Seeing ourselves in the system: Using Kaleidoscopic Data to advance equity in teacher development and leadership

NICOLE PONSFORD, DOCTORAL RESEARCHER, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY, UK Introduction Teacher retention, wellbeing and leadership development remain pressing challenges for schools in the UK and beyond. While much attention has rightly focused on pupil outcomes, the professional experiences of teachers and school staff often remain underexplored in academic research and in practice. This is particularly true for colleagues whose identities are underrepresented in official datasets – including global majority staff, women, neurodivergent and disabled colleagues, and those with caring responsibilities. National data highlights rising attrition, workload pressures and persistent underrepresentation in senior roles (Miller, 2020). Yet traditional workforce datasets do not routinely capture intersectional identity information (Crenshaw, 1989), meaning that many staff experiences remain invisible. This creates an intersectional evidence gap: leaders can observe outcomes but not the lived exp