argued that ‘the decolonising of the school curriculum must involve the removal of oppressive authority. A focus on the content of the curriculum is not enough unless aligned from the beginning with a challenge to hierarchy in schools and other education organisations… as learning about a liberating content when filtered through an oppressive authority will not decolonise the curriculum’ (Race et al., 2021, p. 89). Hypothetically, transforming authority has to produce a change in culture which will not only allow all education organisation to change in relation to decolonising curriculum but also addressing white privilege, thereby increasing understandings of colonising processes in different countries, but how we can use teaching and learning from top to bottom to address how we can transform education for a more social, multicultural and equitable profession (DiAngelo, 2021). A critical realist understanding of mechanisms and structure is used to connect Kellerman’s (2012) argument about the change in the balance of the power between leaders and followers that leaves the former more fragile with the concept of white fragility leads to a new understanding of fragility within hierarchy and how this works again the decolonisation of the curriculum, whilst acknowledging how appealing leadership discourses can be for those seeking curriculum reform and greater social justice. The ambiguity involved in the legitimation of hierarchy as a form of control embedded in struggles around matters of diversity and inequality (DiTomaso, 2021) is used to argue that things need not be as they are and that the challenge to hierarchy must remain an important aspect of all attempts to decolonise the curriculum.

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