TOBY GREANY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY, UK
PAT THOMSON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, UK
Introduction
Definitions of leadership are not singular or fixed; they evolve in line with wider societal shifts and organisational requirements. Nevertheless, at any point in time, there is a dominant leadership discourse that shapes and is shaped by research, policy and practice (Parry and Bryman, 2006). Trait theory was dominant up to the 1940s, when leaders were seen to have physical traits and abilities that distinguished them from non-leaders. The following decades saw a focus on behaviours and a recognition that context matters in leadership. More recently, the emphasis on leaders as managers of meaning, through sensemaking and the establishment of shared vision and values, moves away from heroic, individualised models, recognising that processes of influence are invariably shared, interacting with issues of power, agency and relational trust (Pillans, 2015; Pendleton and Furnham, 2012).
Research into educational leadership has seen similar shifts and debates, but the consensus is that successful school leadership combines transformational (vision and values), instructional/learning-centred (improving the quality of teaching and learning) and distributed (collective efficacy) approaches (Robinson and Gray, 2019; Liebowitz and Porter, 2019; Gumus et al., 2018; Hitt and Tucker, 2016). This ‘global consensus’ shapes key leadership frameworks, such as national headteacher standards, training programmes and qualifications, appointments, appraisals and accountability.
Our purpose in this article is not to review or critique the existing evidence base on successful school leadership, but to ask whether the global consensus holds true at a time when the needs of children, families and wider societies are changing rapidly. Across the UK and beyond, children are directly and indirectly impacted by challenges that include: the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; prolonged austerity; stagnant wages and rising levels of inequality; increased social tensions; and a rise in populist politics (Freedman, 2025). Meanwhile, wider societal changes – including the rise of AI – continue to reshape children’s lives. As a result, schools are grappling with multiple overlapping issues, from rising mental health referrals (MIND, 2025) and increased rates of special educational needs (Ydesen and Daniels, 2024), to worrying rates of persistent absence and truancy (DfEDepartment for Education - a ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England, 2025).
Our recent study of Sustainable School Leadership across the UK (Greany et al., 2026) found sharp discrepancies between the global consensus on successful school leadership and the daily reality of leading schools. The mixed-methods study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and focused on England, Scotland and Northern Ireland; it included seven place-based case studies, a UK-wide survey of leaders (n=1623) and an analysis of workforce data in each nation.
We found that school leaders struggle to find time to focus on instructional leadership due to a growing need to provide care. Leaders refer to this care work in different ways, including 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 learning needs, mental health, wellbeing, safeguarding, behaviour and attendance. The nature and extent of care needs differ among schools, reflecting the different communities that they serve. Leaders commonly describe this care work as physically and emotionally exhausting, highlighting difficulties, tensions and ethical dilemmas coupled with lack of support.
Drawing on feminist care theories, particularly the work of Tronto and Fisher (1990), we argue that care work should not be seen as a distraction from the ‘core’ work of leaders and schools, but as an essential and integrated feature of educational leadership.
We argue that while schools are, first and foremost, educational environments, an ‘ethic of education and care’ reflects the ways in which leaders work to ensure that all students and staff can flourish. The centrality of these issues has not been widely recognised and does not generally feature in official leadership preparation programmes, school improvement initiatives or assessments of school quality and performance. This means that, too often, leaders do not feel well equipped to provide and sustain care.
Conceptualising an ethic of education and care
Tronto and Fisher (1990, p. 40) define care as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’. However, while societies depend on care work, they simultaneously devalue it and make it invisible, reflecting wider forms of gendered and intersectional disadvantage.
Noddings (2012) considered the implications of feminist care ethics for education, suggesting that when students feel cared for, they become more engaged; learning emerges through relationships of attentiveness, responsiveness and shared responsibility, rather than the transmission of standardised content.
Wider research supports this argument. When students feel cared for, they are more willing to take intellectual risks, make mistakes and engage deeply with challenging material (Guo et al., 2025). Students who feel seen, valued and supported by their teachers will be more likely to persist through difficulties, ask questions when confused and participate actively in their education (Jopling and Zimmermann, 2023). Recent work on culturally responsive pedagogies (Caingcoy, 2023) and trauma-informed approaches (Parker et al., 2022) suggests that this is particularly crucial for students who have experienced trauma or whose cultural backgrounds differ from the dominant school culture.
Findings
Interviews with school leaders (n=132) identified a widespread view that the needs of children have changed, widened and become more complex in recent years – and that caring for these needs is taking up more time and (emotional) energy. Meanwhile, wider forms of support, such as specialist health and social/welfare services, have reduced: time and again we heard: ‘everything rolls downhill to schools’.
Across the interviews, common issues were seen to be driving the need to spend more time and energy on care:
- increasing levels of poverty, with many children and families requiring additional support with basic needs
- growth in special/additional needs, together with reduced support
- safeguarding and child protection issues, often requiring complex multi-agency responses
- behaviour and attendance challenges
- COVID-19-related school readiness
- mental health and resilience – of staff and students
- complaints, disputes and parental relations
- community cohesion.
While schools serving the most deprived communities commonly face higher demand for care, it is striking that leaders in all types of schools report increasing – and increasingly complex – demands.
The corollary of leaders spending more time on care was that they were struggling to find time for instructional leadership. In the survey, we asked how much time leaders across England, Northern Ireland and Scotland spent in a typical week on a list of activities. Across all three nations, ‘General administration’ followed by ‘Student attendance, behaviour and wellbeing’ (which maps most closely to issues of care) were the top two most time-consuming categories. Leaders in all three systems are spending relatively less time on ‘Leading teaching, learning and curriculum’ – i.e. the core of instructional leadership – than on care.
Different leaders make different choices about how far to embrace the need for care – influenced by wider policies and expectations as well as the resources available. At one end of the spectrum, we visited a secondary headteacher in a deprived area of a Scottish city, who described her school as ‘almost a community hub’, providing access to a range of support services and organisations, including family liaison workers, youth workers and financial inclusion support officers. At the other end of this spectrum, a minority of leaders in all three nations chose to prioritise the instructional and school improvement aspects of their role, and to actively resist what one headteacher described as ‘doing… the job of social work, the job of health’. These leaders were not uncaring but appeared more able to circumscribe their educational focus and role.
More often, leaders were trying to encompass both education and care, but this rarely felt simple or seamless. At root, the rationale was that if a child is hungry, hasn’t slept, is not attending school or is dysregulated, then they cannot learn. Providing care was a human and pragmatic response to need.
Some interviewees articulated why and how care had become more central to their work in recent years – for example, using the language of trauma-informed or relational practice. More commonly, leaders felt pulled in all directions, experiencing the attempt to encompass education and care together as frustrating, draining and unsustainable. One indication of this was in the survey, where the majority of headteachers in each nation (56–65 per cent) described themselves as either ‘surviving’ or ‘sinking’.
Discussion
The evidence from the research is clear that care is an integral feature of school leadership today, but in ways that are variable, often contentious, and intensely challenging. However, the fact that schools provide care does not make it axiomatic that all school leadership reflects an ‘ethic of care’ in the sense outlined here. Equally, care has not displaced leaders’ focus on educational issues: our interviewees talked at length about curriculum, teaching, learning, pupil progress, professional development and school improvement.
Adopting an ethic of education and care raises practical as well as philosophical questions, such as how to structure and facilitate the development of meaningful relationships at scale, alongside more fundamental challenges around the kinds of organisational cultures required to sustain genuine caring relationships between leaders, staff and students.
