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.
