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What comes to mind when you think about pirates? Parrots, plundering and walking the plank, perhaps? Famous pirate captains from literature and Hollywood? Or fancy-dress memories you’d rather forget? Whatever image you have in your head, we bet it isn’t school leaders.

Discourses on school leadership currently foreground (see also Harris & Jones, 2025); school leaders face increasing pressures of performance, resource management, and student and teacher needs. Leadership studies in other fields have already used pirate metaphors to highlight bravery and disruption (Allende, 2018), and equity and shared ownership (Gino, 2021), in the face of challenging and repressive conditions. We suggest that by using piracy as a spyglass through which to consider the practices of school leadership, we are confronted with new, powerful perspectives.

‘By using piracy as a spyglass through which to consider the practices of school leadership, we are confronted with new, powerful perspectives.’

In our research and partnership work (Gardner-McTaggart, 2025; Higham et al., 2025; Jones et al., 2025) we have encountered daring crews who confidently steer their ships through organisational and economic turbulence to new territories: upturning the curriculum in pursuit of agentic interdisciplinary enquiry; escaping the tyranny of classrooms altogether by setting up a whole school outdoors; and involving the local community in school development work. We work with principals who dare to challenge politically driven initiatives, who create new structures for equitable and participatory teaching and learning practices, and who innovate with students and staff to keep vulnerable children coming to school. These ships are cutting rakish paths through the ocean, offering ideas and practices that are more exciting, more improvisatory, and more humane. They are using their positions of authority to boldly challenge systemic limitations, advocating for the communities they serve and refusing to engage in blind compliance with check-box activities that conflict with their core educational values. They are rethinking the use of resources, designing new spaces, and leading their own collaborative networks in pursuit of educational aims. Can such piratical intentions and actions make positive change in schools seem less impossible?

We don’t want to defend piracy, but to foray opportunistically into its history and appeal. Markoff (1999, p. 673) argues that 18th-century pirate ships were generally crewed by mutineers, and that having escaped being pressed into military service against their will, ‘… they discovered that leadership could derive from the consent of the led, rather than be bestowed by a higher authority’. Elected captains’ right to command was only recognised in critical moments; outside of flight and battle, discussion and consensus ruled. Crews were highly diverse, and dialogue between many cultures led to hybrid, experimental forms of engagement. Graeber (2007) argues that practices like this are democratic, deriving not from a Classical tradition but from ‘the spaces in between’ where cultures mix. Pirates usurped or fled systems that had oppressed them to improvise new communities, goals and ways of living. Can such spaces be opened up in schools?

Piracy has many other shades. State-sanctioned piracy – or privateering – has historically licenced parasitical profits for a few in service of others’ political aims, and seen the birth of corporations more powerful than states (McDonald, 2022). More recent ‘pirates’ have taken to air waves and the internet to transgress regulations and property rights of companies and governments they have seen as repressive. We are being romantic but not naive – these are murky and treacherous waters.

We invite practitioners and researchers to consider how this rich metaphor of piracy might open us up to daring, divergent and rebellious approaches to school leadership that challenge authority, hegemony and compliance through creativity, courage and care. Inspired by Barthold’s (2024) call for radically democratic leadership, we want to explore ‘disruptive, non-hierarchical and pre-dialogic dimensions of leadership that may destruct as well as construct’. This means engaging with less normative traditions and initiatives – from anti-populism and environmental activism to social justice and reconciliation work with Indigenous communities. We are raising a flag of parley: to exchange ideas, build courage, and sail back to shore with new maps for systems that are more Bluebeard and less, well, rigged.

Want to join our motley crew? Train your spyglasses on the horizon for a special issue invitation in 2026.

References

Allende, S. C. (2018). Be more pirate. Portfolio Penguin.

Barthold, C. (2024). Leadership and the promise of democracy. In The Routledge critical companion to leadership studies (pp. 403–413). Routledge.

Gardner-McTaggart, A. (2025). Sustainable educational leadership and the climate crisis: knowledge, power, and positive futures (1st ed.). Routledge.

Gino, F. (2021, July 27). What pirates can teach us about leadership. Harvard Business School.

Graeber, D. (2007). Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire. AK Press.

Harris, A., & Jones, M. (2025). Crisis leadership: Implications for school leaders. School Leadership & Management, 45(3), 201–205.

Higham, R., Kitson, A., & Sharp, S. (2025). ‘What do I do? Save the environment or let children go hungry?’ Leading English schools at time of climate crisis. International Journal of Leadership in Education. Advance online publication.

Jones, M.-A., Dehlin, E., & Bergh, C. (2025). Expect the unexpected: The importance of school leaders in university-school partnerships. European Educational Research Journal. Advance online publication.

Markoff, J. (1999). Where and when was democracy invented? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41(4), 660–690.

McDonald, K. (2022, February 24). European piracy in the Indian Ocean. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.