Whether voluntary or enforced, increasing patterns of migration have significantly impacted schools by making them linguistically, culturally, religiously and ethnically more diverse than ever before. This increasing diversity requires school leaders to put in place mechanisms to ensure equity of participation for migration background students. Dimmock and Walker (2005) believe that school leaders need to play a vital role in promoting and sustaining an environment that embraces diversity and, by association, contributes to solving the macro problems of society. To accomplish this emerging role, there is a need for ‘new approaches to educational leadership in which leaders exhibit culturally responsive organisational practices, behaviours and competencies’ (Madhlangobe and Gordon, 2012: p. 177). This is all well and good in theory, but the current and historical context in which school leaders operate, together with the training and supports that are provided, influences, to a significant extent, how culturally responsive leadership can operate in practice. This study, which is part of a European Commission Erasmus+ funded project entitled Supporting Culturally Responsive Leadership and Evaluation in Schools (CReLES), examines these assumptions by mapping out the factors and actors that can hinder and facilitate the flourishing of such practices in four European countries, Austria, Ireland, Russia and Spain.

The idea of cultural development of a child as introduced by Vygotsky has informed much educational research and theorizing in recent decades. However, in the West it to a large extent tends to be put in the background of the investigation of how teachers or other more experienced participants support children's development, with the concept of scaffolding in the foreground. In this article we review original research and educational psychological theorizing from Russia, work that is less known in the West, discussing how teachers can enter into this developmental field to challenge and support children's development.

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The results of the first large-scale independent study of quality of preschool education in Russia are presented. The possibilities that educational environment of a preschool group provide for children are analysed. Data were obtained in 2016-2017 by expert observation with the instrument "Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale -revised edition" and extra expert questionnaire for "adult-child" ratio evaluation. In addition, a questionnaire for the teachers of preschool groups was used. With its help, factors that influence the quality of educational environment and its dynamics are identified. The results of two sample clusters (leaders of local ratings and randomly selected preschools) are compared for each year and between years. The quality of preschool education has improved from 2016 to 2017 (but still it is on the minimum level), regardless of the participation of preschools of the cluster in the study. However, in preschools, which took part in the second year, the quality has changed for the better more significantly than in "newcomers". Randomly selected preschools showed better quality dynamics than leaders of local ratings. A correlation analysis is made of the dynamics of each preschool participating in the second year and the factors affecting the quality of educational environment. Most factors, such as age of a teacher, his/her experience, professional training program, being familiar with the instrument of evaluation, doesn't have any significant influence. The awareness of teachers about the results of the assessment significantly influences, and the number of workshops where these results were discussed does not matter.

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