TOM SHAW, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, CARR MANOR COMMUNITY SCHOOL, UK
SIMON FLOWERS, CEO, LEEDS LEARNING ALLIANCE, UK
Recent policy discourse has emphasised themes of belonging, 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 and thriving; it feels like a return to the desire for a progressive realisation of inclusive values rather than exclusive values (Booth and Ainscow, 2016). The legacy of years dominated by exclusive values, such as compliance, competition and hierarchy, has left its mark (McCluskey et al., 2024). System expectations have been developed in ways that, in many contexts, limit the scope of school leadership to a narrow and measurable range of academic outcomes.
It is encouraging that across the education system there is growing recognition that school leadership is, at its core, moral and relational work. The Sustainable School Leadership report (Greany et al., 2026) captures this, identifying an ethic of education and care as central to leadership that can endure under sustained pressure. The report articulates something that has long been lived in practice, often feeling subversive, in tension with dominant accountability narratives. What feels new is not the ethic of education and care itself, but that it is finally being named and recognised.
This article affirms this recognition through the lens of Leeds. One of the co-authors has spent an entire leadership career in the city, shaped by Every Child Matters (HM Treasury, 2003), local authority collaboration and a deeply place-based understanding of what schools are for. The other writes from within the school’s research and development work, helping to connect lived leadership experience to research that gives language to what has often remained implicit. Together, we reflect on how an ethic of education and care has been sustained over time, why place has mattered so profoundly, and what this suggests for leadership sustainability now that this ethic is being more clearly recognised.
Care as leadership identity, not intervention
One of the most helpful aspects of the Sustainable School Leadership report (Greany et al., 2026) is the way it frames care: not as a programme, initiative or pastoral add-on, but as a leadership stance that shapes how authority is exercised. Care, in this framing, is disciplined, demanding and unavoidable. This description resonates strongly with leadership formed before the recent dominant narrative that has encouraged headteachers to identify as ‘instructional leaders’ first and foremost, and multi-academy trustAbbreviated to MAT, a group of schools working in collaboration, governed by a single set of members and directors leaders as CEOs.
For one of us, leadership identity was shaped before headship was ever a goal. It was shaped by upbringing, early experiences of failure and recovery, a strong sense of service and professional formation under the Every Child Matters initiative (HM Treasury, 2003). Schools were understood as community services, not simply delivery mechanisms for outcomes. Responsibility was not defined narrowly by attainment or progress measures, but by whether children could attend safely, belong and learn. Care was never something to be balanced against education; it was the condition that made education possible.
What has shifted is not the moral core of leadership, but the policy and accountability environment in which it is enacted. As frameworks narrowed and performance pressures intensified, care often continued to be practised without being named, valued or rewarded. The significance of the Greany et al. (2026) report lies in making this work visible and legitimate. It affirms something that many leaders already know in practice: if there are barriers to learning then leaders need to attend to those barriers to reduce the risk of exclusion. From this perspective, exclusion can often be understood as a consequence of how systems are designed and enacted.
Leadership beyond the ‘education remit’
Greany et al. (2026) show how school leadership has expanded beyond what ‘instructional leaders’ would recognise as an education remit. As external services have withdrawn, schools have become places where safeguarding, mental health, wellbeing and family support converge. This has intensified workload and contributed to the sustainability challenges the report identifies.
Much of this work was embedded under Every Child Matters (HM Treasury, 2003), supported by children’s centres, clusters, behaviour and attendance partnerships, and strong local authority capacity. Care was built into system design. What has changed is that similar responsibilities are now carried with fewer buffers, less shared infrastructure and far more individual risk.
This distinction matters. When care is framed as role expansion, it appears unsustainable. When it is understood as long-standing leadership work that has lost collective support, a new question comes into focus: how do we rebuild the systems and relationships that allow care to be held collectively rather than shouldered by individuals? This is not about schools doing everything; it is about leaders taking responsibility for understanding barriers and building collaboration to address them, rather than locating those barriers as someone else’s problem. From our perspective, understanding and responding to barriers to learning is a core part of educational leadership rather than an example of mission creep.
Leeds as moral and relational infrastructure
A central insight of the Sustainable School Leadership report (Greany et al., 2026) is the importance of place. Leadership is not abstract or portable; it is shaped by local history, civic culture, relationships and moral geography. Place influences what leaders see as their responsibility and what they feel able to do.
From long leadership experience in Leeds, place has functioned as moral and relational infrastructure for leadership. It is not a single homogeneous city but a constellation of communities with distinct histories, patterns of migration and identities, held together by a strong civic sense. Leeds is a receiving city, marked by diversityThe recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, physical ability, religious beliefs and other differences, complexity and change. Understanding Leeds meant designing policy and practice in response to community need, rather than imposing a pre-determined model of schooling. What matters in this work is not simply holding inclusive values but ensuring that those values are consistently enacted through the structures, routines and relationships of everyday school life. It meant innovating to meet need rather than importing practice through manuals and programmes.
Innovation was driven by a commitment to inclusive values. These were expressed through clear priorities: comprehensive education, no selection on entry or exit, and an ‘every child, every chance’ ethos. These values were necessary to serve the community – to disrupt the replication of exclusive logics so that the school community could be a catalyst for inclusion. The community committed to ‘knowing children well’ and being ‘partners in learning’ – partners with children and families, as well as between and beyond school through cross-sector engagement.
This commitment to inclusive values and priorities stretched beyond one school, as they began to be shared by the nine secondary schools in the local Area Inclusion Partnership (AIP). The structures created by the local authority had to be energised by value-aligned leadership. In this context, care moved beyond being a personal attribute of individual leaders and became a collective expectation, sustained through shared and relational forms of accountability (Hibbin, 2023). For example, leaders used the partnership to discuss complex pupil cases collectively, share expertise and agree inclusive approaches, reducing the likelihood that individual schools would respond to challenges in isolation.
A commitment to place mattered because it created the conditions in which an ethic of education and care could endure through shared structures, norms and expectations. It was not optional – children in this community were our children, whichever school they attended. The AIP had no permanent exclusions for 15 years, at a time when the policy environment was normalising the ‘right to exclude’ (McCluskey et al., 2024). It also delivered the strongest academic outcomes of the AIPs in the city.
Collective responsibility and the Leeds Learning Alliance
This Leeds leadership story highlights how collaboration was normalised. Heads’ meetings, clusters, behaviour and attendance partnerships, and children’s centres created shared responsibility for children’s lives between and beyond schools. Preventative work, early intervention and shared accountability for outcomes broader than attainment were part of the system’s fabric. Where collaboration was strong, conversations about care and inclusion were sustained.
As academisation and competitive pressures intensified, many of these structures weakened or fragmented. Trust-based silos replaced geographical communities, and schools became more accountable upwards than outwards. It was in this context that the Leeds Learning Alliance (LLA) became morally and practically necessary. The LLA did not emerge as a technical improvement structure, but as a way of sustaining values under pressure.
Through shared dialogue, mutual challenge and solidarity, the LLA reduced isolation and enabled leaders across sectors to hold inclusive principles – such as refusing exclusive logics or prioritising outcomes for young people at 25 – without standing alone.
In this sense, the LLA functioned as ethical infrastructure. Care survived not because of individual goodwill, but because it was deliberately held collectively. There is a commitment to mobilise the commonwealth of the city to serve the most disadvantaged young people and their families. This is where culture becomes critical: when systems, partnerships and professional norms are aligned, inclusive practice no longer depends on individual goodwill.
Reframing outcomes and success
A defining feature of this Leeds-based leadership stance has been a refusal to let narrow, short-term performance measures become the sole definition of success – a willingness to exercise ‘active agency’ and move beyond pragmatic compliance with externally imposed accountability measures (Greany, 2024). Leadership responsibility has been framed instead around individual life chances: skills for adulthood, pathways into employment and whether young people are flourishing years after leaving school. A focus on NEET (not in education, employment or training) status and seeking outcomes for young people at 25 is not rhetorical; it reflects a moral commitment to education as preparation for life and not just examination.
This reframing challenges the idea that care-led leadership distracts from outcomes. Experience in Leeds suggests the opposite: when barriers to learning are addressed properly, including attendance, safety, wellbeing and family context, outcomes improve across the spectrum. A commitment to high challenge and high support, where needs are understood, alongside a willingness to act as an anchor institution for community development, can deliver sustainable education and care. From this perspective, it is unfortunate when addressing barriers beyond school is viewed as a distraction from improving outcomes. Our experience suggests that, in practice, when those barriers are addressed, young people and their communities are better able to engage, participate and flourish.
The cost of moral leadership
Leading with care within tightly performative systems carries real personal and professional cost. Remaining inclusive by keeping children on roll, refusing to off-roll or permanently exclude and accepting implications for attendance data can work against inspection narratives and headline measures. In such moments, leadership stops being technical and becomes ethical. These moments often expose a gap between what a system says that it values and what it rewards in practice. It requires a commitment to value-aligned practice, and a rejection of value-misaligned practice that will improve whole-school outcomes but increase the vulnerability of individual children and their families.
This is where the Sustainable School Leadership report’s emphasis on the intense and constant pressure leaders experience must be heard (Greany et al., 2026). It highlights the fear in the system. Sustainability depends on refusing to let fear become the organising principle of leadership. Care here is not soft or sentimental; it is disciplined, risky and demanding. It becomes sustainable when leaders are not forced to absorb that risk alone but can rely on shared purpose and collective responsibility.
What is now being recognised – and what must endure
There is a strong sense in the Sustainable School Leadership report (Greany et al., 2026) that the system must recognise what has long sustained ethical leadership. The danger is not that care will disappear, but that it will be rediscovered without sufficient attention to the conditions that made it possible. Trust, autonomy, place-based collaboration and shared responsibility were not incidental; they were foundational, necessary enablers for education and care.
The Sustainable School Leadership report (Greany et al., 2026) names an ethic of education and care with clarity and authority. The task now is to protect and invest in the moral and relational infrastructure that allows that ethic to live. 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.
