A critical approach to researching social justice and school leadership in England

This article investigates how school leaders in England understand and describe social justice in terms of their own lived lives. By this we mean how they understand equity issues by recognizing the ways in which they themselves have experienced inclusion or exclusion in their lives. We then go on to examine how this way of knowing shapes the way school leaders want to operationalize social justice in their schools. The research is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 school leaders. The empirical evidence was read through Cribb and Gewirtz' (2003) conceptual framework of social justice. Theorizing in this way revealed that handling challenging professional issues, such as the national curriculum, enabled school leaders to work for cultural justice, distributive justice, and associational justice in their school communities. It is argued such activity impacts on dimensions of quality and performance in working for change in educational institutions. © 2008 SAGE Publications.