Towards educational change leadership as a discursive practice—or should all school leaders read Foucault?

Abstract

While educational policy-makers bemoan the ways in which educational reforms falter, they both valorize and punish leaders for their key role in change. In this paper, using a national study funded by the English Creative Partnerships programme, we suggest that it may be helpful to understand the limits to change by seeing change leadership as discursive practice. We elaborate this by showing the correspondences between the words of senior leaders and what was happening in their schools. We focus on four status quo maintaining discourses—delivery of curriculum; subjects as the organizer of curriculum; ability and low aspirations—and show how these inhibited change. We argue that thinking of change as discursive offers the notion of leadership as state of being and knowing which might simultaneously enact, de-construct and disrupt taken-for-granted and dominant discourses. We then wonder what implications this perspective has for what and how we teach serving and aspirational school leaders.