In this presentation, I adumbrate a new methodology for critical scholars who research education leadership, which I call Critical Education Leadership and Policy Scholarship (CELPS – see Courtney, 2024). This methodology is intended to enable critical research into a construction of education leadership that is explicitly co-constituted with education policy. I argue that this new methodology is necessary for two main reasons. The first is the epistemological inadequacy of dominant education-leadership methodologies. Most education leadership research is in the school-improvement sub-field (McGinity et al., 2022), but its methodologies are functionalist and so are unsuitable for critical researchers. This is because functionalism is a positivist paradigm: it sees social reality as external to researchers. Functionalists seek to measure and intervene upon this reality to remove barriers to more effective and efficient organisational functioning in which leadership is a determining variable. This, in turn, is expected to produce raised standards of pupil attainment in a traceably causal relationship (Courtney et al., 2017). Critical researchers instead see social reality as co-constructed between themselves and participants, and not objectively measurable. Leadership involves power as embodied relations and structures—making a research focus on traits irrelevant—and there is no hard division between leaders and the policy context.
The second warrant for the new methodology is the way in which the dominant critical methodology in the critical part of the field—policy scholarship—does not enable an explicit focus on education leadership but relegates it conceptually to a by-product of education policy. This enables those critical scholars who see leadership as a “tainted” concept to avoid or deny it. For these scholars (e.g., O’Reilly and Reed, 2010; Ozga, 2000), using the language associated with dominant, functionalist discourses of leadership, or what O’Reilly and Reed (2010) call ‘leaderism’, inevitably reifies a concept whose dismantling they demand. I see an unfortunate pessimism to arguments that a tainted concept can be addressed only through banishment or marginalisation; such a position constitutes a resigned acceptance of the discursive totalitarianism desired by authoritative voices and interpretations. Leadership is left to become wholly associated with only one set of (negative) discourses, and to contradict is risky.
The new methodology proposed here — critical education leadership and policy scholarship (CELPS) — responds to the problems above through six core features: 1) it is epistemologically critical, that is, it focuses on context and power from a post-positivist perspective. 2) CELPS locates and works with education policy in diverse contexts, including the geographical, ideological, historical, political, discursive, socio-economic, axiological and cultural. 3) CELPS understands education leadership and policy as mutually constitutive. 4) CELPS enables the ontological deployment of the terms leader and leadership without committing to a project of reification. 5) CELPS requires the explicit theorisation and/or conceptualisation of its objects and assumptive architecture. 6) CELPS makes room for new or diverse approaches, agendas, methods, aims and foci. This new methodology addresses directly the conference theme in enabling education research with the potential to shape the future of educational practice, since it is more convincingly located epistemologically in how the social world functions rather than in how policymakers and functionalist researchers want it to function. My approach intends that CELPS either explicitly mitigates or establishes the conceptual or empirical conditions for further research to mitigate any disadvantage conferred by the power relations identified as a normal product of its usage. Wide in scope, the methodology is intended for use in Europe and beyond.

Methods and methodology pertain here in two imbricated ways. First are the methods underpinning the new conceptualisation and second is the resulting methodology itself. First, the rigour of the construction of the new methodology relies on the robustness of my argument, which is that current methodologies for researching critical education leadership and policy are deficient/inappropriate owing to epistemological misalignment (i.e., they are functionalist), or they are entirely missing. In other words, those oft-used methodologies epistemologically available to critical, i.e., post-positivist researchers do not focus explicitly on education leadership, for instance, policy scholarship, ethnography, and case study. A potential alternative suggested by Eacott (2015), ‘relational leadership’, is analysed and discounted because Eacott explicitly sees it as not critical, and because it more resembles Eacott’s intellectual agenda than an accommodating new methodology. It matters that e.g., policy scholarship does not focus on leadership because it implicitly reinforces a commonly held critical view (e.g., Ozga, 2000) that leadership is conceptually suspicious. Reclaiming leadership conceptually becomes a central task for the new methodology. The robustness of this argument concerning current methodological gaps and deficiencies justifies the six features of the methodology created to address them: Critical Education Leadership and Policy Scholarship: 1. Enables a critical approach to research. That is, CELPS first focuses on power relations and structures, and second, it takes context seriously as co-constructing social reality and actors’ identities. 2. Works with and locates education policy in its ideological, historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural context. CELPS builds on policy scholarship (Grace, 1995), by centring leaders/leadership. 3. Understands education leadership and policy as mutually constitutive. Education policies structure the roles, practices and identities that are conjured as “leadership”, and “education leaders” not only enact and embody policy, but also contribute to the socio-discursive conditions in which new policies emerge. 4. Uses the words ‘leadership/leader/leading’ without assuming any particular conceptual solidity or normative value. Whilst naming may create new realities and reinforce existing discourses (Gunter, 2004), it may also enable counter-discursive meanings. 5. Requires the explicit theorisation and/or conceptualisation of leadership/leader/leading, including their underlying assumptions. CELPS holds that it is a methodological flaw not to recognise or foreground the assumptions researchers have about the social world, and hence about how to investigate it. 6. Makes room for multiple approaches, agendas, methods, aims and foci. If CELPS is to be taken up across the critical sub-field, then it has to accommodate diversity.

The potential for a considerable contribution to the field through this new methodology is clear: the field may take up the proposed methodology and expand it, through novel usages, in a variety of distinctive and interesting ways. Or it may be challenged, in which case my contribution here is focused on starting a new debate regarding what may be considered an appropriate methodology for critical work in education leadership, and how its features may be defined. Of course, it may also be treated to what Eacott (2015) calls the ‘benign neglect’ (p. 99) field members typically evince towards those whose onto-epistemic assumptions they do not share. Like all methodological frameworks, this one is inherently normative in privileging a particular construction of the social world and inviting coherently aligned ways of investigating and thinking about it. The critical ontological “problem” of leadership is recast through CELPS’ shifting the object of research from the effectiveness of leadership to its functions, purposes, mechanisms and products which, whilst socially constructed, are no less “real” for it. CELPS researchers are not obliged to “believe” in leadership to observe these four in education systems and polities that repeatedly summon leadership through policy to do work that is both discursive and material. In turn, it is to be hoped that CELPS can give a new methodological home to such critical researchers, whose previous communities have accepted them provided they avoid the “L” word.

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