This article reports early case-study data gathered from 20 schools involved in the "Impact of School Leadership on Pupil Outcomes" project. We present and discuss the perceptions of headteachers and other school leaders regarding leadership factors that directly and indirectly affect pupil outcomes in these improving schools. Included are…

In this paper the authors provide a synopsis of their results to date by organising them in response to four questions. These are questions about: leadership actions that account for sustained improvement or effectiveness in their school over at least several years; how the influence of these actions is exercised; differences among heads'…

Different approaches to conducting and theorising school leadership have become a major preoccupation within school systems throughout the world. This reflects the importance placed upon school-level education and the belief that leadership issues can play a big part in increasing the effectiveness of pupil's learning. This paper re-visits some…

Many schools are organised into departments which function as contexts that frame teachers' professional experiences in important ways. Some educational systems have adopted distributed forms of leadership within schools that rely strongly on the departmental structure and on the role of the department coordinator as teacher leader. This paper…

A cultural gap is widening in English secondary schools: between a twentieth-century ethos of institutional provision and the twenty-first century expectations and digital lifestyles of school students. Perhaps disaffected by traditional teaching methods and the competitive target culture of schools, many students have turned to social networking…

Many educational systems, like many public sectors, find themselves in the midst of rapid changes. In many cases, decentralisation is the order of the day, often alongside re-centralisation. The new relations between supra-national, national, local and organisational levels create novel conditions for leading schools and for establishing…

There is an emergent field of effective leadership of schools that is the product of recent policy strategies regarding the relationship between the state, public policy and knowledge. It is argued in this paper that this is producing a centralised branded form of effective leadership for the commissioning and delivery of provision that is…

Leadership for learning (LfL) is conceived as a network rather than as a centre within the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. This paper explores what is understood by the term network, both within LfL and in the wider educational and research communities, and how these understandings are reflected in a number of projects carried out…

Critical friendship is a flexible form of assistance for development and research, and one that had a key role in the international Carpe Vitam Leadership for Learning project. Whilst conforming to common features and engaging in similar activities there were some differences in the way critical friendship was enacted across the eight sites. The…

This article focuses on teacher leadership, an important dimension of the work of the Leadership for Learning network which is the focus of this special issue. More specifically, the article focuses on the launch of a journal--"Teacher Leadership"--as a strategy for promoting key values: shared leadership, teachers' leadership of development work,…

The values and principles underpinning the "Leadership for Learning: Cambridge Network" support the distribution of leadership to all members of the school community. This paper introduces the HCD (Highest Common Denominator) Student Partnership as a key way in which the "Leadership for Learning" team learns from, explores and extends student…

This article accounts for a project that rests on a collaboration between the Leadership for Learning group at the Faculty of Education and the county council in King's Lynn and West Norfolk to address a concern regarding the low aspirations in the community. At the heart of the project was the development of a cadre of "Learning Catalysts" who…

This paper draws on data from a recent multi-method study exploring knowledge management in support of district-level instructional renewal (Edge 2005). The data for this paper come from a strand of inquiry that examined the perceived impact of literacy teacher leader LC Networks in support of improved in-school implementation of the early…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how leadership can be conceptualised as a social fashioning process performed in everyday practice as a de-centred web of sociomaterial network building activity. Rather than positioning investigations of leadership according to units of analysis or a priori variables of interest, the leadership approach…

Governments around the world have adopted school self-evaluation as an essential corollary to the local management of schools. Typically this has been accompanied by prescribed frameworks, indicators and scoring systems, tending to promote a form of ritual self-inspection rather than an ongoing and dynamic process of self-evaluation. It is argued…