Promoting Equity in Schools : Collaboration, Inquiry and Ethical Leadership

This book explores how evidence from different perspectives can act as a catalyst for change that promotes learning and equity in schools. Drawing on action research carried out within schools in Queensland, Australia, where equity is a long-standing and seemingly intractable challenge, it illustrates how evidence from multiple perspectives can be used to reform existing practices and develop new approaches. Building on ideas from international research evidence, this book highlights how school systems throughout the developed world can harness untapped potential to break the link between disadvantage and educational failure.

Around the world, countries are searching for ways of making their schools more effective for all children and young people. This book offers a new way of thinking about how to address this challenge. It sees improvement as requiring a collective effort that involves contributions from all members of a school community. Crucial to this is the idea of ethical leadership.

Promoting Equity in Schools is written by a team of academic researchers who had a most unusual opportunity to work with a network of schools over three years, experimenting to find more effective ways of including hard-to-reach learners. Bringing together practitioner knowledge and ideas from research carried out from a variety of perspectives, the authors provide rich accounts of what happened when the schools attempted to become more inclusive and fairer. In so doing, they throw light on the challenges this presents for school leaders.

The accounts presented in the book are located in Queensland, Australia, where the school system faces significant difficulties in relation to equity that resonate with similar difficulties around the world. These difficulties relate to policies that emphasise high-stakes testing and school choice, which tend to promote increased segregation, to the particular disadvantage of young people from low-income and minority backgrounds. The arguments presented suggest that even where worrying policies are in place, schools with leadership driven by a commitment to equity can still find space to develop more equitable ways of working.