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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and leadership practices of executive leaders in English multi-academy trusts (MATs) considering the meaning of system-level leadership and its perceived impact on schools' improvement processes, conditions and culture.

This paper was guided by an ecological systems approach emphasizing the interactions between the micro-, meso-, macro-, exo- and chronosystems, and was used to develop context-sensitive accounts of leadership across groups of schools. It involves interview-based multi-perspective case studies using a sample of five MATs and collecting data from 31 interviews with various school and MAT leaders.

The primacy of leadership at the executive level was central to efforts for school and MAT transformation and that was evident throughout the findings of the study. System leadership was multifaceted and was understood through the multiple layers of the organizational structure of MATs. Four major domains of practice highlight the efforts of these leaders to address complex and systemic challenges. These are setting strategic directions, developing people and organizational capacity, establishing organizational infrastructure to support schools' improvement efforts and providing instructional guidance.

Findings reveal new empirical data about the role of executive leaders in English MATs and highlight the ways in which they seek to establish, manage and sustain school and MAT-wide improvement providing the research with a holistic idea of system leadership.

This chapter revisits, reinforces, and extends our view of the underpinning principles and practices of school leadership in Aotearoa New Zealand. It presents extracts from case studies of schools that illustrate the crucial role of the principal in ensuring ongoing improvement and innovation while working in increasingly complex and uncertain environments. The chapter discusses the need to understand the importance of relationships between individuals and groups, actions, contexts, environments, and cultures where processes of interaction shape principals' practices. Features of complexity thinking are used as a lens through which to understand schools as complex adaptive systems and illustrate the importance of the dynamics of the interactions among the agents and elements within the New Zealand educational system. The chapter concludes by drawing together the implications for leadership that emerge across this chapter.

This introductory chapter underscores the urgent need to reimagine school leadership in the face of unprecedented challenges and uncertainties, including the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing struggles for racial justice, and declining trust in public institutions. The chapter argues that traditional, top-down leadership approaches no longer sufficiently meet the complex needs of students, families, and communities and advocates for paradigm shift toward more collaborative, adaptive, and equity-centered leadership practices. Leadership practices are suggested that build inclusive school communities, foster a culture of continuous learning, and prioritize the holistic well-being of every student are highlighted as crucial. Readers are challenged to rethink the very purpose and goals of education, moving beyond narrow measures of academic achievement to encompass the development of the whole child. Three key themes are introduced: (1) school characteristics and structures for facing future challenges, (2) leadership practices to initiate and support new organizational perspectives, and (3) innovative school organizations addressing crises and implications. The chapter asserts that transforming school leadership requires a fundamental rethinking of the structures, policies, and incentives that shape the work of educational leaders. Therefore, school leaders must be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to lead for social justice, build culturally responsive school communities, and create transformative spaces where all students can thrive. This bold vision requires leaders to approach their work with humility, curiosity, and courage as they navigate the complexities of educational leadership in the 21st century.

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e‐learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E‐learning is data‐intensive, user‐driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competiveness. Although the complexity of such systems has increased exponentially, the design process still lacks a systematic quality control procedure. In this work we address the increasing need for new methods that maximize usability, and thus end‐user satisfaction. We analyse the technological, managerial and economic factors that affect the design and deployment of a large e‐learning platform with advanced services and propose a set of new metrics for assessing its quality. The metrics are based on the four external quality characteristics (functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability) of the ISO9126 standard for software systems.