Transforming schools towards sustainability is widely recognised as a key lever for societal change. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to empower learners to actively engage with complex global challenges, yet its effective implementation requires structural, cultural, and pedagogical transformation at the school level. (UNESCO, 2021) Within this process, school leaders play a pivotal role (Holst, 2023) they shape organisational conditions, enable participation, and translate sustainability goals into long-term school development strategies. (Mogren and Gericke, 2017) Despite this central role, empirical research consistently indicates that many school leaders feel insufficiently prepared to lead ESD implementation in a holistic manner, particularly when framed through a Whole-School-Approach (WSA) (Brock & Holst, 2022).

This paper addresses a key gap in current research by foregrounding the importance of school leaders’ own perspectives on which competencies and other factors are needed to successfully implement ESD and how they conceptualise their leadership role in this context. While existing studies often focus on learners and teacher practices or curricular integration of ESD (Holst et al., 2024),comparatively little attention has been paid to school leaders’ subjective understandings, perceived enabling conditions, and role interpretations related to ESD-oriented school development and leadership (Mogren & Gericke, 2017).

The paper draws on empirical data from the LoLE (Leaders of Learner Empowerment) training, a six-month professional development initiative designed to empower school leaders to initiate and lead ESD-related change projects within their schools, which is grounded in principles of action research (Wood & Govender, 2013), peer learning (Vangrieken et al., 2017), and learner empowerment (Hart, 1992) and is being conducted in Germany as well as in seven partner countries (Costa Rica, Ethiopia, South Africa, Canada, the USA, Japan and Saudi Arabia). The empirical focus of this contribution lies on a qualitative survey conducted with participating school leaders from two German LoLE cohorts, addressing enabling conditions and role understandings of school leaders (Warwas, 2012), which is complemented by interviews on the needs of the school leaders regarding the LoLE training and selected qualitative materials from the training context, including written reflections and project descriptions, to contextualise and deepen the analysis.

Preliminary findings indicate that school leaders emphasise enabling conditions, that are not fulfilled yet, on multiple, interrelated levels. These include structural conditions (e.g. time resources, institutional support, and policy frameworks), relational and cultural conditions (e.g. trust, participation, and shared vision), and individual dimensions (e.g. leadership identity, confidence, and perceived legitimacy to initiate change). (Holst et al., 2025) Furthermore, the analysis reveals differing role conceptions, ranging from managerial coordination and strategic framing to facilitative, participatory, and learner-centred leadership practices. (Warwas, 2012) Notably, many school leaders describe a tension between hierarchical leadership expectations, the engagement and the motivation of the collegium and the participatory demands of learner empowerment within a WSA.

This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into how ESD-leadership is understood in the context of schools and enacted from the perspective of school leaders (Holst et al., 2025) The findings have implications for the design of leadership training programmes and the conceptualisation of ESD-oriented leadership competencies. The paper concludes by discussing how professional development formats can better align with school leaders’ perceived needs, including required competencies of the school leaders, and by inviting discussion on how school leadership can be supported better in the future.

This paper is embedded within a broader doctoral research project examining the role of school leaders in implementing ESD-related change projects through a Whole-School-Approach (WSA). It follows a qualitative, exploratory research design aimed at capturing school leaders’ subjective perspectives, role conceptions, and perceived enabling conditions in relation to school development and leadership for sustainability. The primary data source for this contribution is a qualitative survey conducted with school leaders participating in two German cohorts of the LoLE training. Participants represent diverse school contexts and leadership backgrounds. The survey was administered prior to the beginning of the training and invited participants to reflect on two guiding prompts: (1) what they perceive as necessary to feel capable of implementing ESD at their school, and (2) how they understand their role as school leaders in enabling ESD, learner empowerment, and school-wide transformation (Warwas, 2012). The survey data are complemented by selected qualitative materials generated during the training process. These include interviews focusing on school leaders’ needs and expectations regarding the LoLE training, written reflections, documentation of change projects, and short narrative inputs from an online learning environment on the platform Moodle. These materials are not treated as outcome measures, but as contextual and interpretive sources that allow insights into how leadership roles are articulated, negotiated, and reflected upon in relation to concrete professional development experiences. The survey responses were analysed by using a free and inductive form of Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring, 2014) identifying central themes related to perceived needs, enabling conditions, and initial role understandings of the school leaders. These themes were comparatively related to patterns emerging from the training-related materials, allowing for preliminary, results-in-progress insights into how school leaders’ role conceptions and leadership orientations appear to develop over the course of the training, influenced by analysis techniques of Constructivistic Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006). By combining qualitative survey data with contextual materials from a professional development setting, this methodological approach enables an in-depth and cautious exploration of how school leaders articulate their needs and roles in relation to ESD and WSA in the context of the LoLE training, while remaining sensitive to the complexity, situatedness, and ongoing nature of leadership learning processes (Pinheiro et al., 2025). Further research will include a comparison of experiences between the German cohorts and the seven international cohorts, that were mentioned above.

This paper provides empirical insights into how school leaders themselves conceptualise the conditions and leadership roles required to implement ESD through a WSA. By foregrounding school leaders’ voices, the findings highlight that ESD implementation is not primarily perceived as a technical or curricular challenge, but as a complex leadership task that involves navigating structural constraints, cultural dynamics, and personal leadership identity (Wohlfart et al., 2026). The analysis suggests that school leaders view their role less as sole drivers of change and more as facilitators of participatory processes, mediators between policy demands and school realities, and enablers of learner and teacher agency. At the same time, many participants describe tensions between hierarchical leadership expectations and the participatory, empowerment-oriented logic of ESD and WSA. These tensions point to the need for leadership concepts and training formats that explicitly address ambiguity, role negotiation, and shared responsibility. From a research perspective, the findings contribute to ongoing debates on leadership for sustainability in education by empirically grounding leadership roles and enabling conditions in school leaders’ lived experiences. Rather than proposing fixed competency models, the results underline the importance of understanding school leadership for ESD as relational, context-sensitive, and developmental (Müller et al., 2020). For practice and policy, the paper suggests that professional development programmes for school leaders should move beyond knowledge transfer and instead create reflective spaces for role clarification, peer learning, and engagement with real-world transformation projects. The presentation will conclude with discussion questions addressing: • How can leadership research better integrate the school leader´s perspectives? • What forms of professional capacity building are needed to support participatory and empowerment-oriented leadership? • How can policy environments better align expectations and capacities of school leaders in the context of ESD-leaderships?

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