TOBY GREANY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY, UK
PAT THOMSON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, UK
Every era of educational reform has its own distinct preoccupations and buzzwords. In England, the 1960s and ’70s were about removing selection and comprehensivisation, the ’80s and ’90s became dominated by the new national curriculum and its entitlements, while Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ mantra presaged a relentless focus on improving standards throughout the late ’90s and noughties. After 2010, Michael Gove and Nick Gibb prioritised the ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum and unleashed huge structural changes through academisation.
In reality, these eras were not nearly so unified and discrete: multiple reforms commonly interacted in complex assemblages shaped by political ideologies and values, cultural norms and expectations, policy borrowing, research and evidence, and the resources available (Greany and Earley, 2021). Meanwhile, changes in practice were often relatively gradual and cumulative (Tyack and Tobin, 1994).
But it seems worth asking how our current educational era might be characterised. Our own research (Greany et al., 2026) indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic was a hinge point, accelerating a set of shifts that were already underway (think austerity, Brexit, populism, climate change, global instability and the explosion of social media), while introducing a new set of pressures as a result of the lockdowns and their associated impact on children, families and communities. Across the UK, the result is that educational policymakers, practitioners and researchers are focused far more on issues of inclusionAn approach where a school aims to ensure that all children are educated together, with support for those who require it to access the full curriculum and contribute to and participate in all aspects of school life, special/additional needs, mental health, wellbeing, safeguarding, belonging, behaviour and attendance than they were in the years before 2020.
This shift suggests the need for a renewed way of thinking about the core purposes of education: rather than an overriding focus on imparting knowledge to achieve measurable improvements in standards, we suggest a need to encompass an ethic of education and care. We set out what this might mean in more detail in our own article, which opens this issue of Impact.
If schools are being asked to care more than ever, then who is caring for the people doing that work? How sustainable are these roles, given the often intense emotional labour involved in care work?
This edition includes six articles directly related to our recent UK-wide study of Sustainable School Leadership (Greany et al., 2026). Three of these are by members of the research team, exploring aspects of the findings and their implications. This includes our own article on an ethic of education and care, Tom Perry’s article, which digs into the survey data to explore how leaders spend their time on care-related issues and how this links to wellbeing, and Mike Collins’ article, which focuses on how place-based leadership (a related theme in the project conceptual framework) provides the basis for student engagement, attendance and sense of belonging.
The following three articles provide responses to the research – one from each of the three UK nations we studied. Alison Mitchell and her colleagues from School Leaders Scotland draw on their recent manifesto and the findings from our research to describe Scottish headteachers as the ‘last service standing’, picking up responsibilities for mental health, safeguarding and family crisis that used to sit with other services. Their argument is that the job has grown past what one person can carry. Care, they suggest, is a shared public responsibility, and leaders should not be expected to supply it alone.
In a similar vein, Tony Gallagher and Jackie Bartley provide various illustrations of how leaders in Northern Ireland are responding to the increased need for care, only some of which are viable. They highlight how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, schools ‘stepped up to the plate’ to support students. They argue that just because school leaders are prepared to do this, this ‘should not allow other agencies to step back from their responsibilities’. Rather, we need multi-agency coalitions of concern to address pressing social challenges.
Finally, Tom Shaw and Simon Flowers, both serving leaders at Carr Manor School in Leeds, draw on their significant experience to articulate the foundational importance of care for educational success and to identify some of the core cultural and systemic supports needed to make this sustainable. They conclude powerfully: ‘At a time of increasing fragmentation in our communities, the need for all public servants to weave together community services in ways that the most vulnerable can access is a priority. If care is to endure, it must be held collectively, embedded in place and recognised as core leadership work rather than an optional extra.’
The focus of the wider issue on behaviour, attendance, school culture and belonging neatly encapsulates the shifts we are describing, often exemplifying how an ethic of education and care can be realised in practice.
Several articles examine school belonging, exploring frameworks and examples that move beyond one-off initiatives to achieve consistent relational cultures, practices and systems. Siddiqui and Gorard’s research in England and South Asia leads them to conclude that ‘schooling works not only because of what is taught, but because of the relationships and emotional capacities that it helps to build’. The strongest impact from early schooling is socio-emotional development, ahead of literacy and numeracy gains. Achieving such holistic development depends on teachers who are themselves supported and fairly treated and an accountability framework that values the wider benefits of schooling.
Nwaka’s study outlines how the development of an inclusion and intervention plan helped one autistic student with school-related anxiety to re-engage with school, while Raza’s article on performative inclusion argues that visibility is not the same as belonging. Themed assemblies and dress-up days can signal that a school has noticed diversityThe recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, physical ability, religious beliefs and other differences, but they can also place students in the position of correcting or enduring misrepresentation rather than being served by it. Mahmood and Nelson make a related argument using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model. Belonging, they say, is shaped by policy, curriculum and systemic factors; schools should ask not just ‘How do we help this student to belong?’ but also ‘How is our environment shaping whether belonging is possible?’.
Baker, Lomas and Scott consider belonging for pupils with SEND, who are disproportionately likely to be excluded from schools. Their framework highlights the interconnections within an explicitly inclusive culture that aligns classroom practice, pastoral systems and meaningful strengths-based recognition for all students.
The issue also includes practical accounts of care built into ordinary school routines, often as a way to enhance attendance and engagement. Wakefield, Anderson and McCafferty describe how Ashby School in Leicestershire restructured tutor time around coaching, reflection, enrichment and wellbeing (CREW), so that the most consistent adult in a student’s week has a defined role in building relationships and strengthening self-directed learning, rather than just taking the register.
Talbot and Easterbrook describe sustained work at Thomas Tallis School in London to embed findings from research into the social psychology of belonging. This included introducing anonymised assessment, more equitable classroom questioning and a Year 7 transition resource built around older students’ own accounts of settling in. Lloyd’s account of Forest Academy reframes attendance around belonging, clarity and connection, and avoids talking about attendance purely in percentages, describing instead what is lost: missed phonics, missed relationships, missed learning.
Staff–student relationships are core to belonging, engagement and care, so several articles focus on the skills and approaches required. Watson-Burge cautions that a student who attends school but does not engage will not learn. Calm can look like readiness when it is really dependence on an adult who is still doing most of the regulatory and cognitive work. Her trauma-informed PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, empathy) approach seeks to ensure that engagement becomes meaningful. Kerslake’s work on oracy shows that asking a teacher what a word means can be a sign of confidence, provided that schools do not penalise the many different ways in which students phrase a request for help. Kapcia’s framework, developed from her doctoral research and her own classroom practice, treats withdrawal, defiance and disruption as forms of communication. Patterson makes a similar argument for pupils with co-occurring autism and ADHD. A child who is settled at home and struggles at school is responding to a mismatch between executive function demands and environment.
Goldenberg’s study shows that care is equally about the physical environment. She compared indoor and outdoor learning for a group of 76 Reception children in Newham, London, finding that moving learning outdoors reduced antisocial behaviour and increased prosocial behaviour, particularly among the children who had struggled most indoors.
Finally, Crompton, Kay and Morris examine perceptions of classroom behaviour in further education colleges, based on a national survey of teachers and leaders (n=272). Twenty-seven per cent of respondents claimed that disruptive behaviour was prevalent in most lessons, often related to mobile phone use. The authors argue that ‘While many staff feel confident in their own practice, they are calling for stronger consequences, greater consistency and, in some cases, changes at institutional or national level.’
Drawing all this together, schools have always had a duty of care, but the societal shifts referred to here mean that the needs of children, families and communities are changing and, often, expanding, making this duty more urgent, more central and more challenging. This is certainly true in more deprived areas, but our own research shows that all categories of school are affected.
The implications of these changes are profound. As the articles in this issue attest, many schools and colleges are already responding and finding ways to address the expanding need for an ethic of education and care. Sometimes their focus is on a specific issue – such as attendance, behaviour or additional needs – but often the response is more holistic, seeking to shift school cultures and ways of thinking – for example, by using the language of belonging.
Read together, the articles highlight how education and care are intertwined through every aspect of schooling: care is central to the relationships between teachers and pupils in the classroom, and an ethic of care can be fostered by reading and discussing stories or debating ethics in science, just as education occurs in form time, the nurture room or on a school trip. The articles also offer a rich shared vocabulary across leadership, pastoral care and classroom practice: belonging before behaviour, presence before participation before learning; scaffoldingProgressively introducing students to new concepts to support their learning distinguished from rescuing; structural change alongside relational warmth.
What becomes clear is that care work is not peripheral, but core to every aspect of learning and schooling. A one-off INSET day for staff or a tweak to tutor time arrangements will not be enough to compensate for a system under strain. Critically, this cannot be left to individual leaders and their teams to address in isolation; we need systemic responses backed by resources that offer coherent, place-based, multi-agency early intervention and support for children and families.
Alongside this, and integral to it, we need school staff and leaders to feel that they too are cared for and that their roles are sustainable. As our own research highlights, care work can be emotionally and physically demanding for school staff – even while also being profoundly satisfying and rewarding for many.
A renewed focus on an ethic of education and care offers scope for a more human, relational, whole education, for staff as well as for students (Biesta, 2021). This issue of Impact offers hope that it is already emerging.
