Notions of distributed leadership and professional learning communities are bedfellows in the drive to school improvement. However, these ideas of sharing leadership and mutual learning as a community are not introduced and developed in a neutral context. Power relationships, priorities and purposes are constructed in certain ways within the policy and organisational environments educators work within. A blunt critique of distributing leadership is that it is about sharing responsibility but concentrating power, and there is some force in this assertion. Leadership is increasingly dispersed and intended to work through networks across organisational boundaries, but this is in a context which is strongly structured and which binds and directs the area of discretion. The degree to which professional educators are complying with or challenging reforms that promote performativity and private sector values and principles is hotly debated. Whatever the degree of compliance or challenge, the response to the context there is today requires a vision of an alternative and how to move towards it. This article argues that attention and research focused on democratic learning communities will help renew understanding of the possibilities for a democratic alternative. (Contains 2 figures and 4 notes.)