Abstract
This paper reports on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of international school leaders. Drawing on a study of 13 leaders of international schools in 14 different countries, its key findings are that the pandemic resulted in increased stress, trauma and isolation for school leaders, and that school leader well-being is interdependent with the well-being of students and teachers. Yet, although student and teacher well-being has become a priority area post the pandemic, school leaders feel there is little or no attention paid to their own well-being. The data presented here suggest that more attention needs to be paid to international school leader well-being, for the benefit of all stakeholders in the school.
Keywords
Introduction
From early in 2020, school systems across the world faced the threat of transmission of COVID-19 in educational institutions – and in consequence schooling and school leadership were both transformed (Harris and Jones, 2020). In many countries, governments chose to close schools and temporarily transitioned to online learning. High-stakes national assessments were cancelled. In some instances, schools transformed into community hubs providing food and emotional support to their communities as much as being institutions of learning. Governments in most contexts provided rules and guidance about how this transformation of institutional purpose and practices should take place, and made adaptations to allow for the ongoing schooling, or transition to university, of their students.
However, one type of school, international schools, faced these extraordinary circumstances without the same government support. An international school is a school, usually fee-paying, which follows a curriculum from outwith the host country using a medium of instruction (typically English) which is not the same as the host country (Bailey, 2021). International schools often draw a large proportion of their teaching staff from overseas. Traditionally, they served globally mobile, expatriate populations, although over the last two decades there has been a rapid increase in the number of host-country nationals attending such schools (Kim and Mobrand, 2019; Tanu, 2017); there has been a reversal of the ratio of expatriate to local students with such schools now being populated by 80% local host nation children as opposed to 80% expatriate from two decades ago. There has been a continued growth in such schools over the last 20 years, with the present number of children studying in them globally being 6.5 million in January 2023 (ISC, 2023), a number similar to a medium-sized country like England. International schools have diverse forms of governance: they may operate on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis; they may be standalone institutions or part of a chain of schools; some are affiliated with prestigious schools in English-speaking countries; while others emphasis a more hybrid identity, fusing elements of their national location and their international curriculum (Gibson and Bailey, 2021).
The leadership of international schools differs from national schools in that such leaders face challenges such as loneliness; transience; cultural differences; governance; business elements; and managing school composition (Bailey and Gibson, 2020). Leaders of international schools are typically expatriates on a fixed term contract with a short tenure (Benson, 2011). They may or may not have experience of the host country, or speak its national language.
Government regulations about school closures or socially distanced learning during COVID-19 generally applied to all educational institutions in a country, but international schools faced particular challenges. Although international schools typically serve a privileged clientele and could therefore expect their students to have a learning device and internet, ensuring a relatively easily transition to online learning (Bailey, 2021), they also faced a number of difficulties specific to their nature. Firstly, many international schools are staffed by multi-national teachers and/or attended by multi-national students; as families fled home or were trapped in other countries by sudden travel embargoes, international schools found their staff and student bodies dispersed across time zones (Doll et al., 2021). Secondly, international schools follow a curriculum and assessments deriving outside of the country in which they are located; for them there was no guarantee that high-stakes assessments or curricular expectations or adaptations from elsewhere would meet the needs of their students (Fitzgerald, 2023). Thirdly, the diverse nature of international school stakeholders meant that schools were dealing with very different expectations of how a pandemic should be handled (Doll et al., 2021), as parents and teachers made comparisons with how they would be experiencing the pandemic in their country of origin. Fourthly, international school communities may be detached from their locality, operating in a bubble, which led to fear as people tried to navigate changing pandemic rules and the stress of lockdowns in a foreign culture and perhaps a foreign language (Stasel, 2020). Fifthly, as international schools are generally fee-paying institutions and some parents questioned the value of online learning provision, their income was threatened by the pandemic (Swift, 2020). Leading international schools therefore posed a different set of challenges to leading a government school through the pandemic.
This paper is part of a study of international school leadership during the pandemic. The larger study aimed to chart changes in leadership resulting from the crisis through interviews with 13 international school leaders, there was a single overarching research question, ‘What were the challenges in leading an international school during the COVID-19 pandemic?’. In this way we were seeking to understand issues that such leaders had during this period, including the extent to which they matched those of national schools. Information on this larger project is available elsewhere (Bailey and Gibson, 2024). One of the recurrent foci in every interview was well-being – leaders spoke emotionally and in detail about the impact that the circumstances of leading an international school through the pandemic had had upon their own well-being. Whilst noting that the well-being of students and teachers had become a priority as the world emerged from the exceptional circumstances, they felt that little attention had been given to leader well-being in international schools. This paper is in part a response to their plea to give more attention to this vital subject.
Literature review
School principal well-being is important but has been ‘a peripheral topic in either school well-being or principal literature’ for a long period of time and does not receive sufficient attention in public policy (Chen et al., 2023: 1). This literature review is in five sections. Initially, we conceptualise well-being. We examine school leader well-being prior to, and then during, the COVID-19 pandemic. This discussion is followed by a section on well-being in international schools, and finally a section on the challenges of leadership in such schools.
Conceptualising well-being
There is an extensive literature conceptualising well-being. Well-being can be divided into objective well-being (a combination of physical health, economic circumstances and a degree of connectedness to others) and subjective well-being (a presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions) (Shirley et al., 2020). For example, Seligman (2011) has argued that there are five elements to subjective well-being – or ‘flourishing’ – positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. However, the value given to specific positive emotions – e.g. happiness rather benevolence or wisdom – may differ between cultures (Shirley et al., 2020), which makes well-being particularly hard to operationalise in an international context. In addition, a variety of other dimensions of well-being have been identified – for instance, Seligman (2018) conceptualises the building blocks of well-being as positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and a sense of accomplishment. We conceptualise well-being in our study as subjective, and constituted of these multiple dimensions.
We are also attentive to the idea that well-being might not be best conceptualised as an individual attribute, but as relational or collective. This is an issue that merits further examination, and is compatible with the available literature. For example, one Australian intervention to improve teacher well-being showed ‘downstream’ benefits for student well-being (Carroll et al., 2021). In an analysis of data from Canada collected prior to the pandemic, Shirley et al. (2020) show that teacher and leader well-being is connected to student well-being. For example, teachers’ well-being is affected when they feel that the systems they are responsible for administering (e.g., particular assessments) are having a negative impact on their students’ well-being (Shirley et al., 2020). Moreover, theorists of well-being have pointed to relationships as integral to the concept (Seligman, 2011). We shall see below that the interdependence of well-being was also a feature of the current study.
In the analysis and discussion we use Seligman's (2011) concept of well-being as a theoretical framework within which to understand our data.
School leader well-being during COVID
Emerging evidence on the experiences of school leaders around the world since 2020 suggests that school leader stress and well-being are major post-pandemic concerns (Harris and Jones, 2022; Urick et al., 2021). School leaders have been impacted by major crises before – for example, US school leaders have faced a rise in school shootings – and studies on these have demonstrated that ongoing chronic stress can lead to professional burnout (Urick et al., 2021). However, early evidence from the US suggests that many school leaders sought to deal with their stress and anxiety during COVID-19 by suppressing it (Reid, 2022). The idea that ‘leaders eat last’ meant that some US school leaders paid little attention to their own self-care (Doyle Fosco et al., 2023; Hayes et al., 2022).
These findings have been replicated in research about leadership during COVID-19 across many national settings. For example, one study from Ireland found that 70% of primary school leaders reported that COVID-19 had had a negative impact on their well-being. The authors call for a focus on school leaders’ well-being after the pandemic, justifying this as a priority by using the metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others (Burke and Dempsey, 2021; Dempsey and Burke, 2021). Similarly, studies of school leaders during COVID-19 from England suggest that the pandemic increased the stresses of an already-stressful role (Fotheringham et al., 2022). Frequent and changing communications from government were a major source of stress (Fotheringham et al., 2020). Another English study reports on the significant negative impact that the exigencies of the pandemic had on school leader well-being, ranging from a lack of sleep and weight gain to hospitalisation, attributing it in part to a ‘trust deficit’ (Greany et al., 2021; Thomson et al., 2021). In our study of English school leaders’ experiences of high-stakes assessments during the pandemic, all the participants reported that the experience had had a negative impact on themselves and other school leaders they knew (Bailey and Gibson, 2023). They struggled to reconcile government directives with the negative impact on their staff and students, and some said that they had been ‘broken’ by the experience.
This is also contrasted with other work such as a New Zealand study that whilst the school principals perceived challenges such as uncertainly of the duration of online learning, they also saw opportunities. They believed this was a time when they could make a difference to peoples’ lives and improve their use of distributed leadership (Thornton, 2021). In the UK school leaders reported positive changes such as the temporary cessation of Ofsted inspections, enabling them to engage more on core values such as social justice (Beauchamp et al., 2021).
School leader well-being before COVID-19
Although there is now a growing recognition that principal well-being is important, literature concerned with well-being prior to the pandemic referred to principals’ responsibilities for caring for the well-being of their staff, rather than their own well-being (a responsibility, which of course could further increase principal stress). In an early paper on the issue, Robbins (2013) questioned, ‘who cares about the school leader?’, in the sub-title to their work. Robbins’ work identified omissions in leadership preparation programmes such as the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) in England, finding that their content at that point did not address issues around well-being and stress and that there was no organisation in the UK which specifically organised courses preparing principals for these issues.
Key stressors for principals related to work, relationships and time and that these produce unpleasant feelings in response to them such as guilt, a feeling of unfairness, loneliness or disappointment (Mahfouz, 2020). Coping strategies were found to be spending time with loved ones or an outlet outside of work. The struggle between loneliness and belonging for school principals was found to be a key theme emanating from a principal's gatekeeper role (Kelchtermans et al., 2011). Additionally, the high-stakes nature of the role in England, particularly around student performance in national qualifications and school inspection regime, has been identified as a further threat to principal well-being (Gibson and Simon, 2020).
An early large-scale empirical report (n = 1523) of New Zealand school principals (Hodgen and Wylie, 2005), reported that although principals had generally good ratings on a well-being scale, a quarter had moderate-to-low scores. The study identified key stressors for principals and called for a discussion of how their role could become more balanced. However, Marsh et al. (2022) note there is surprisingly little research on the antecedents of school principals’ health and well-being. Studies such as theirs – large (n = 3683), longitudinal studies of the demands and resources that drive principals’ well-being – are ‘largely absent from occupational health, education, leadership, organisation, and psychology journals’ (24). One of the key outcomes of their Australian research was to suggest the use of principal self-completed questionnaires that give immediate feedback and present ‘red flags’ which recommend the principal seeks professional help. Wells and Klocko (2018) draw parallels between physicians and school principals in the US. Both occupations have high stress levels, feel isolated and work under considerable pressure. However, unlike physicians, there are no programmes of assistance for school principals specifically for dealing with stress. They propose programmes of mindfulness and self-care, which have been established in the medical field, to be transposed to school principals.
The situation is changing post-pandemic and many Western countries now have principal support agencies, which also conduct principal well-being surveys, however, these are recent innovations (e.g. Headrest.co.uk started during the pandemic in October 2020). Given that school leaders in the UK and elsewhere have seemingly little preparation for dealing with stress (Robbins, 2013), this evidence of mounting tensions created by COVID-19 are concerning. As we will see in the following section, there are reasons to hypothesise that these challenges may be particularly acute in international schools.
Well-being in international schools
Researchers have noted that specific characteristics of international schools may impact on the well-being of students and staff. The multicultural and multinational nature of many international schools may lead to tensions and differences (Wigford and Higgins, 2019), while the multiple cross-cultural transitions experienced by their students and staff may also impact negatively on well-being (Cooker et al., 2016; Wigford and Higgins, 2019). In addition, further well-being challenges may proceed from the fact that many students in international schools may be learning in a language and cultural context that differs from that of their home country (Boomhower, 2020). Nevertheless, there is a limited literature examining well-being issues in international schools, and most of what is available has focused solely on student well-being.
The evidence on student well-being in international schools is mixed. Cooker et al. (2016) found that, despite the potential challenges to well-being in international schools, such as frequent student transitions between schools, students in the ten schools they studied had medium-to-high levels of well-being. The teachers they interviewed attributed this in part to the International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes used at the case-study schools, which gave them a strong framework for addressing well-being. By contrast, the research conducted by Boomhower (2020) suggested that the single case-study international school studied did not have appropriate resources and processes for adequately supporting student well-being.
Although there are many studies that have looked at teacher and leader well-being in national systems of education, there has been little examination of staff well-being in international schools (Wigford and Higgins, 2019). The exceptions to this overwhelmingly focus on teacher rather than leader well-being, with leadership being considered primarily in relation to how it can bolster teachers’ well-being. For example, Mohan (2009) conducted small-scale action research in Thailand to improve teacher well-being, while another study of teacher well-being in international schools found that appreciation, relationships and belonging were key factors, with leadership critical key to fostering each of these (Wigford and Higgins, 2019). In contrast, Stasel (2020) charts the experiences of both teachers and leaders in Malaysia, Macau and China during the pandemic, suggesting that they experienced heightened acculturative stress as a result of the COVID-19 measures taken in their location. However, it is unclear how many participants there were in Stasel's study, and of these, how many were leaders. Although Pearce (2023) addresses both well-being and leadership of an international school during the COVID lockdown, references to well-being are about the leaders’ responsibilities for staff, student and parent well-being, rather than their own.
Although not directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic, but relevant, international schools, even when described here as ‘standalone’ in reference to their independent governance, are to some extent loosely linked and may be an example of a complex system that Hawkins and James (2018) describe as ‘complex, evolving, loosely linking systems (CELLS)’. In particular teaching staff, including principals, are frequently a mobile workforce working in such institutions globally and they may feel a ‘communal collective’ to working in such places. These schools then become ‘loosely linking’ as ‘interacting units in complex systems … [and] are ‘tied together’, interact, yet remain distinct with a separate identity’ (Hawkins and James, 2018: 738). The notion of CELLS may be applied to international schools to conceptualise their positioning unique and different to that of national schools.
Challenges faced by international school leaders
It is unsurprising that there is a dearth of research into international school leader well-being, as this area of leadership in all types of school is still an emerging area of study (Bailey and Gibson, 2020). However, prior research has indicated various challenges faced by international school leaders.
One of the earlier works in this field was that of Benson (2011), who found that the average tenure of an international school principal was only 3.7 years, with tensions with the school board cited as the most common reason for departure. Other studies have suggested that international school principals may face additional challenges that are not faced by leaders of government schools. These particular difficulties may include: high but varied parental expectations; difficulties in reconciling national and international inspection or curriculum frameworks; and managing high staff turnover (Lee et al., 2012). Additional stressors may include negative social media comments resulting from the isolated nature of these schools, meaning teachers have fewer alternative outlets for expressing their frustrations (Bunnell, 2018). Additionally, the role of international school leader is inherently lonely, as leaders are at a geographical distance from friends and family, and often face different challenges from the national schools that are geographically close to them (Bailey and Gibson, 2020). Burks (2020) concludes that international school leaders experience more stress than their American counterparts as they try to manage high staff attrition and pressure to deliver high student outcomes with the difficulties of working in a foreign culture.
Aspects of international school governance can add to these challenges. Machin (2014) argues that the advent of for-profit international schools means that principals face tensions in their role as they are expected to simultaneously meet the sometimes conflicting expectations of commercial and educational perspectives. This is echoed by the finding by Gibson and Bailey (2021) that international school principals may experience affective dissonance regarding working in for-profit schooling, and that blurred lines between governance and principalship in many international schools may be an added stress of their role. In summary, even prior to the pandemic many theorists suggested that the role of an international school principal was particularly challenging, but nevertheless there had been minimal investigation in their well-being.
In conclusion, this literature review has affirmed an increased importance being placed upon research into well-being in schools, and evidence that school leader well-being in government schools was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has identified a gap in the existing literature regarding the well-being of international school principals, noting that there are a range of reasons, based on the existing literature, for thinking that these leaders will have faced particular challenges as a result of the pandemic. The research project that is reported on in this paper sought to investigate the following research question: ‘What were the challenges in leading an international school during the COVID-19 pandemic?’ In the remainder of this paper, we analyse the data pertaining international school leader well-being that emerged from this study.
Methods
The data analysed below come from a qualitative study of international school leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were asked to recollect their leadership experiences and challenges during this time, and well-being emerged as a key feature of their responses.
Thirteen international school leaders participated in this study; a semi-structured online interview, lasting approximately one hour, was conducted with each participant during the period May–October 2022. The interviews were conducted by the authors, the schedule of interview questions was emailed to participants in advance and, due to the use of semi-structured interviews, the researchers used probes and prompts to generate additional data.
The sample was a combination of purposive and opportunistic methods. We initially contacted a range of international school organisations globally, and one of these agreed to distribute details of the study to member principals. Criteria for participation were that the interviewee should be the most senior leader in their school (although different job titles are used, we refer to them as principals) and that the institution should define itself as an international school. Snowballing was also used in order to increase the sample size, some of the participants had participated in a previous study of international school leadership conducted by the two authors. We were also contacted by other leaders who had heard about the study from fellow participants, and been told that participation was a cathartic experience. Table 1 demonstrates the geographical diversity of our small sample, but it should be stressed that we make no claims for its representativeness. Indeed, our data demonstrated that experiences of the pandemic varied greatly between countries, which was one of the challenges faced by these leaders. We are therefore sensitive to the limitations of our study, including its generalisability. There are no participants from China, a major host nation of international schools. The table also shows the type of international school to which each leader belonged. The majority were traditional, standalone schools which were not part of chains, these schools were frequently not-for-profit and run by parental collectives. This particular context may well have an effect on feelings such as isolation and loneliness. Finally, the table also shows the original ‘home’ country of the participants. It is notable here that only one of them, Zara from Ghana, was a host country national; all the rest found themselves in another country during this period. We place ‘home’ in inverted commas to problematise it; for some participants, it had been some years since they had returned to that country, as many international school principals move from county to country within a global school workplace. The lack of international school chains and the geographical location of the participants are further limitations of the research along with the use of self-reported data and a lack of triangulation. These limitations point to the need for further research, but also indicate the complexity of conducting research into the international school sector.
List of participants.
Each participant gave informed consent; the protection of anonymity and confidentially were key ethical issues and each participant has been given a pseudonym. The study gained ethical approval from a UK university. The interviews were transcribed and coded (Saldana, 2011). These codes developed into emergent themes. The approach for data analysis followed Braun and Clarke's (2006, 2021) six phase (reflexive) Thematic Analysis (TA). Trustworthiness was increased using more than one coder with coder consensus, the transcripts were read and re-read and then initial codes were produced from which emergent themes, with sub themes, developed. Principal well-being was one such theme, with its sub themes. Based on this rich, qualitative data, we are able to offer insights into international school leadership during the pandemic.
Findings and discussion
The data analysis showed that five emergent sub-themes related to the overarching well-being theme featured heavily in these participants’ accounts of leading international schools during the pandemic: stress; trauma, and isolation were three themes pertaining solely to experiences of their own well-being, whilst the themes of interdependence of well-being and the priority given to well-being provide insights into well-being in their institutions as a whole.
Stress
There is mounting evidence that school leadership became a focus for the frustrations different stakeholders experienced during the pandemic (Harris and Jones, 2020), and our study suggests this conclusion applies no less to international schools. Echoing the international school leaders studied by Stasel (2020), the leaders in this study described a number of changes to their role under COVID which were stressful: for instance, the financial pressures faced by their schools; the relentless nature of the work during COVID; and dealing with the unknown.
The schools had varied in the extent to which COVID resulted in financial problems for them, but some schools experienced a collapse in their school enrolment when learning went online and needed to make teachers temporarily or permanently redundant. For the leaders at these schools, this was a major threat to their well-being. As Bernard explained: Having to speak to 34 people in two days to tell them that they don’t have a job anymore was emotionally a really stressful thing to go through. (Bernard) Fundamentally I’m exhausted, because I feel like we have not had a break since March of 2020, because it's just been dealing with situation after situation. (Lloyd)
For those leaders who had young or school-aged children, the pressure was even more acute: You should see me trying to run a school from my house with three kids online, it was a disaster! … One day I just had a huge breakdown, and just fell on the floor and cried, cried, cried, wanted to kill myself … And I think that traumatised my own kids, that they saw me just breaking down completely. (Zara)
Several leaders talked about the difficulties of managing the unknowns of the pandemic. Trying to anticipate the responses of international assessment organisations had angered James, echoing findings from the UK that high-stakes assessments were a source of leader stress (Bailey and Gibson, 2023). For Nick, in Italy, arbitrating between anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination parents was particularly difficult (which is similar to the conflicts that some principals in England faced in Greany et al.'s study). Stuart observed that because people didn’t know how to manage others’ health during a pandemic, in place of the usual collective decision-making, instead everything fell to him – for example, decisions over masking and social distancing. Stuart found it helpful to attend group counselling with other school principals. It enabled him to talk things through with others, and also to see that the problems in his school were also being encountered elsewhere. Nevertheless, at the time of the interview he reported that he was taking early retirement as a direct consequence of his pandemic experiences.
There were some more positive outcomes, as some leaders felt that they had been forced to develop better stress management strategies, and that managing the challenge gave them a feeling of accomplishment (Seligman, 2018). For example, Edward reported that initially his well-being suffered and he put on weight, but in the longer-term he felt more confident: I think the pandemic also helped you realise that no matter what obstacle comes your way, you’re gonna be able to get through it, and so it's almost been a confidence booster. Now when new problems come up it doesn’t seem so insurmountable so to speak, it's like well hey, we got through this, this other issue should be a piece of cake. (Edward)
Trauma
We discussed above the importance of positive emotions to well-being (Seligman, 2011); by contrast, the distress of themselves and others was a recurrent theme of these interviews. Managing negative emotions – fear and grief, for example – was a particularly salient source of stress. However, several interviewees went further and said that the experiences had been a form of trauma – in other words, that they had ongoing emotional disturbance as a result of their experiences. This was a term that the interviewees introduced into the interviews; it was not used by the interviewers.
Many of the leaders cried during their interviews. For example, John cried when talking about a new member of staff getting COVID along with their family. Several were surprised by how upset they became, but others said that they had participated in the research because they were aware of their unresolved trauma. For example, Zara said that she found leading a school through COVID traumatic and explained that she was participating in the study to help her to come to terms with it: We tend to want to erase that period, and that's why I pushed myself to be part of this, because I’m struggling with like I need to heal, I need to deal with that trauma! (Zara) From a trauma, emotional standpoint, I probably will carry it with me for the rest of my career. I mean even during this conversation here, I’ve had a year off in Montana, I’m in a new school, it's open now, I mean I’ve got a beautiful new campus, I’m in a different place, I’ve got a new start, and you can still probably hear the emotion in some of my stories and my voice, so I don’t think that's ever going away. (Charles)
Matthew explained that his decision to leave his current school was linked to the trauma of leading through the pandemic: I decided to leave the school, this is my last year there. I feel like as a leader the emotional strife that I was expected to deal with was too much. And it burnt bridges for me. I personally, in order I think for me to get over my COVID trauma, I have to leave.
In summary, the leaders had found dealing with a tide of negative emotions to be a traumatic experience and detrimental to their well-being. Whilst other work on national schools points to the difficulties school leaders had in dealing with the emotional aspects of running a school during this time (Doyle Fosco et al., 2023; Greany et al., 2021; Hayes et al., 2022), these international school leaders appear to have undergone a more traumatic experience, albeit based on a very small sample.
Isolation
Previous research has demonstrated that the role of the international school leader can be isolated (Bunnell, 2018) and lonely (Bailey and Gibson, 2020) – and a sense of loneliness and isolation came out strongly from these interviews. Some of the issues causing loneliness were: the expectation that others had that they manage things alone; a sense that leaders shouldn’t show emotions; a belief that others did not show empathy or understanding of their unique situation. This was a high risk, high stress situation, and the emphasis our participants placed on loneliness during this crisis was seemingly higher than pre-COVID literature such as Kelchtermans et al. (2011) describes. As the literature suggests that relationships are integral to well-being (Seligman, 2011), this is another way in which leaders’ well-being was undermined by circumstances of leading through the pandemic.
Matthew felt that he was given insufficient support as he made difficult decisions: I think leaders weren’t supported as much. I didn’t feel supported by the community as much as I needed at the time. And I felt let down by definitely people in the group. Because I look, especially if you look back, and even those people that let me down, they’ve come back now and said we were lucky, it worked out pretty well. But it's like but yeah, but you still said those horrible things in public about people that I adore. (Matthew) I felt like if I was in the position of my CEO I would … I would have given some counselling or some HR support, and I didn’t feel like I had any of that. In fact my PA was the person who helped me, you know? (Claire)
Theo mentioned incidents when he had felt emotionally isolated during the pandemic. A teacher at his school died of COVID, and he had to deliver the eulogy over Zoom. Then, his own mother died (although not of COVID), and he was unable to travel to say goodbye because of COVID restrictions. Theo didn’t tell anyone at his school, other than the chair of the board, about his mother's death: But I found it very difficult, you know, trying to keep it together, because I couldn’t be seen to be out of control, and I’m still dealing with my own stuff … at one point I actually had a pin in my hand just gently poking it into my thigh to distract me from going off, because you know, I’m dealing with my own emotions, and I had to be professional still, but you know, people weren’t aware of that … it feels like it's part of the job description, is you cannot show that you’re upset, you cannot show that you don’t know the answer. (Theo)
Eleanor recounted watching her father's funeral on Zoom because of COVID travel restrictions. She felt that she was expected to listen empathetically to people and to acknowledge that they were going through a terrible experience, but then feeling that there was no-one to listen to her: That's I guess the role of the leader, but people would be talking to me as if I wasn’t in the pandemic, and that used to drive me nuts! I’m like, hello, I’m in the same boat as you guys! But you just have to go oh yeah, it must be terrible for you. Oh, really, oh, you’ve not seen your parents, oh, that must be terrible. I’m like, I’ve not seen mine! (Eleanor)
Conversely, however, there were occasions when the loneliness of being the international school principal was ameliorated by the pandemic experience. For example, Eleanor – who was living on a semi-rural school campus in India – felt that at times the social hierarchy between the leader and teachers was reduced by the pandemic, because everyone was forced to be each other's community and family. She described following the development of colleagues’ small children with interest, filling in for their grandparents who could not be there during this period.
Moreover, the extraordinary situation fostered networking and support between international school leaders. In one region, the association of international school headteachers organised group therapy for principals. Zara was one of the leaders who was particularly appreciative of this support: everybody sharing and supporting, which honestly was what helped us, that kind of global village being activated to support each other. (Zara)
Interdependence of well-being
As these leaders described their pandemic experiences, it was evident that the well-being of different members of the school community was interdependent. Previous research has demonstrated a connection between teacher and leader well-being (Carroll et al., 2021; Dreer, 2023); in the current study, however, there were a number of incidents where the support of leaders had been critical to maintaining the well-being of students and teachers. Some of the leaders had faced suicide in their school community during COVID-19. For example, in Claire's school, one member of staff developed mental health issues as a result of the hard lockdown, returned to their home country and then committed suicide, and she had to support colleagues through this. Claire said that she feels burnt out after only two years at the school, because of the intensity of the experience: Dealing with people's grief, loss, dealing with loss and grief myself. Also that kind of the, the having to be on call 24–7, and that not really going away, OK? Hasn’t really gone away. You know, you would think that you would plateau at some point, but it hasn’t, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t calmed down yet. But there's still a very high need and a high expectation from me as a leader to have the answers. (Claire) So students coming back, we’ve had even to send two students to a psychiatric ward for acute psychotic episodes. We had to deal with eight students with extreme depression, we’ve had to deal with, I think, if I remember, more than 40 kids with anxiety disorders. (Zara)
Some of the leaders had found lockdowns particularly challenging for the well-being of their school community. John talked about the stress of the first COVID cases coming, and how one new teacher caught COVID as they arrived in the country. He started crying during the research interview as he remembered the teacher being removed to a quarantine centre while his wife barricaded herself in the house with their children. Similarly, Claire discussed the challenges of supporting well-being through a hard lockdown: And people couldn’t get food, and people couldn’t get medicine, and I had to deal with a lot of well-being, and people who were in high-rise flats when the lifts were turned off, it was a health and safety issue as well. (Claire)
In Matthew's school, however, reopening after the lockdown had been a time of intense anxiety for students and teachers: One of the hardest times I think on the emotional fragility of people was actually the opening, reopening. So when we took the masks off and let people go, that's where we actually saw all the problems and all the trauma people held in, and we couldn’t just jump back to normal. We thought everyone would be happy, but actually a lot of people were fearful and scared and anxious. (Matthew)
Similarly, Stuart also said that in the year when they reopened after COVID, tiny incidents at the school escalated quickly: Everybody was just highly stressed and coming back to school, tiny triggers and boom, it tipped them over. (Stuart)
However, whilst leaders played a critical role in supporting others’ well-being, many reported that their well-being had been adversely affected because of the poor well-being of others. For example, Edward explained that schools were seen as a target for people to express their anger and frustration, which then impacted on his own well-being: I think school, for staff and for parents and for students, school's an easy target. You can’t go and yell at the government, you can’t go yell at Covid, but school's a target that you can take out some anger at. (Edward)
Matthew's office door had been broken when a teacher had, in frustration and worry at the school's social distancing policies, hit it so hard that the glass broke. He explained the effect that such incidents had on him: Those kinds of things just wore me out, because people were asking for … Especially faculty members, were asking for my empathy with their personal stuff. You know, I definitely think the people that wanted my, that empathy, were using and leveraging their angst to get my empathy, displayed very little in return, and that was really hard. (Matthew)
These findings, whilst not dissimilar to the research on national schools (Bailey and Gibson, 2023; Greany et al., 2021), point to the added burden for these leaders in experiencing geographical isolation, living and working in another country; all of our sample, bar one, were foreign nationals.
To summarise, the data demonstrate that the well-being of students, teachers and leaders are connected, a finding which is consistent with the work of Shirley et al. (2020) prior to the pandemic. When leaders described their own well-being challenges, they were often linked to the well-being challenges of others. Yet, leader well-being was essential to their effectively supporting their school community through the pandemic.
Priority of well-being
There was a broad consensus among our participants that well-being had become a priority for schools after the pandemic. Connected to this, several heads mentioned that consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion (social justice issues) had become more important as a result of the pandemic. However, this priority given to the well-being of, ostensibly, all did not extend to emphasis or respect for the well-being of school leaders. This echoes research from other contexts suggesting that school leader well-being was not prioritised during COVID (Doyle Fosco et al., 2023; Hayes et al., 2022).
Theo explained how periodic and nominal attention was given to well-being prior to the pandemic, but the increased number of people dealing with more extreme issues had given it more importance: from a leadership point of view it's, you know, I have to work out how to balance extra things now, like wellness of staff, wellness of students. While that was always kind of there, it was never really at the forefront.(Theo) Particularly in Asia, schools are seen as exam factories, they’re something where you get high exam grades. That's all they thought about. The last two years has really shown parents that the social interaction, the mixing, the laughing, the joking, that's an enormous part of schooling. (Bernard) I don’t have to sell to a board or a parent community why the social emotional well-being of the children matters, just as much as maths and language. Before I used to have to do that. (Charles) I think what we’re seeing right now, and whether it's pandemic-related or not, is this huge focus on wellness, and that's been really interesting conversation, in terms of my time versus school time, and expectations and notions around bringing work home and extra assignments. (Edward)
However, some leaders felt that ‘well-being’ was also being used cynically. Both James and John felt that well-being had risen in importance for their school, but were frustrated that a few people were using the term for leverage to achieve their personal demands.
Similarly, John talked about ‘well-being’ being used as an excuse: It's great that we went to well-being because it's needed, but I think it's now becoming the de facto, oh, well-being, I can’t do this. Oh, my well-being's not good. You know, you’ve got to think of well-being, oh, I don’t think I can do that, I’m a bit stressed out at the moment. It's now becoming an excuse, which is, it's a shame, that you’ve got some people doing that … some people are jumping on that bandwagon and using it to their own advantage, which then denigrates the whole thing, unfortunately. (John)
In summary, these leaders agreed that the well-being of teachers, parents and students was being given more attention as a result of the pandemic, but they felt excluded from this focus on well-being – on the contrary, increased attention to well-being had become an additional pressure on leaders themselves. Given that, as discussed above, the data also demonstrate that the well-being of students, teachers and leaders are interdependent, the lack of priority that continues to be given to leader well-being will adversely impact on students and teachers as well. This data becomes more concerning when viewed in the context of the schools being standalone schools, not under the remit of government-funded schools so strategies such as those recommended by Doyle Fosco et al. (2023) of support at district level would be unavailable for these workers. It would be of interest to contrast our findings with similar research into international schools operating within chains which might provide more support.
Conclusion
This study of the well-being of international school leaders has offered insights into the experiences of these leaders during the pandemic. It supports findings from national contexts charting the considerable negative impact that COVID-19 had on school leader well-being (Burke and Dempsey, 2021; Fotheringham et al., 2020; Thomson et al., 2021; Urick et al., 2021) – being a source of stress, trauma and isolation. The study finds evidence that supports Seligman's (2011, 2018) concept of well-being. We use words such as ‘trauma’ and ‘isolation’ as they give a notion of the weight of the data, that these were meaningful events; several participants openly cried, became tearful or asked for the cameras to be turned off during the interview. Recollection of events was a difficult process for all our participants.
We have seen in this study that the well-being of school stakeholders is interdependent (Carroll et al., 2021; Shirley et al., 2020), so that the mental and emotional struggles of students and teachers resulted in stress and trauma for school leaders, as they tried to support everyone through challenging times. Despite this interdependence, however, leaders felt that there was insufficient attention given to their well-being by members of their community (Burke and Dempsey, 2021). The isolated nature of international schools makes them unique and significantly different to national schools, making the pandemic effects potentially more intense and meriting specific study. The data presented here are small-scale but concerning. They suggest that further research needs to be conducted to investigate whether these findings are representative, and to explore whether leader well-being has recovered as time has elapsed since the height of the pandemic.
We know from other studies (Bailey and Gibson, 2020; Gibson and Bailey, 2021) that international school leadership differs from that of national schools. This work contributes to the field by indicating how the leadership of such schools differed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and given the dearth of studies of international school leaders and their pandemic experiences, these conclusions are significant. Although work such as Greany et al. (2021) indicates that the well-being of school leaders during COVID-19 was an issue for national school leaders, our work appears to show that it may have been more severe for international school leaders. International school communities may always be particularly susceptible to well-being challenges because of the multiple cross-cultural transitions made by their leaders, teachers and (sometimes) their students (Cooker et al., 2016; Wigford and Higgins, 2019), and their geographical distance from wider family support networks. Yet, the findings above point to a lasting emotional legacy from the pandemic, which may impact recruitment to leadership positions in international schools – our small sample included participants who had left the profession and others who had changed school as a result of their pandemic experience. Moreover, they suggest that recent measures increasing attention to teacher and student well-being may be doomed to failure unless they also include attention to the well-being of school leaders (Burke and Dempsey, 2021).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
