Needs and Challenges in Educational Leadership Training: An Exploratory Study of Academic Staff in Selected Chinese Universities

ABSTRACT Strengthening the leadership capacities of leading academics by educational leadership training programmes is inevitable for academics who lack experience, training and knowledge of educational leadership. This study has been conducted in association with a cooperative project on capacity building under the Erasmus+ programme, focusing on academics in Chinese higher education. The aim of this study is to explore academics' perceived needs and challenges in educational leadership training programmes. With a phenomenological study design in this research, semi‐structured interviews were employed with 12 academic members from nine Chinese universities and a qualitative content analysis by MAXQDA2022 was adopted for data analysis in this research. The findings show there are needs in leadership training from three dimensions: training methods, training contents and training formats and there are challenges in the pre‐training organization, training design and content, post‐training application and in the institutional administration systems. The findings are framed as contextually grounded insights that inform theory development and offer practical implications for similar higher education contexts across China. Finally, this study provides recommendations based on a nuanced understanding of academics' needs in educational leadership training, with the aim of improving and supporting more sustainable leadership development initiatives in similar Chinese higher education contexts.