This article examines how principals socially construct the leadership configuration of principals and vice-principals in Singapore and what factors influenced the principal's shaping of this configuration. The qualitative study, involving the interview of 10 principals, sought to understand how principals made sense of their vice-principals roles…

The university academic manager (AM) or head of school/department is typically positioned in a hierarchical world: as a middle manager 'sandwiched' between senior management and subordinates. I propose a different framing: the AM cohabits two worlds, the worlds of hierarchy and collegiality respectively. Using an ideal type framework and data…

Chile is undertaking an ambitious public education reform, re-centralising the administration of municipal schools in larger territories. This reform is unprecedented, both for the size of the new intermediate-level services ("Servicios Locales de Educación Pública") and the escalation of their bureaucratic complexity, facing widespread…

The current study examines senior school leaders' theories of action driving their decision-making around how they manage departments and distribute leadership to department heads. Based on a thematic analysis of transcripts of interviews with the principal, head of the curriculum unit, and two department heads from nine high schools, four…

System leadership continues to be constructed largely as a desirable, even normative, evolution of educational leadership, with critiques often focusing on implementation rather than principles. This belies its increasingly recognised role in processes of disintermediation, in which the 'middle tier' comprising local government is dismantled. In…

There is currently considerable interest in system leadership and how it can support school change at scale. System leadership aims to move learning beyond school boundaries through leveraging experience and expertise. The success of system leadership depends on how key educational players can move effectively between and across traditional…

Education leadership literature indicates that relatively little attention has been given to the specific duties and responsibilities of South African deputy principals in comparison with other leadership and management positions in schools. As a result, their roles and responsibilities remain vague. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to…

In England, schools are able to take on academy status, which is intended by the central government to give them greater autonomy (DfE, 2018). Groups of academies can form multi-academy trusts (MATs), which typically grow in size with additional schools becoming academies and joining. One mechanism for MAT growth is sponsorship, which occurs when…

Scholars have asserted that a school principal's authentic leadership can raise the engagement of teachers under their charge. This paper delves into this consideration, within the context of Kuwaiti educational reform, by investigating the extent to which principal authentic leadership (PAL) affects teacher engagement (TE) by enhancing their…

This article considers distributed leadership in the context of the extensive literature on post-bureaucratic organisations. It suggests that both distributed leadership and bureaucracy are ideal types. It outlines the development of bureaucracy as an organisational form, challenges the often-stereotypical criticisms that have damned the theory…

The role of principal supervisor has been shifting from a focus on management to one that emphasizes support for principals. External partners can sometimes help with redesigning the role and other aspects of district organization. However, most research focuses on large urban districts with role conceptions and organizational structures that are…

In early childhood education, the concept of distributed leadership has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding leadership as well as a normative guide for what leadership should be. The concept originates in Peter Gronn's work, where it is positioned as overcoming the structure-agency debate, which is a foundational question in the…

Ensuring effective university governance and leadership is more important than ever before given contemporary transformations of higher education functions, institutions and social roles. This paper reports contributions which seek to stimulate research in this field. Drawing from the formative case study of Australian universities, it discusses…

This article explores newly appointed principals' descriptions of a decentralised and market adopted school system. An institutional logics perspective is applied to analyse how logics visible at the national level evoke images among principals at the local level. Empirical data consist of 66 examinations from the National Principal Training…

This paper troubles notions of 'social justice' as being compromised and fractured by the autonomous school agenda. Drawing on interviews with 13 autonomous school principals in Australia, it demonstrates how the devolution of schooling simultaneously rips the seams of the 'social' fabric that makes "collective" justice possible. The…