MIKE COLLINS, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, UK
Introduction
The focus of this article is to explore the idea of ‘place’ in understanding how schools and leaders experience and respond to the challenges of the rapidly changing and uncertain times we are living through.
Schools are embedded in society and local communities, so are directly affected when changes impact students and their families. Globally, there have been economic crises deepened by multiple conflicts with profound wider effects; the continuing after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are pervasive and the global climate crisis frames all these challenges. French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin coined the term ‘polycrisis’ to describe such separate – but interacting – entangled, intractable crises (Morin and Kern, 1993).
Exactly how these trends impact different nations and play out at a more local level, interacting with individual histories, is varied and indirect. In the UK, there have been, for example, political upheavals such as Brexit; substantial direct migration as a result of worldwide conflict and political uncertainty; prolonged economic challenges following the 2008 financial crash; and a rise of populist politics (Freedman, 2025).
A similar point can be made about specific challenges facing schools. Examples of common challenges are the increasing numbers of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and the increasing complexity of their needs (Ainscow, 2020), and the continuing trend of students’ poor attendance at school, which is a government priority (DfEDepartment for Education - a ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England, 2026). These common challenges that schools and leaders in the UK face are expressed here in general terms, but they are not experienced in the same way in every locality and every school.
Considering the nature of place helps us to understand how differences arise across schools and what this means for leadership. In this article, I outline a way of thinking about place before drawing on the research and findings from our study of Sustainable School Leadership across the UK (Greany et al., 2026) to illustrate these ideas.
Conceptualising ‘place’
When it comes to leadership, context matters. In their synthesis of research on successful school leaders, Leithwood et al. (2008) proposed that all successful school leaders ‘apply contextually sensitive combinations of the basic leadership practices’ (p. 31). Here, context is characterised by common features that can be measured and differences observed: pupils’ individual characteristics, such as gender, first language and access to free school meals; community characteristics, often expressed in terms of indices of multiple deprivation; and geographic location, such as urban or rural (Hallinger et al., 2010). This article argues not that these features of context are not important, but that the idea of place moves beyond describing context in terms of variables and distinguishing qualities, and challenges the idea that leaders are simply adapting standardised practices to context.
Place is conceptualised as including geography and location, but also how people experience it through relationships with each other and in interaction with their environment. Places are material locations with unique geographical features that play an important part in social life, as well as being homes to usually multiple communities, which are networked and constantly evolving; members of those communities attach meaning and significance to places, sustaining social histories and stories. Places are connected at different scales, shaped by the global and national forces described earlier. This way of thinking about place draws on the work of contemporary thinkers and geographers (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1999) and understands place not as a neutral ‘stage’ or a container in which we act, but as being actively created and produced by the stories of communities that unfold over time. Massey (2005) described this development over time as ‘a constellation of trajectories’ (p. 151), emphasising the different ways in which groups and communities experience place.
One of the implications of this conceptualisation of place for schools and leadership is that multiple – sometimes competing – ideas of what schools should be and what they should do meet in a school. Leaders must navigate the tensions arising from different understandings and expectations of their schools. A second implication is that place, as the product of such complex interactions, is pivotal in shaping what a leader does and who might be a leader in that place.
Research and findings
Our research into Sustainable School Leadership (Greany et al., 2026) sought to explore how school leaders were recruited, trained and retained across the UK, and how approaches addressed individual, local and systemic needs for the future; we were interested in the sustainability of leadership, as well as leadership for sustainability. Central to the evidence that we collected in the three-year, mixed-methods study were seven locality case studies, three of which were in England.
In each locality, we interviewed local leaders (e.g. local authority (LA) or multi-academy trustAbbreviated to MAT, a group of schools working in collaboration, governed by a single set of members and directors leaders) and employers (e.g. chair of governors) and visited a locally representative spread of primary and secondary schools, where we interviewed potential or serving heads. Across the seven localities, we conducted 111 interviews with 132 participants.
The case studies illustrate several ways in which place is central to understanding how leadership is enacted. One example is taken from the locality ‘England Shire’. Hugo and Robyn were headteachers of schools in Shire LA that, based on contextual characteristics, looked very similar (see Table 1). Pseudonyms have been used for names and localities.
Table 1: Comparing headships
| Headteacher – Hugo | Headteacher – Robyn |
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Although their contexts look nearly identical, Hugo and Robyn’s experiences of headship were sharply contrasting.
Robyn had been appointed a decade earlier, following the departure of the previous head during an investigation into financial misconduct. As a result, she described the school as ‘a toxic, toxic environment’. She characterised the local community as quite isolated and close-knit, with a high proportion of reasonably affluent, self-employed families working in trades. There had been racist incidents in the school that she had needed to challenge. These issues meant that she had felt ‘ostracised in the community’ and had needed to spend many years rebuilding trust in the community and the reputation of the school: ‘that’s all I’ve been doing for the last 10 years’.
Hugo too talked of engaging with the school’s dispersed community: ‘organisations, groups, individuals, business because we believe a community really brings up a child’. His experience, however, had been different and had grown from developing the school’s building: ‘making use of local materials, local skills and crafts and building technologies seems to fit… acknowledging where we live’. The result, over a period of many years, was a school woven into the life of a community in multiple ways and at various levels. He summed it up by saying: ‘I love the diversityThe recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, physical ability, religious beliefs and other differences [of the job], and I love teaching and I love being part of the community.’
Hugo and Robyn’s experiences reveal that the idea of place extends far beyond the similar characteristics defining their context. That both schools were small and in rural locations was important, but their experiences were differentiated by the nature of relationships with the school, the way the communities’ identities had evolved (influenced by geography and patterns of employment) and how the two leaders responded to their situation. For example, Hugo’s gradual transformation of the school building, working with local tradespeople over more than a decade, can be understood as contributing to ‘place-making’. Although Robyn and Hugo may have articulated similar general goals for their schools, they were very different headteachers, formed in large part by the places in which they were leading.
Place also operates at different scales. In the final report of the Sustainable School Leadership project (Greany et al., 2026), we compare how the development of professional identities is shaped by differences in two localities (Scotland City and Scotland Rural-Coast). In City, the dense, compressed nature of social interactions meant that the deliberate actions of the LA to cultivate a city-wide commitment to ‘social justice and nurture’ were reflected in how headteachers thought about their roles and the choices they made. Bonnie, a headteacher who had 30 years’ experience in City, said: ‘it’s very hard to walk away because of that commitment to the young people of City’. In Rural-Coast, there was not a cohesive locality-wide idea of what being a headteacher meant. Geography and difficulty of travel meant that place was dispersed. Orla observed: ‘there doesn’t feel like a Rural-Coast-ness, because it’s like little pockets of different things’. In Rural-Coast, identities became much more focused on clusters of more localised communities, often experienced as richly rewarding. Ethan, a headteacher of a secondary school in a rural town, said: ‘I feel very, very privileged to have the position I do. And, you know, people do respect you in the community’.
Discussion and conclusion
The concept of place is rich and multi-dimensional, extending far beyond the idea of context. Place actively produces or shapes the type of leadership required, and place can, in turn, be shaped and changed by that leadership. This does not mean that the standard expectations of a headteacher, such as focusing on instructional leadership and setting the direction of a school’s development, are not relevant. It does mean that the way that those practices are enacted is shaped by place, and that other practices leaders find necessary may not be part of the ‘basic practices’ identified by Leithwood et al. (2008). This suggests that one size does not fit all in terms of the practices demanded of headteachers, the nature of their roles, and the qualities and capabilities required of them. Instead, a ‘local solutions mindset’ is required.
The implications of a local solutions mindset are significant – for example, in preparing potential leaders for headship roles, supporting experienced heads and designing policies. Standardised frameworks for practice or intended outcomes of policies may be helpful in setting out ambitions and working for equity. But a local solutions mindset challenges us to allow for and capitalise on the uniqueness of place. Leaders should recognise how place shapes their roles by considering real cases, and understand that standardised frameworks may be insufficient, and that priorities and ways of doing things may vary from locality to locality. Thinking about place in this way can be a powerful tool for leaders reflecting on and making sense of the challenges they face.
