Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Today in the context of the European Union, educational leadership is considered the key to change and innovation in building effective and successful schools. While it is generally agreed that we all want to build a good school, the problem is that it is easy to think and propose in education; the difficult thing is to implement and sustain policies in such diverse contexts. In the European Union, this issue is particularly relevant, as in this context, there is a strong tendency to build a European education agenda through regulatory mechanisms and instruments called “soft laws.” But how do these political ideas translate into particular national contexts? Our proposal is to present an analysis of the process of construction of educational policy in the context of the European Union, and confront these guidelines with the ideas of educational leadership supported by the main theoretical and conceptual contributions. Finally, we present the case of Portugal, and the way it has politically developed educational leadership, to point out some evidence of constraints to the practice and implementation of these policies.