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Schools are placed in ‘special measures’ in England if they are deemed to be under performing by failing to provide their pupils with an acceptable standard of education. This chapter explores one female headteacher’s emotional experiences as she coped in difficult circumstances during an intense period of scrutiny as she led her staff towards school improvement and out of special measures. The headteacher regulated and utilised her emotions intelligently to deliberately enhance the performance of others at work and in doing so she addressed and changed the localised culture of the school. Data are drawn from a series of interviews with the headteacher and her self-reported responses to an ‘EQ Map’ (Cooper & Sawaf, 1997). Using the EQ Map as the conceptual framework, findings show a sense of work satisfaction emerged as a result of tackling challenging situations. An increased awareness of one’s emotions led to being mindful regarding the emotional state of others, as the headteacher sought opportunities to bring about school improvement and address challenges presented by being placed in special measures. A distinctive list of 21 key features of emotional management emerged from the scales of the EQ Map capturing a model in relation to coping under internal and external pressures.

The development and role of trust in school performance has been built primarily on educational research in the United States. The problem is that the resulting theory of trust may not accurately reflect the development and role of trust in schools in other global contexts. Researchers broadly agree that the implications of trust dynamics filter into every segment of the school's organization. However, trust is often either oversimplified or made to seem overly complex, whereas reality is likely somewhere in the middle and depends largely on specific national and regional circumstances. The resulting problem for school administrators globally is a lack of role clarity regarding their leadership responsibilities related to trust and school performance.

Currently, leadership is a recurring theme in the field of education. There is also a number of research that examined school leadership from different perspectives. Some of these studies pay greater attention on school leadership policies while others focused on the key role of school leadership. Leadership is, as will be shown in this chapter, key to developing school practices that support schools to become effective organizations. Although, researchers usually defined leadership according to their individual perspectives and the aspects of the phenomenon which is of interest to them, some perspectives have been more influential than others. In this sense, these authors see leadership as a process which encourages staff at variety of levels take on leadership role. This approach of leadership not only synthesizes distributed model but also provides an opportunity to capture how leaders encourage and manage school improvement in practice. With this mind, this chapter examines the nature of leadership in one school in the UK to see whether it facilitates distribution of leadership. The data was collected using semi-structured qualitative interview with the headteacher of the school. The data collected was analyzed by reading the interview transcript many times, highlighting what was considered important. From the headteacher’s responses, recurring school practices – collaboration, shared leadership, learning culture, school connection with communities, and school response to SEN children – emerged. However, these findings should be considered with caution because the study was carried out in one school. A reasonable number of schools would have possibly provided more corroborated evidence. However, the findings can possibly further thinking in other schools with similar situations.

In England, systematic school self-evaluation (SSE) began as model for school improvement. However, since 2000, and in the context of increasing moves toward ‘new public management’, it has become a policy priority for the Government which is inextricably linked to the inspection regime and risks becoming more closely associated with accountability than improvement. Such policies can, paradoxically, compromise school improvement (Fuhrman, 1993). This chapter will explore ways in which teachers and school leaders have attempted to engage in school self-evaluation in ways that allow them to maintain control of the evaluation agenda and retain the focus on improvement and pupils’ learning. It illustrates attempts by schools to engage with and reduce the negative side-effects of target-driven policies and the drive towards competition between schools. In particular, it will consider the benefits and challenges of inter-school collaboration through networking. It should certainly not be read as an endorsement of current policy developments in England and does not seek, as other chapters do in this volume, to address the key question of what kind of society we want? It offers a pragmatic exploration of some schools’ creative responses to the context in which they currently operate aimed at being more conducive to public rather than private good, that is meeting the needs of the ‘knowledge society’ as opposed to the ‘knowledge economy’ (Hargreaves, 2003).