Leading Complex Educational Change Via National Participative Reforms? A Case of Finnish Core Curriculum Reform Leadership

Abstract National-level educational administrators constantly face the question of how to ensure that the basic education system successfully meets complex local, national, international, and global challenges, and what is the best way to initiate and drive systemic changes in education amid such complexity and to create value for society. Studies have shown that participative approaches to reform leadership are beneficial; however, in practice, participative incentives are randomly used in national reform contexts. In this article, we present a Finnish case of national participative leadership regarding the Finnish Core Curriculum Reform of 2014 (hereafter FCCR2014). We interviewed key leaders in the FCCR2014 process (n = 23) and analyzed the data from social, personal, interpersonal, and organizational viewpoints with this question in mind: How did administrators responsible for leading the reform develop and lead the participative FCCR2014 process? Sub questions were: (1) What were their goals in developing and leading the reform, and (2) how did they succeed in developing and leading the reform in line with their goals—what was effective and what was not? The results show how participative leadership in a national curriculum reform calls for top leaders to include stakeholders, build and support strong and open collaboration processes, take the risk of losing some of their control, reject strict dichotomizations between strategy formulation and implementation, and consider change leadership a responsible act of giving stakeholders a fair chance to participate in the decision-making that affects their lives. Key aspects to participative leadership included building participation, not quasi-participation; building coherence in complexity—together; and fitting change to the education system with responsible leadership.