Instructional Leadership Under Dual-Curriculum Pressure: A Narrative Review and Conceptual Framework for Bilingual K-12 Schools in China

<p>China now hosts more K-12 schools delivering non-national curricula than any other country, and an increasing share now blend a host-nation curriculum with an English-medium one. This growth has outpaced research into how instructional leaders in these schools manage the resulting dual-curriculum pressure. This narrative review synthesises 14 sources across four strands: the structural and staffing realities of international/bilingual schooling in China, the instructional leadership tradition founded on the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS), leadership challenges specific to internationally-accredited curricula (e.g. the International Baccalaureate), and emerging scholarship on leader identity in dual-language settings. Based on this synthesis, the review proposes an original conceptual extension: that the PIMRS dimension of 'managing the instructional programme' requires splitting into local-staff and expatriate-staff sub-constructs to adequately describe leadership practice in schools with co-taught bilingual classrooms. This proposition is offered as a conceptual contribution and a direction for future empirical research, not as an empirically tested finding.Keywords: instructional leadership, bilingual education, international schools, dual curriculum, China, K-12 education, narrative review</p>