Promoting Equity in Schools: Collaboration, inquiry and ethical leadership

Around the world, countries are searching for ways of making their schools more effective for all children and young people. This book offers a new way of thinking about how to address this challenge. It sees improvement as requiring a collective effort that involves contributions from all members of a school community. Crucial to this is the idea of ethical leadership.

Promoting Equity in Schools is written by a team of academic researchers who had a most unusual opportunity to work with a network of schools over three years, experimenting to find more effective ways of including hard-to-reach learners. Bringing together practitioner knowledge and ideas from research carried out from a variety of perspectives, the authors provide rich accounts of what happened when the schools attempted to become more inclusive and fairer. In so doing, they throw light on the challenges this presents for school leaders.

The accounts presented in the book are located in Queensland, Australia, where the school system faces significant difficulties in relation to equity that resonate with similar difficulties around the world. These difficulties relate to policies that emphasise high-stakes testing and school choice, which tend to promote increased segregation, to the particular disadvantage of young people from low-income and minority backgrounds. The arguments presented suggest that even where worrying policies are in place, schools with leadership driven by a commitment to equity can still find space to develop more equitable ways of working.

Jess Harris is Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle. Her research interests include school change, educational leadership, teacher learning, and the study of talk and social interaction using Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.

Suzanne Carrington is a Professor and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. Suzanne’s areas of expertise are in inclusive education, disability and teacher preparation for inclusive schools. She has engaged in research to inform policy and practice in Australian and international education contexts, more recently extending this research to the South Pacific and Asia.

Mel Ainscow is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Manchester. Currently he leads Schools Challenge Cymru in Wales. He is a long-term consultant to UNESCO, working on international efforts to promote equity and inclusion globally. In the Queen’s 2012 New Year honours list he was made a CBE for services to education.