Conceptualising innovation in education: a scoping review of implications for school leadership and change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School leadership is increasingly recognised as a critical lever for driving innovation in education, yet the concept of innovation itself remains conceptually ambiguous and inconsistently enacted across contexts. This scoping review examines how innovation is conceptualised in the school leadership literature and explores its relationship to leadership and change. Drawing on 63 peer-reviewed studies published between 2014 and 2025, the review follows the PRISMA framework and employs thematic synthesis to identify key patterns and tensions. Five themes emerged: innovation as a situated and relational process; leadership as enabler, mediator, or constraint; tensions between policy and practice; conditions and cultures that support innovation; and equity, inclusion, and the politics of innovation. The findings highlight the centrality of leadership, particularly distributed and transformational models, in shaping innovation, while also revealing persistent gaps in addressing issues of equity and inclusion. The review proposes a conceptual framework that integrates these themes and underscores the need for context-sensitive, equity-focused approaches to innovation. It concludes by identifying implications for leadership development, policy coherence, and future research, particularly in underrepresented and transitional contexts. This work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of innovation as a dynamic, relational, and contested process within school leadership and educational change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.096 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.025 | 0.029 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".