Critical Education Leadership and Policy (CELP)

Critical Education Leadership and Policy (CELP) is a Research and Scholarship Group located in the Manchester Institute of Education. CELP’s networks and scope are international, with collaborators and projects located in institutions and sites ranging from Australia, through North and South America, to Europe and China.

CELP locates its methodologies in the social sciences, drawing especially on policy scholarship and on sociological and political-science disciplinary resources. We use and develop a wide range of methods, social theories and conceptual frameworks in order to illuminate and problematise what it means to “do” education leadership and to “be” education leaders. Our critical approach means that we foreground the relationship between the wider context and leaders’ practices and identities in our empirical and conceptual contributions. This context includes the policy, ideological, historical, economic, political and cultural.

We are particularly interested in confronting and having an impact on the significant challenges that public services education continues to face around the world. These challenges may be understood as elements of a reform agenda that seeks to privatise, de-politicise and de-democratise education as a common good. Our values for this work are therefore located in public education and social justice in compulsory and post-compulsory education. These values influence our concern with the discourses and power relationships in which students, professionals and communities are located, and the ways in which advantage and disadvantage structure agency in policy design through to leaders’ practice and the student experience.

Our recent research has made contributions to the following areas:

1. The privatisation of education nationally and globally (eg 1, 2, 3 and 4)
2. Education and its leadership as a public good (eg 1, and 2)
3. Privatising and corporatising education leadership (eg 1, 2 and 3)
4. School leaders’ roles, practices and identities (eg 1, 2, 3 and 4,)
5. Theorising education leadership (eg 1 and 2)
6. Collaborations between schools (eg 1 and 2)
7. System leadership (eg 1)
8. Education leadership and gender (eg 1)
9. Mapping the field of educational leadership research (eg 1 and 2)

Follow us on Twitter for updates at @celp_uom