The last decade or so has seen an emerging literature supporting the position that school leaders and school leadership are important. This article argues, however, that recent developments in the area of school leadership have led to an orthodoxy that needs to be challenged and tested. It is an orthodoxy that has been driven essentially by those…

This article argues that while notions of collective leadership, such as distributed or shared, are nominally more inclusive, barriers to inclusive ways of thinking about and relating to one another will be multi-faceted (past and present) and formidable to change. This argument emanates from a critical review of research literature and an…

This article argues that the work of school principals in South Africa is shaped by two major sets of constructs or "landscapes": the literature on leadership and management which provides particular constructions of the field and its changes; and the terrain of new policy frameworks adopted after apartheid to transform the education…

This article critically examines two sets of ideas that have influenced educational reform in the recent past: managerialism and market approaches. It is argued that while each can be demonstrated to have led to useful change, neither provides a basis for future improvement in education. A recent example of change within the State School sector of…