International Schools in China in the Post covid-19 Pandemic Era: Survive or Thrive?

Abstract

This paper reports part of a study of a 3-year large project on international schools in China, where the landscape of international education has been recently transformed. The covid-19 pandemic, together with the policy context in China, reshaped international schools. The three-year project investigates the challenges as well as opportunities that the international schools in China are confronted with in the post pandemic era and how the successful principals enacted their leadership practices in the contextually diverse international schools, by employing a mixed-methods design. This paper only demonstrates the initial results from the interview data with twelve participants, which aims at exploring the nuanced profile that international schools in China had. Implications and future research are discussed.