Challenges and opportunities for culturally responsive leadership in schools: evidence from four European countries

Whether voluntary or enforced, increasing patterns of migration have significantly impacted schools by making them linguistically, culturally, religiously and ethnically more diverse than ever before. This increasing diversity requires school leaders to put in place mechanisms to ensure equity of participation for migration background students. Dimmock and Walker (2005) believe that school leaders need to play a vital role in promoting and sustaining an environment that embraces diversity and, by association, contributes to solving the macro problems of society. To accomplish this emerging role, there is a need for ‘new approaches to educational leadership in which leaders exhibit culturally responsive organisational practices, behaviours and competencies’ (Madhlangobe and Gordon, 2012: p. 177). This is all well and good in theory, but the current and historical context in which school leaders operate, together with the training and supports that are provided, influences, to a significant extent, how culturally responsive leadership can operate in practice. This study, which is part of a European Commission Erasmus+ funded project entitled Supporting Culturally Responsive Leadership and Evaluation in Schools (CReLES), examines these assumptions by mapping out the factors and actors that can hinder and facilitate the flourishing of such practices in four European countries, Austria, Ireland, Russia and Spain