Purpose: During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.Design/methodology/approach: The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.Findings: The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.Originality/value: This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

The global pandemic of 2020 has changed the ways that university academics do their work and manage their time, including teaching, engaging with graduate students, conducting research, and working with colleagues. The mode of delivery of higher education has substantially moved to the digital, and workspaces have shifted to home. Having to work from home has placed unique demands on academics, including adapting to working entirely on ascreen and adjusting their work/life balance. Despite much anecdotal evidence that the well-being of academics is being adversely affected during this global pandemic, there is currently little published research about this issue. As five academics who work in an education faculty at an Australian university, we present our collaborative autoethnographic reflections of this time. We share these experiences of being academics in 2020 through curated narrative vignettes, with analysis of the meaning of these vignettes. Employing aphenomenological approach, we craft understandings of our experiences and explore the immediate world of these experiences, constituted in our practices as academics and our personal lives in this challenging time of unexpected change. We note the phenomenon of feeling unsettled, distracted, overwhelmed and lacking focus, and being conflicted between various roles.

Despite growing scholarly interest in student voice and leadership over the past two decades, both terms continue to be used with little consensus about their meaning. They are also often evoked without much clarity or agreement as to how they should be enabled or enacted, for what purposes they should be fostered, or what conditions are necessary for them to take place. This article asks: ‘what are student voice and leadership, and how can they best be fostered in schools to enable disengaged or marginalized students?’ Drawing on the evaluation of a successful Indigenous leadership program in Australia, which works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, this discussion unpacks certain constituent parts of student voice and leadership, and explores how they can successfully be strengthened through an educational program, and the challenges arising at the interface of the program and school life.

Reframing Continuous School Improvement in Australian Schools: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9970-0.ch006: There is a significant lack of documented research on Australian school improvement contextualised within business improvement model settings. This is the

Increased school autonomy and a greater focus on achieving school effectiveness and improvement has made it essential to reconsider the role of school leaders (OECD 2009, Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results from TALIS. Paris: OECD Publishing). This recommends that leadership development in this rapidly changing world deserves significant consideration compared to the past. With the increasing interest entrusted to school leadership, this article reports on how school leaders are currently prepared by the higher education programmes offered in two out of three universities in Fiji. Through an extensive literature review as well as through programme documents and policy reviews, this article focuses on current educational leadership post-graduate courses offered at these Fijian universities and highlight areas of strengths as well as suggests recommendations for improvement that are in line with identified needs for effective principal preparation in a Fijian context with key connections made to the larger South Pacific region.