| Summary: | "In a rapidly changing world with threats to the sustainability of the environment, societies, institutions and the people within them, a crucial question for educational leaders needs to be: What are these threats to sustainability, and how does the role of the educational leader need adapting to meet them through this century? Bottery unpacks this question, starting by providing greater clarity of thought for action by examining how major terms in the field, including sustainability, resilience, well-being, complexity, inter-connectedness, sufficiency, and equity, are used, mis-used, or mis-understood. He looks specifically at five covert threats, whether unnoticed or deliberately hidden: wicked problems, positive feedback, exponential growth, inappropriate degrees of connectivity and tipping points. He looks at the impact of five covert threats to sustainability at micro-, meso-, and macro- levels, and how understanding and meeting these threats affects and changes the thought, values, and practice underpinning the educational leadership role. Bottery argues that such awareness should similarly alter the focus of educational institutions, and of inspectoral processes on these institutions, and needs to become part of the cultural zeitgeist of present-day societies if future generations are to inherit a sustainable world. In so doing, The Educational Leader in a World of Covert Threats provides an original, timely and essential re-think of the role of educational leadership which makes it unique in the educational leadership literature."--
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