Place, Belonging and School Leadership

Kathryn Riley is here extending what is an increasingly urgent debate about school, both as a place of belonging and as a site of struggle. In the neo-liberal education marketplace, more and more schools are adopting measures, including police in corridors and classrooms, school exclusion and even the banning of parents, to win compliance with school values and ethos by coercion and to operate a regime with a primary focus on punishment and varying degrees of institutional bullying of students. Students have a capacity to do horrible things to one another and to dent their peers confidence and sense of safety and wellbeing, especially through their use of social media and threats of violence in and out of school. Kathryn Riley underscores the importance of distributing leadership to the level of students themselves and delivering an essential part of their educational entitlement, i.e., guidance and support for each student in embracing their personal responsibility to act in a manner that helps to make the school a place where all can feel they belong, are valued and can learn and teach in safety and comfort. * Gus John, Visiting Professor, Coventry University, UK * Kathryn Riley's passion and scholarship are powerfully demonstrated throughout her new book. Bringing her life-long commitment to making the world a better place for young people, she creates an inspirational and universally applicable approach to school improvement, richly illustrated, theoretically robust, and eminently practical. * Helen Wildy, Professor of Education, The University of Western Australia, Australia *

Kathryn Riley is Professor of Urban Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK, and Co-Director of The Art of Possibilities (www.theartofpossibilities.org.uk).

Foreword, Karen Seashore Louis, University of Minnesota, USA Prologue About the Author Acknowledgements Part I: Place and Belonging in our Volatile World 1. Putting Belonging into the Frame 2. A World in the Classroom Part II: Framing the Study: School - A Place Where I Belong? 3. Themes Concepts and Agency 4. Designing the Study Part III: Research in Action 5. How School Leaders See It 6. Teacher-Researchers 7. Student-Researchers Part IV: Leading Research to Make a Difference 8. A Step-change in Thinking 9. A New Way of Belonging? Appendix I: Further Research Material Appendix II: Materials for Student-researchers Appendix III: Videos Appendix IV: A Framework for an Intervention Strategy References Index