Licensed Leadership? Challenging the Orthodoxy of Distributed Leadership in Three Countries

Distributed leadership has commanded expansive interest in contemporary international literature and policy discourse. This interest exists, despite a lack of empirical substance. In each of the two countries in this roundtable, Ireland and Scotland, distributed leadership is now part of the orthodoxy of school leadership. However, despite the rhetoric of involving staff democratically in the leadership of schools, there remains an absence of consensus with regard to how this is both conceptualised and operationalised.

The purpose of this roundtable is to explore a reality that is far more complex than often reflected in the international discourse. Each of the two studies drawn from, sought to explore the extent to which there was genuine evidence of bottom-up leadership, or whether informal leadership from below remained dependent on legitimisation from above.