EMAL is 50: Celebrating half a century disseminating high quality research and scholarship

Happy New Year and welcome to volume 50 of EMAL. I hope you spotted the gold banner on the cover, added to celebrate our half-century. On a personal note, this is also the 20th volume for which I have responsibility as editor-in-chief. The March issue (volume 50.2) will be a 50th Anniversary Special Edition with longitudinal overview papers by members of the UK and International Boards. This will be a very significant issue – not to be missed. We are also celebrating a new contract between EMAL’s owner, the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS) and its publishing partner, Sage, to publish EMAL and our sibling journal, Management in Education, until 2026. This is good news for EMAL, and we are delighted to extend the partnership. The new contract provides for electronic access to BELMAS journals but not for print copies. However, BELMAS Council has decided to continue print copies for BELMAS members during EMAL’s 50th Anniversary Year. From 2023, members wishing to retain print copies will need to pay an additional membership fee. If you are not currently a BELMAS member, you can find out more at www.belmas.org.uk. In this first issue of our anniversary year, I offer some reflections on the 50 years of EMAL. The first edition of the journal was published in June 1972 with the title of Educational Administration. Strangely, the second issue of volume 1 was published in March 1973. Throughout the 1970s, there were only two issues per volume. This increased to three each year in the 1980s and to four in the 1990s. This continued until 2009, when the current pattern of six editions of each volume was introduced. The first volume was also very different in other ways. All the articles were written by UK authors and focused on administration and management (no sign of leadership) in UK settings. Several papers were commentaries, rather than research reports or literature reviews, and the authors included some practitioners reflecting on their experience. There was also a focus on local education authorities, which had a much stronger role in educational administration than they do in contemporary England, for example. These features of the early editions of EMAL are a product of the time, of course, but also reflect that educational administration was an emerging field with few scholars and limited knowledge production. I imagine that the founders of the journal, including the editor Meredydd Hughes, who later became a distinguished professor at the University of Birmingham, would barely recognise the journal in its present form but I hope they would appreciate that it has become a leading global journal publishing articles from all over the World. Its current position in the first quartile of the Education and Educational Research category of the Social Sciences Citation Index, with an impact factor of 4.208, is a source of pride for the current Editorial Board but this would not have been possible without the pioneering work of the journal’s founding editor and contributors. Editorial