Inclusive leadership in practice: How private primary schools in Lahore publicly represent the management of diverse learning needs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68065/joccd.05.01.167Keywords:
Inclusive Leadership, Distributed Leadership, Social Justice Leadership, Neurodiversity, Private Schools, Document Analysis, Lahore, PakistanAbstract
Inclusive education is an established international imperative, yet a substantial gap persists between policy commitments and the publicly visible practices through which schools staff, lead and resource inclusion. Private primary schools in Lahore illustrate this gap clearly: operating in a competitive, fee-paying market, they face pressure to present themselves as inclusive. This document and content analysis examined 39 publicly available sources, including institutional websites and policies, search-indexed web content, videos, podcasts and interviews, corporate social media, and NGO, academic and policy documents. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke's six-phase thematic analysis, with a coding framework drawn from distributed leadership, social justice leadership and neurodiversity-inclusive perspectives. First, Lahore's private primary sector lacks a shared inclusion standard and instead spans three tiers: rhetorical or general inclusion, structured fee-based inclusion, and inclusion as institutional identity. Second, depending on tier, inclusion is positioned either as a priced add-on service or as core institutional identity. Third, the sector relies on parallel, standalone provision, with no documented referral or information-sharing networks linking mainstream private schools and specialist centres for learners with special educational needs. Fourth, although school-level inclusive leadership is largely absent from Pakistani discourse compared with international literature, national policy and NGO documents reveal operational challenges similar to those reported elsewhere. The study concludes that this gap does not stem simply from budget constraints and can be addressed. Inclusive education is a responsibility, not a privilege reserved for high-income families. Recommendations are offered for school leaders, policymakers, parents and future primary research in Pakistan.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Mumtaz Shahid, Hafiz Mutti Ullah Ijaz (Author)
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