COVID-19 has ripped apart comfortable assumptions about the world and how we as communities and societies should operate within it. Practices have been disrupted, such as; children attending school in face-to-face settings, or groups of people chatting together in comfortable physical proximity. A world-wide social experiment is taking place in inventing, adapting and creating new practices of human sociality and many of us are struggling to keep pace, to adapt and to cope. Educators, including educational leaders are frontline workers in this social experiment.

The rapid onslaught of COVID-19 has exposed major inequalities and injustices, such as a digital divide between the haves and have-nots. Mass closures of schools across the world have exposed the crucial role that educational settings can play in building a sense of belonging and connection for many vulnerable learners (children and adults alike) and in providing resources and a haven in an unsafe world. Educational leadership is a critical component of this process.

COVID-19 provides us with an opportunity to pause, to take stock, and to engage in a critical global conversation that allows us to re-imagine the practice and purpose of educational leading in a post COVID-19 era.

Join our facilitator, Australian journalist, author, radio and television presenter, Virginia Trioli, along with our panel of internationally-acclaimed researchers who will tackle questions including:

• How have our understandings of educational leadership and what it means to lead been disrupted as a result of the changes brought about by the pandemic?
• How may these understandings/ways of leading, bring about change for the better/or for the worse for the learners in our care?
• Given educational inequalities have been exacerbated by COVID-19, what new, more socially appropriate ways of leading can be reimagined? What are the conditions, resources and arrangements that can sustain these?
• What are the implications of the pandemic for who becomes educational leaders, who we want as leaders and what leadership is and should be for?