Alexander Gardner-McTaggartI’m an Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Doctor of Education (EdD) programme at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. I’m also a Senior Associate Editor of *Educational Management Administration & Leadership*, a BELMAS Trustee, and have been involved with the International and Comparative Education Research Interest Group for several years. In 2026, I spent part of the summer as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge.
My research has moved in some interesting directions over the past decade, although the questions that first drew me into educational leadership are still very much there. I began by looking at the globalisation of educational leadership, particularly through the International Baccalaureate and international schooling. I wanted to understand what happens when ideas about education and leadership travel, who and what travels with them, and how they shape the people working within them. I became particularly interested in the educational leader: how leaders themselves develop, what they are expected to become, and how much freedom they have to imagine and practise leadership differently.
Comparative and international education has been central to this work. I have spent much of my professional life working internationally, and moving between countries, cultures and educational systems has made me curious about ideas we sometimes treat as universal. Looking at education elsewhere has a wonderful habit of making the familiar seem strange. It opens up different ways of thinking about leadership, education and what each might be for.
That curiosity has gradually taken my work beyond the organisation itself. I’ve become increasingly interested in the world into which education is helping people to become, and whether educational leadership has enough to say about that world. My first book, *Sustainable Educational Leadership and the Climate Crisis* (Routledge, 2025), explored this through our ecological predicament. My more recent work has moved into artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, time and human development, where I have developed ideas including ‘ontological capture’, ‘pace compression’, ‘inequality of becoming’ and ‘ontological stewardship’.
Much of this comes together in my new book with Cambridge University Press, due out in February 2027. It explores what AI and technological change mean for educational leadership when the conditions in which we learn, live and become are themselves changing.
I sometimes describe my current concern rather simply: educational leadership can feel as though we are rearranging the furniture in the room when the rooms themselves have changed. I’m interested in those changing rooms: the technological, temporal, ecological, cultural and democratic conditions in which education now takes place, and how differently they are encountered around the world.
Before entering higher education, I spent sixteen years working in schools internationally, and that experience still sits behind much of what I do. Education has taken me to some extraordinary places, intellectually and geographically, and I remain fascinated by what educational leadership can make possible for people, including the leaders themselves, and who we might yet become.
I would like to continue on the BELMAS Board because, after three years as a Trustee, I feel I still have something useful to contribute. My involvement with BELMAS goes back further than my time on the Board. I was the inaugural convenor of the International and Comparative Education Research Interest Group, and BELMAS has become an important part of my academic and professional life. I have made friends there, enjoyed the conversations and debates, and would very much like to remain involved in where the Society goes next.
I came into academic life by a fairly circuitous route. Before becoming a full-time academic, I spent 23 years working in education, mainly as a teacher, much of it outside the UK. At various points I coordinated an arts department in Azerbaijan, led part of a literacy and reading initiative in the Middle East, directed a youth theatre organisation and served as Vice-President of a European youth theatre organisation. Looking back, I was involved in leadership for a very long time before it occurred to me to become an academic and start writing about it.
Universities, in turn, have proved remarkably quick to discover my administrative and people skills! Since entering higher education I have been an academic lead, programme director and full Dean, and I now direct the EdD at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. I know my way around committees, budgets and institutional processes, but much of what I have learned has simply been about people: how to work with them, listen to them, bring them together and occasionally find a way through when things become difficult.
Living and working in different countries has also shaped what I can offer BELMAS. I know British education well, but I have spent a large part of my working life elsewhere. That has made comparison almost second nature to me and has left me suspicious of the idea that there is one obvious way of doing education or leadership. I would like BELMAS to continue looking outwards and developing its international presence, while retaining the sense of community that makes it distinctive.
My first term on the Board has given me a much better understanding of the Society itself. I currently sit on the Finance Committee and have enjoyed seeing more of the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep BELMAS healthy and moving forward.
And, quite simply, I enjoy it. I enjoy BELMAS, I enjoy working with the people involved in it, and I still have the energy and enthusiasm to contribute. I know considerably more about what I am volunteering for this time around, which seems as good a reason as any to put myself forward for another three years.
