Leuphana researcher honored as a “key figure” in the education scene

For Sarah Fichtner, school principals are people who not only administer, but also shape the future. This conviction runs like a thread through the social anthropologist's career. Sarah Fichtner joined the team of Prof. Dr. Marcus Pietsch, Professor of Education Management at Leuphana University, in April 2025. She is doing pioneering work in a DFG research project on innovation and school leadership and is responsible for setting up a Euro-African research team. The aim is to produce a qualitative meta-synthesis that systematically brings together existing studies on school leadership and innovation processes in Africa and makes them internationally accessible. 

During and after her doctorate, Fichtner spent several years conducting research in West Africa and ethnographically documenting the everyday life of a school principal in Benin. A documentary film was also made. “This experience had a profound impact on me,” she says. “It was there that I understood how central school leadership is to personal and social development.” 

Since 2020, Fichtner has been working at the Research Institute for Education and Social Economics (FiBS) in Berlin. Among other things, she helped establish the Cornelsen School Management Study and led several nationwide surveys. The study combines in-depth interviews with representative online surveys and reveals the conditions under which school administrators in Germany work—and how strongly they see themselves as shapers of school development. 

She has now been honored by Bildung.Table for this work, with her expertise on the role of innovative school leadership and her work on educational issues in sub-Saharan Africa particularly standing out. The award confirms her status as one of the most prominent thought leaders in the “Think Tanks” category.

Sarah Fichtner sees the award as recognition for a field of research that has long received little attention: “It is precisely qualitative research that looks beyond the horizon, combining social anthropological and educational perspectives, that can give us crucial insights into how school leaders enable innovation in different contexts. We already know that they do so,” explains the researcher. 

The research project “Educational Leadership and Innovation: Systematising the Evidence” is funded by the German Research Foundation with around 350,000 euros.