Inclusion, Diversity and Leadership: Perspectives, Possibilities and Contradictions

Drawing on research from a longitudinal case study of a large urban secondary school, this article examines senior leadership of and in a school struggling to be inclusive. The analysis focuses on the effect of senior leadership on: the ways in which inclusion is conceptualized and practised in this school, in particular by teachers; student intake profiles and diversity; teacher motivation and educational outcomes. The study illustrates how senior leaders are reconciling their commitment to moral values of inclusion and diversity to tackle disadvantage and underachievement, with the dominance of the Standards Agenda and associated pressures of short-term performance targets; the study also offers significant insights into the ways in which leadership conceptualizes and operationalizes contested concepts of inclusion and diversity. The article argues that simplistic distinctions between, for example, moral leadership, curriculum leadership, distributed leadership and other theories of leadership mask the multidimensional nature of leadership.