Abstract

The purpose of this study is to illustrate the value of educational leaders intentionally including students on a leadership for inclusion team, critically reviewing and developing policies and practices that affect young peoples' experience of school. The study advocates for ways leaders can engage young people in school leadership and holds promise to build caring, equitable, and responsive classrooms and schools by centring students’ voices.

The potential of establishing collaborative initiatives to develop an individual schools' capacity for improvement is evaluated, specifically in their quest for inclusive education, where there is potential to increase knowledge about the value of including the voice and participation for students placed on the Autism Spectrum, as they engage in a collaborative leadership partnership that also comprises of school leaders and teacher leaders. Current opportunities for student participation in collaborative leadership teams are investigated, where students' and teachers' perceptions were sought; we gained insight into whether or not those perceptions hold any value in advancing the inclusive education agenda in schools. The study also investigated the impact of including students on collaborative leadership teams, where previously, there has been little empirical investigation of how adults facilitate the development of students' voice and, subsequently, youth leadership. It was intended to investigate how participation in a collaborative leadership partnership may develop a sense of agency in the students involved, where they become empowered as advocates and leaders of positive change towards greater inclusion. It is proposed that this study provides possible insights on how to develop clear systems and structures for teachers and administrators to facilitate and support collaborative initiatives within their organisation where there is the potential for students to positively impact school leaders and other staff in their development of policies, structures and procedures that will increase the school's ability to develop and provide more inclusive environments.

A qualitative, single-site case study was employed to carry out this research study. Multiple data collection methods were used to explore the following research questions, which emerged from the literature review and conceptual framework. What are the participants' perceptions of a collaborative leadership for inclusion team of the value of having students deemed to lie on the Autistic Spectrum as part of this group? What are the group members' perceptions relating to how the group worked together? What are the group members' perceptions relating to the outcomes (recommendations/action planning for the future) produced by the group? The study was made up of an initiative which involved five collaborative leadership meetings that engaged student participation, students assessed as placed on the Autism Spectrum (AS), who volunteered to take part in the study. Through the course of the meetings the schools' policies and practices were interrogated using the lens of the Autism Friendly School Audit, where challenging problematisations were identified and solutions were produced in the form of a document, an 'action plan' for change. The study took place over a six-month period beginning in January 2022 and ending in May 2022. Phase one of the study proposed an 'initiative' composed of five fifteen-minute meetings with the students and each meeting was followed by a meeting with the collaborative leadership team (CLT), each approximately forty minutes long and again, there were five in total. All meetings were audio recorded. Following the meetings initiative, three focus group discussions took place each lasting approximately 40 minutes. School leaders, teacher leaders and student participants were invited to take part in their respective focus groups which were audio recorded. All three focus group discussions were then transcribed. I undertook to analyse and explore the data by adopting a system for data analysis that drew heavily on the framework for thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006). Thematic analysis involves identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns that emerge in the data. "It minimally organises and describes your dataset in (rich) detail" Braun and Clarke, 2006, p.6.

Three major themes emerged that provide structure to this discussion: 1) The inspiration of the principal and teachers; 2) The specific acts performed by the principal and teachers, and; 3) The outcomes of those acts. Thus, the findings are organised into three major sections as they align with those three major organizing themes. Each section is then further organized by the themes that emerged within that overarching topic. Finding 1: Mitra, Serriere, and Stoicovy (2012) highlight the vision of a school principal who prioritises engaging students and staff in a belief that this “part of the way we do things here” (p. 106). Leaders who actively seek out the perspectives of their students internalise this as a core belief and create a school culture that nurtures this ethos (Damini, 2014; Gentilucci and Muto, 2007). Finding 2: Listening authentically to the voice of students assessed as being on the AS and assigned to special class for AS. Billington (2006) suggests that ‘insider accounts’ of autistic young people need to be central to the discussion of what enables (or disables) their access to education. The students appeared to grow in enthusiasm after the first meeting. At the second SIM, Aisling stated, ‘It was alive, the room. The room was alive with excitement………..yes, very positive. Very, you know, you can definitely see that there are going to be changes, it's very exciting’. Finding 3: There is a value to collaborative partnerships that include student participation in critically evaluating policy and practice and finding new ways of leading. Flynn (2013) confirms the potential relationship between 'voice', 'empowerment' and 'transformation', where participants actively contributed to improving relationships with their teachers and peers while participating in strategies and activities that positively impacted their experience of school.

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