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Despite the role pedagogical leadership plays in quality early childhood education and care services, limited research to date has explored the appointment and enactment of educational leaders in Australia. This qualitative study explored the role and influence of two educational leaders in a highquality rated service. Findings revealed that these educational leaders' exercising of distributed and transformational leadership enabled ongoing quality improvement. Appointing the 'right' person; a supportive, effective and cohesive team; the whole-of centre valuing of the educational leaders and their role; investment of resources; and professional autonomy, were identified as key enablers of quality education across the service. As the first study to investigate the educational leader role in an 'excellent'-rated service in Australia, this study highlights that the effectiveness of an EL is dependent on the person in the EL role and the context in which they are working. Implications for policy and service providers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the views of 72 Australian middle school students from 12 metropolitan schools across six states and territories as to their understanding of leadership. Initially, literature is reviewed regarding the developments in middle-years education and theories of leadership pertinent to student leadership. The research methodology is then explained, providing an overview of the participants, the school contexts and methods of data collection and analysis. The subsequent section on results is presented under three topics: examples of good leaders, attributes that make a good leader and participants' understanding of the concept of leadership. A final discussion is centred on three considerations: the form of leadership that middle school students believed to be appropriate, the type of leadership that they rejected and possible underlying reasons for their choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective leaders are believed to inspire followers by providing inclusive visions of the future that followers can identify with. In the present study, we examined the neural mechanisms underlying this process, testing key hypotheses derived from transformational and social identity approaches to leadership. While undergoing functional MRI, supporters from the two major Australian political parties (Liberal vs. Labor) were presented with inspirational collective-oriented and noninspirational personal-oriented statements made by in-group and out-group leaders. Imaging data revealed that inspirational (rather than noninspirational) statements from in-group leaders were associated with increased activation in the bilateral rostral inferior parietal lobule, pars opercularis, and posterior midcingulate cortex: brain areas that are typically implicated in controlling semantic information processing. In contrast, for out-group leaders, greater activation in these areas was associated with noninspirational statements. In addition, noninspirational statements by in-group (but not out-group) leaders resulted in increased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area typically associated with reasoning about a person's mental state. These results show that followers processed identical statements qualitatively differently as a function of leaders' group membership, thus demonstrating that shared identity acts as an amplifier for inspirational leadership communication [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found that transformational leadership is related to positive outcomes in educational institutions. Hence, it is important to explore constructs that may predict leadership style in order to identify potential transformational leaders in assessment and selection procedures. Several studies in non-educational settings have found that emotional intelligence is a useful predictor of transformational leadership, but these studies have generally lacked methodological rigor and contextual relevance. This project, set in Australian educational institutions, employed a more rigorous methodology to answer the question: to what extent is the Mayer and Salovey (1997) model of emotional intelligence a useful predictor of leadership style and perceived leadership outcomes? The project was designed to move research in the field forward by using valid and reliable instruments, controlling for other predictors, obtaining an adequately sized sample of current leaders and collecting multiple ratings of their leadership behaviours. The study (N = 144 leaders and 432 raters) results indicated that emotional intelligence was not a useful predictor of leadership style and perceived leadership outcomes. In contrast, several of the other predictors in the study were found to predict leadership style. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]