Leadership for inclusion: what can you do?

This course will help you to develop your understanding of how to promote and support learning for all, within classrooms with a diverse student and staff population. It will encourage you to embrace your own capacity to lead at any level of an organisation. You will explore the tensions around collective responses and individualised challenges, consider these alongside the need to embrace risk and recognise the opportunities that arise from everyday uncertainty. By engaging with these inclusive principles, you will be invited to seek out ways in which you can support others and so enhance collective learning opportunities.

This course is part of a suite of 4, which seek to provide students with a better understanding of inclusion and leadership in schools, in particular: leading in an inclusive way (inclusive leadership) and playing a leading role in inclusive contexts (leadership for inclusion). The material will build upon the skills and experiences students already have, so that through their own expectations and understandings of practice they can reflect on personal and institutional responses to enacting leadership that support the involvement of all. Recognising the calls for collaboration and ongoing development of practice, students will be supported to explore the experiences of practitioners, managers and learners working alongside others and how they might develop their own capacity in this regard. The course will look towards practical approaches which place relationships at the heart of the leadership process, encouraging all of us to be confident, successful, responsible and effective within the learning situation, not only for ourselves but as advocates and supporters for each other.

If you are interested in this course, you might be interested in the Open University Inclusive Practice Leadership and Management Masters pathways.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

Understand a range of perspectives on the nature of educational leadership

Engage more positively with collective learning opportunities and individualised challenges

Reflect upon the unfinished nature of inclusion

Recognise how anyone can effect change within an educational institution.