Actionable companion · School leadership and instructional improvement

From leadership research to district action: Dismantling colonial legacies: Decolonising research and teaching at the Health in Humanitarian Crises Centre, London school of hygiene and tropical medicine

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.

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 Despite a burgeoning discourse within the humanitarian health community regarding decolonisation, there remains lack of practical guidance for researchers seeking to decolonise their work. We conducted a qualitative study which aimed to explore the perceptions of research and teaching staff at the Health in Humanitarian Crisis Centre (HHCC) and their external partners —including humanitarian health researchers, practitioners, and donors— regarding how to decolonise research, teaching and partnerships at a leading global health Higher Education institution in the UK. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews and 3 focus group discussions with HHCC members and external partners, including donors, academic institutions in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings, and practitioners from local and international humanitarian organisations. The first theme explored the concept of decolonisation itself, examining the disparate definitions and understandings held by HHCC members and partners, along with examining the institutional appetite and the role of leadership in driving decolonisation efforts. The second theme focused on sectoral and structural barriers to decolonising HHCC’s work, including the dominance of Western-defined knowledge models, inequitable funding policies and practices, and epistemic injustice. Finally, the third theme explored HHCC’s experiences in decolonising teaching and curriculum. The study identifies good practices within the HHCC community including knowledge co-production, equitable authorship arrangements, co-dissemination of findings, assigning co-principal investigators from conflict-affected countries, and centring and building on the experiences of researchers with relevant lived experience. However, these individual efforts contrast with a lack of appetite at the institutional level to address the underlying structural barriers. Our study provides the foundations for humanitarian health researchers and educators based in the Global North to begin to practically decolonise their work in the sphere of global/humanitarian health.

A 90-day district inquiry

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

Sali Hafez; Amber Clarke; Katharina Richter; Michelle Lokot; Althea-Maria Rivas; Neha S Singh. Dismantling colonial legacies: Decolonising research and teaching at the Health in Humanitarian Crises Centre, London school of hygiene and tropical medicine. PLOS Global Public Health (2025-07-23). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004833

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.