Leadership, Organisation and the Sustainability of Teacher Work: Towards a Processual View of Education

There is clear evidence that teacher work is increasingly unsustainable, leading to an impact on health and well-being, and sector-wide and international challenges such as teacher retention and recruitment. Leadership, Organisation and the Sustainability of Teacher Work focuses on the intersections between educational leadership, organisational processes, well-being and how these relate to concerns regarding teacher work, workload and the sustainability of the profession.

Amidst the performative pressures on teachers, the authors explain that central to all these issues is the process of leadership and its embedded nature within organisations. Leaders play an important role in developing positive workplace environments in which teachers can thrive, but their work is part of a wider flow of activities which constitute the essential nature of organisations and hence teacher work. By advocating a view of leadership, organisation and teacher work as complex, intertwined tangles of processes, this book begins to sketch out an alternative perspective for understanding educational organisations and how the work of teachers might be made sustainable.

Leadership, Organisation and the Sustainability of Teacher Work argues for the need to understand leaders and leadership as part of a wider network of processes and relationships so as to draw out the complexity of the work involved for all within educational organisations. Drawing on organisational sciences, sociology, psychology and education research, it is offered for reflection and challenge to scholars in those fields interested in a sustainable future for the teaching profession.