Re-culturing Educational Leadership: Placing Teacher Well-being at the Heart of Educational Innovation

Educational innovation and leadership are widely positioned as central to improvement across global education systems, commonly associated with modernization, performance, and measurable outcomes. Yet such framings tend to reduce innovation to an event to be delivered and leadership to a mechanism for its implementation, overlooking the cultural and relational conditions – and the lived experiences of those who enact change – through which innovation is sustained in practice. This chapter reconceptualizes educational innovation as a condition-dependent, relational, and cultural process: what can be meaningfully sustained over time. Drawing on Schein’s (1996, 2010) model of organizational culture and White’s (2017) framework of relational well-being, it argues that innovation does not reside in policy or design, but emerges through the interaction of organizational conditions, professional agency, teachers’ well-being, and everyday practice. When these conditions are weak or misaligned, innovation produces intensification, manifested in workload, emotional strain, absenteeism, and presenteeism, rather than sustainable improvement. The chapter advances a clear conceptual contribution by theorizing teacher well-being not as a secondary outcome, but as a constitutive condition of innovation itself. In doing so, it reconceptualizes educational leadership as the work of re-culturing: the deliberate shaping of organizational values, relationships, and practices that enable teachers to remain recognized, supported, and capable of sustaining change over time. Educational leadership, therefore, is not the delivery of innovation as work, but the responsibility for sustaining the people through whom innovation becomes possible.