How school leaders navigate neoliberal education reform: A scoping review

Abstract

The aim with this scoping review is to provide an overview of research on school leaders’ responses to neoliberal education reform. The review offers insights into how macro-level policies translate into micro-level experiences. By mapping existing studies on school leaders’ lived experiences under neoliberal reforms, it provides valuable knowledge for policymakers, educational leaders, and researchers seeking to navigate and influence these ongoing transformations. This article employs a resistance theory perspective. I identified 21 articles that met all the inclusion criteria through the search. I undertook both a descriptive and a content analysis. The latter considers how school leaders navigate the reforms, and how they resisted them. The results show that resistance was manifested in terms such as speaking one’s mind, irony, simulation and compliance. These studies exemplify some of the problems associated with the ‘new professionalism’ fashioned by educational policy seeking to steer the work of schools in a competitive school marketplace. Overall, the review underscores the transformative nature of neoliberal reforms on education and the imperative for using resistance and power theories to both help shed light on the sometimes soul- altering changes these initiatives can achieve and point to possible counter-discourse and counter-conduct.