Centre for Transformative Change in Schools (CenTCS)

This research stream aims to investigate how transformative professional learning serves as a catalyst for change across multiple levels, especially for teachers, schools, and education systems. It examines the extent to which professional learning fosters deep shifts in beliefs, practices, and identities, and explores the dynamics that enable these changes to scale and influence organisational culture and systemic reform. The stream considers how top-down policy structures and bottom-up initiatives interact to create conditions for sustainable transformation.

During 2025–26, this stream supported Centre-wide conversations about how we conceptualise transformative professional learning and its relationship to transformative change in schools. The resulting conceptual position paper can be found here. 

The stream focuses on researching and enhancing connections between communities and educational spaces, fostering parent and family engagement, and building on the affordances of place-based education. We strive to eliminate barriers and soften boundaries between schools and communities, and teachers and caregivers. In addition, we also embrace families' funds of knowledge, and imagine educational futures that include all educators, students, families, and wider communities.  Our work foregrounds linguistic and cultural diversity, social inequality, and agency of educators, students, families, and community members. This stream primarily focuses on the first question in our Research Compass by reimagining education for just futures through place-based connections. We also address the fourth theme in the Research Compass by focusing on partnerships (broadly defined) and young people and their communities. Activities of this stream have implications for the other themes in the Research Compass.

During 2025–26, this stream supported work to understand and soften boundaries between schools and communities, teachers and caregivers, and formal and informal educational spaces. It has also provided a foundation for partnership work with schools, community organisations and international collaborators. Colleagues have collaborated on (Dis)Connections in Schooling: A Concept Paper, which can be found here. 

This project stream investigates how educator learning can become a generative force for justice and sustainability amid rapid technological, geopolitical and planetary transformations. It explores pedagogies that open up learning beyond the classroom—across human and more-than-human relationships, digital and material worlds—to imagine new ways of being, learning, and teaching that serve to drive change for social good rather than simply react to external change. Our research approaches aim to support the creation, rather than merely description, of educational conditions for a just and thriving future. ​

During 2025–26, this stream supported Centre conversations about the future of teaching and teacher education, the implications of digital and ecological change, and the role of educational research in creating more just and sustainable conditions for learning. As part of this work, members of CenTCS were involved in scholarly trips to learn and exchange ideas with other institutions around shared concerns and innovative international professional learning initiatives. In partnership with Glasgow City Council, CenTCS hosted a roundtable discussion with teachers holding a range of different roles in the system to explore ‘Glasgow Learning Futures’. This work is ongoing, and the themes arising from these meetings have informed the scoping of the funding horizon for future actions. An overview of the thinking that underpins our work so far is available here: CenTCS Stream 3 - Futures Thinking