From leadership research to district action: Local learning landscapes: conceptualising place-based professional learning by teachers and schools in decentralised education systems

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract This article sets out an original conceptual framework for place-based professional learning by teachers and schools in decentralised education systems. High quality Continuing Professional Development and Learning by teachers is associated with improvements in children’s outcomes. Most research in this area focuses on evaluating formal professional development programmes provided by external, non-school organisations. However, in practice, much professional learning is informal and takes place ‘on the job’. Meanwhile, in many systems globally, school leaders have been granted increased autonomy, for example taking on responsibility for the recruitment and professional development of staff. In these contexts, traditional place-based providers of professional development, such as Local Authorities and school districts, have been rolled back, while school leaders have been encouraged to draw on a wider marketplace of provision. These developments might create space for agency and innovation, but also present risks in terms of coherence, quality, and equity. For these reasons, we argue that there is a need to conceptualise the ways in which formal and informal learning occurs across complex local learning landscapes. We describe the iterative process through which the conceptual framework was developed before setting out the framework itself and the bodies of research and theory which underpin it. We draw on our empirical research using the framework in England to illustrate its three main contributions: as a heuristic device, an analytical tool, and an example of methodological innovation. We conclude by highlighting key implications for educational stakeholders, arguing that strengthening coherence, quality and equity across local learning landscapes in decentralised school systems requires attention to system governance and design as well as leadership and locality dynamics. Keywords: School leadership, Professional development, School autonomy, Place, Socio-spatial theory, Complexity theory, Networks, Organisational learning

Study methods

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Limitations

Without doubt, the framework has limitations. We imply above that our decision to grapple with individual, organisational and inter-organisational learning, and the interactions between them, and to draw four different areas of research and theory into a single, accessible framework, could be seen as over-ambitious at best, and unhelpfully imprecise at worst. We certainly acknowledge that the work is conceptually ambitious, but our experience of sharing it with policy makers and practitioners in England suggests that it is nonetheless helpful and that they ‘recognise’ the concepts and issues addressed. Indeed, following a recent presentation, we were contacted by a local hub leader who exclaimed ‘finally, now I’m nearly at retirement, I know what my job is – I’m a landscape gardener!’ Thus, rather than being unhelpfully imprecise, we suggest that the framework’s inherent fuzziness allows users space to interpret and adapt the six concepts in ways which make sense across an array of different contexts.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Toby Greany; Tom Cowhitt; Andy Noyes; Cath Gripton; Georgina Hudson. Local learning landscapes: conceptualising place-based professional learning by teachers and schools in decentralised education systems. Journal of Educational Change (2024-07-04). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-024-09508-x

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.