The National College for School Leadership is committed to helping schools to share leadership in a way that improves pupil outcomes. Distributed leadership is not a new idea. It has been around for a long time, either as delegated or as shared leadership.

It is essentially about sharing out leadership across the organisation. But we are aware that, while there is a strong belief in the idea, there is not a great deal of evidence about how it works in practice. Therefore, we have been exploring the idea in some depth. We know that leadership makes a difference. Therefore, schools need many leaders at all levels.

The belief in leadership teams: belief in the power of one is giving way to a belief in the power of everyone. As schools become more complex places to manage and lead, we need many more leaders than ever before. Ensuring that there are many leaders enables us to create pools of talent, from which we can grow tomorrow’s leaders.

 

The distinctive element of school leadership is that it is focused on learning and teaching. Therefore, when we talk about sharing leadership, we ought to mean sharing learning-centred leadership. We should create and develop many leaders who influence and improve the quality of learning and teaching.Although distributed leadership is not a difficult idea, when put into practice it can take many different forms. For this reason, we have studied what it looks like in action and produced these materials.