COVID-19 – school leadership in crisis?

Without question, COVID-19 is upending the modern world. It is devastating the global economy, shaking up society and radically changing education. COVID-19 has placed limitations on public life that would have been simply unthinkable just a few short months ago. In this pandemic, education has been re-crafted, re-designed and re-booted as a home-based, technology-enabled, on-line activity. Teaching and learning practices have dramatically altered, the core functions of schools have shifted and education leaders have been pushed to the very limit.

The impact of COVID-19, in the short term, has been to disrupt schooling globally. With 1.6bn young people out of school during this pandemic, every country has experienced a hiatus in education as usual. “Virtually all schools have been paused and teaching has been re-organised in various ways” (Zhao, 2020, p. 1) By treating COVID-19 as a short-term crisis, however, it has been proposed that an important opportunity to change schools and school systems for the better will be missed (Zhao, 2020). To view current leadership practices as some temporary, quick fix until normal service is resumed misses the opportunity to lead differently and potentially, to lead more effectively.

Prior to COVID-19, the type of leadership most typically found in schools could be described as traditional, following the contours of role and position. The core purpose of the headteacher or principal was fundamentally to run the school and ensure learning and teaching was most productive. Currently, the staff meetings, coffee catch-ups and corridor chats are gone. All those formal and informal moments where relationships are forged and leadership is enacted vanished overnight. Globally, education leaders, at all levels in the system, spend their time influencing and engaging with others through a laptop or phone screen. They practice their leadership through a two-dimensional space spending hour after endless hour on Teams, Zoom or Google Meet.

This article focusses on school leadership and asks: Is it in crisis? The article considers some of the fault lines within education that have been made more visible through COVID-19. It examines current leadership practices, focussing particularly on distributed, collaborative and networked leadership. The article concludes with some reflections about the work of school leaders within this current set of circumstances.

Fault lines

The contemporary discourse around COVID-19 is highly polarised....