Special Issue "Educational Leadership for/as Inclusion, Diversity and Equality"

Dear Colleagues,

Across global and local contexts, education systems and stakeholders are at a crossroads as they experience the opportunities and barriers when developing inclusive school environments in response to growing student diversity. Internationally, governments have committed to rethinking their education systems—some more radically than others—in consideration of their commitments under international conventions, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Within this broad context of (inter)national policy and practice commitments to inclusion and growing student diversity, tensions and debates exist as to how system and school leaders can best support students and educators across both mainstream and special education settings to realise these educational aims.

International research has sought to understand the key factors influencing inclusive education, including the reform of policy contexts, stakeholder consultation, system and school structures, both individual and collaborative teacher development and consideration of broader, more inclusive student outcomes. There has been comparably less emphasis to date, however, on the importance and role of educational leadership in influencing the extent of and success to which inclusion and diversity educational aims are enacted today at systems and school levels.

This Special Issue responds to this gap in the research by collating work on the role of educational leadership in shaping practices in inclusive education, broadly conceived.

This Special Issue will bring together global researchers into the role system and school leaders, including school principals, deputies and assistant principals, middle and teacher leaders, and other relevant actors in creating inclusive school communities. By presenting this research, the editors of this Special Issue seek to highlight the critical importance of inclusive leadership, illuminating contemporary challenges and promising practices in the creation of inclusive education systems and school communities. We particularly welcome research that embraces both global imperatives in inclusive education and local contextual relevance, distilling the interplay of these sometimes complementary and other times competing forces.

We invite researchers to submit original research articles and reviews to this Special Issue. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research studies (including longitudinal studies) of innovative approaches and practices in educational leadership with regard to inclusive education and the effectiveness and/ or impact and/ or improvement of policies.
• Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research studies (including longitudinal studies) on the impact of educational leadership on inclusive practices in schools from the perspectives of students, parents/ caregivers and teaching/ other school staff.
• Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research studies (including longitudinal studies) on the policies, practices and/ or processes involved in building inclusive professional capacities, cultures and communities in schools.
• Conceptual/ theoretical manuscripts focused on educational leadership and inclusion. Such manuscripts might engage or extend to other related concepts, such as belonging, care, culturally-responsive approaches, diversity, (in)equity and/ or social (in)justice.
• Reviews of research focused on how inclusive leadership (and its impact) is shaped by the cultural, national and/ or organisational context(s) of schools.
• Comparative studies seeking to compare and contrast different approaches to inclusive educational leadership.
• Studies on inclusive education from a rights-based perspective within the context of educational leadership.

Dr. Joanne Banks
Dr. Gavin Murphy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• leadership
• inclusion
• student diversity
• equality