In about a decade the theory of distributed leadership has moved from a tool to better understand the ecology of leadership to a widely prescribed practice. This article considers how to account for its spread and dominance and what purpose it serves. The concept offers an enticing suggestion of including more in leadership, and even sometimes…

This article examines illustrative cases of partnerships from a government-funded programme of experimental projects in England designed to test out the potential of senior business managers to provide leadership across a group of schools. The article places the programme within the context of international public service reforms and, more…

The most recent decade has seen a major growth in interest in teacher leadership, but there is limited research on the extent to which early career teachers can take on teacher leadership roles. In this article we explore this question by looking at teachers prepared through the alternative certification programme Teach First (TF), which aims to…

Formal and informal partnerships have become key features of education policy and practice in many countries and managing such collaborative arrangements is an important dimension of the role(s) of leaders of educational organizations. Recent research has shown both the tensions and conflict that can develop in partnerships as well as the…

Most research and scholarship in the field of educational leadership and management seems focused on leaders and managers and their perspectives, while the perspective of an entire constituency--"the led"--is generally overlooked and neglected. This article contributes towards redressing this imbalance. Located within the context of the…

The move in England towards extended services was a core part of the educational policy of successive Labour governments throughout the 2000s. Sitting alongside like-minded initiatives, school leaders were encouraged to envision, plan for and operate a range of activities and services aimed at deepening and extending schools' relationships…

This article reports the findings of a small-scale investigation into the perspectives of Chinese school leaders (school principals and deputy principals) on their leadership learning opportunities. The research draws on key policy documents and semi-structured interviews within a phenomenographic framework based on a cluster sample of ten school…

Distributed leadership is now widely known and variously enacted in schools and school systems. Distributed leadership implies a fundamental re-conceptualisation of leadership as practice and challenges conventional wisdom about the relationship between formal leadership and organisational performance. There has been much debate, speculation and…

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government elected in 2010 has argued contemporary reform will increase the autonomy of schools in England. Given the complexities that exist, however, in the balance between autonomy and control, we explore how school leaders view autonomy as it exists within the wider policy framework. The article…

We present a multi-phase coaching model that was implemented to help principals improve their instructional leadership practices. We then discuss a rubric based on this coaching model that we used to evaluate coaches' implementation of key model phases and to identify principals' responses to the coaching. After presenting the leadership…

A group is a learning community when members share a common vision that learning is the primary purpose for their association and the ultimate value to preserve in their workplace and that learning outcomes are the primary criteria for evaluating the success of their work. Some attributes of a learning community include modeling, continual sharing…

Research shows that the basic right to equal school education has become a reality since 1956, but has not led to equal achievement. Some of the factors responsible for low achievement levels are low birth weight, frequent changing of schools and class size.

Childhood environment and skills are important factors that contribute to the achievement gap of students, but blaming only the preschool years for low achievement will not solve the problem. Ample funding of schools and transformative power of teachers and peers can rid the student of the gap.

New positron emission tomography (PET) and MRI technologies, which allow looking inside the brains, show that the brains of boys and girls differ both structurally and functionally that profoundly affect the human learning. These gender differences in the brain are corroborated in males and females throughout the world and do not differ…

The large achievement gap between white and minority children cannot be bridged by only improving schools. The factors which need to be looked into are health need of the children, providing stable housing to low-income families and increasing the number of professional caregivers during the out-of- school hours.