Rethinking leadership: perspectives on

remodelling practice

Steve Rayner*a and Helen Gunterb

aSchool of Education, University of Birmingham, UK; bSchool of Education, University of

Manchester, UK

This article describes forms of educational leadership observed as part of an

evaluation of the Transforming School Workforce Pilot Pathfinder Project in

England commissioned by the UK Government. The 32 Pilot Schools made

interventions in organizational practice in ways that required them to think

differently about leadership. Changes in the number, type and deployment of the

school workforce combined with thinking about the nature of work have challenged

existing practices. In particular, a focus on change management teams drawn from

the whole school workforce and supported by an external school workforce advisor

required schools to examine the nature of decision-making and participation. In this

article we draw on case study evidence from eight schools and through this examine

the implications of the Project for how leadership is understood and practiced. We

intend to critically engage with the current popularity for distributed leadership by

examining the models of practice in the Pathfinder schools and the potential that

distribution theories of educational leadership have for the workforce, for students,

and for the wider community.

Introduction

School leadership is currently being presented to us as an abstraction of propositions

and required behaviours, often derived from non-educational settings by those at a

distance from where this leadership is practiced (Gunter, 2005). Leadership is

construed as an objectified and tangible entity that we can understand by asking:

what is leadership? The implications of such a question are that we draw on very

limited knowledge claims: we tend to discount the self and our experience as being

meaningful to such a question; we tend to comply with established norms about how

organizations work. We bring into our work setting the wider social and cultural

stabilizers rooted in leader centric notions of hierarchy and role.

*Corresponding author. School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham

B15 2TT, UK. Email: S.G.Rayner@bham.ac.uk

Educational Review, Vol. 57, No. 2, May 2005

ISSN 0013-1911 (print)/ISSN 1465-3397 (online)/05/020151-11

# Educational Review

DOI: 10.1080/0013191042000308332

In this article we intend thinking through the interview data from the eight case

study schools in ways that look at leadership differently. The rich narratives from

individual and group encounters enable us to ask questions that interrogate how

leadership is being constructed and presented, and to take the opportunity to reveal

other ways in which we can think about our practice. We are both members of the

research team who were involved in designing and carrying out the fieldwork and in

this article we are able to report aspects of the formal evaluation findings. In addition

to this our scholarship and professional practice locates us within the field of

educational leadership as practitioners, teachers, and theorists. We have drawn on

this in order to develop insights about what the data means for how we produce

understandings regarding professional relationships within change processes. We

propose a way of describing, understanding and explaining organizational life as

distributed practice, where leadership is relational and diffused. In doing this we

draw on Bourdieu’s (1990) theory of practice where his thinking tools incite us to

challenge knowledge production in regard to what is known and what is worth

knowing, and to reflexively engage with who says what is worthwhile.

Distributed leadership

Remodelling retains and strengthens hierarchical leadership principally located in

the headteacher:

Our determination is to ensure that every Head is able to do more than run a stable

school. Transformation requires leadership which:

% Can frame a clear vision that engages the school community;% Can motivate and inspire;% Pursues change in a consistent and disciplined way; and% Understands and leads the professional business of teaching.

To achieve their full potential, teachers need to work in a school that is creative,

enabling and flexible. And the biggest influence is the Head. Every teacher is a leader in

the classroom. Every Head must be the leader of these leaders. And the Head’s greatest

task is the motivation and deployment of their key resource: staff.

Heads must be free to remodel school staffing, the organisation of the school day,

school week and school year and be imaginative in the use of school space—opening up

opportunities for learning in the community, engaging with business and developing

vocational studies. (DfES, 2003, p. 26)

This approach is consistent with the training and licensing of headteachers as school

leaders (Hopkins, 2001) and wider public sector reform (PMSU, 2004).

Headteachers are to implement reforms, such as remodelling, through having the

attributes and behaving as transformational leaders who can inspire and build

commitment from individual post-holders within the workforce as followers. There

is a simultaneous separation and integration of leaders with followers: heads as

organizational leaders must strategically perform through the delivery of targets and

so are separate from but at the same time associated with teachers, the bursar,

administrators, teaching assistants, who must operationally perform in order that

152 S. Rayner and H. Gunter

heads deliver the effective school. Performance measurement requires an integration

of hearts, minds and bodies with targets and so the division of labour is continually

being reworked but not dismantled.

Alternative insights can be gained through engaging with experiences from the

Transforming the School Workforce (TSW) Project, which, we argue, offers a more

accurate explanation of ‘real-life context’. To better understand this process we need

to put it into a framework of wider policy strategies. Grace (1995) is helpful here as

he argues that there are two trends in how power in the educational setting is

exercised: first, the ‘hierarchical and authoritarian features of the English ‘‘head-

master tradition’’’ and, second, the ‘shared decision-making practices of the 1960s

and 1970s’. Both are manifest in the ‘position of the headteacher as expert chief

executive’ and the development of ‘collaborative school management in the 1990s’

(Grace, 1995, p. 45). The continued dominance of strong leadership reinforced by a

policy context that has reworked headship as organizational school leadership is the

setting in which remodelling is taking place. If we build on the Grace analysis, we can

identify that the headmaster tradition is observable in delegated and empowered

leadership (Gunter, 2005). Both of these approaches assume that distribution is

through formal organizational processes such as line management, roles and job

descriptions, and as such leadership is what leaders do to followers. Delegation is the

reallocation of work from one role to another (between or within a level) and so the

person who is delegated to is authorized to do that work. Remodelling is being

delegated to and within schools. There is an emphasis on role definition so that work

that was previously done by teachers (display, pastoral, enrichment activities, etc.)

could be delegated to other post-holders (bursar, administrator, teaching assistant).

Empowerment is a more normative form of delegation through cultural licensing,

and as followers our emotional commitment is captured. A teaching assistant who is

empowered still works within a clearly defined boundary (and salary structure) but is

optimistic about delegation in ways that new ideas about the role could be developed.

Research shows that while heads and teachers have been presented with this type

of leadership and have had to work within it, they have not necessarily become

complicit with it. School leadership as transformational or performance organiza-

tional leadership is disconnected from working lives and so is hollow. It denies

agency in ways that recognize bottom-up approaches through dispersed and

democratic leadership (Gunter, 2005). This assumes that distribution is ‘stretched-

over’ the organization (Spillane et al., 2003, p. 535) and work happens in ways that

may be separate from the influence of formal leaders. We should take Gronn’s

(2003, p. 278) advice and shift our gaze away from heads as ‘causal agents of work

outcomes’ towards the ‘totality of the work that is to be performed by the

organisation’, and so make visible the relationships and influence flows within

people as the organization. Consequently, remodelling grows out of how people

think about and experience their practice, and how teachers strategically engage with

the aims and what it means for them within their working and wider lives.

Dispersal means that the workforce have developed ways of working together that

can be aligned and intuitive, and so people can work in ways that are coordinated

Perspectives on remodelling practice 153

and interdependent (Gronn, 2003). Working within partnerships such as the head

and bursar, teacher and teaching assistant, clerical assistant and site manager,

teacher and student, means that work and who is to do it, and on what terms, is

negotiated and agreed. Democracy is a more normative form of dispersal, because it

is less about who participates and more about how opportunities to participate are

widened and developed. Hence in a democratic school a teaching assistant is able to

sit down with a teacher and have parity of esteem in the decision-making process,

and is able to lead on developments not just as an employee but also as a citizen of

the community served by the school as a public institution. The potential exists here

for a more educative leadership where practice is integrated with learning, and

through that practice we learn.

While these ways of conceptualizing practice are helpful because they enable us to

both describe it and to engage in dialogue about changes to that practice, they do

tend to be based on a binary divide between agency and structure. We can examine

structure (with associated concepts such as role) and so focus on the formal division

of labour. In this case we ask questions about how work is delegated and how people

feel empowered. We can examine agency (with associated concepts such as identity)

and so focus on what people do within the formal division of labour. In this case we

can ask questions about how people work together and how influence flows through

relationships. The separation of agency and structure enables us to focus on one or

the other and while this illuminates aspects of organizational life it does not enable

reality to be fully charted and better understood. We need to have a way of

understanding organizations that allows the interplay between agency and structure

to be theorized within activity, and so we propose distributed practice. We also need

to have a way of giving recognition to the understanding of leadership that we bring

to our work, and how these may be different to the preferred and increasingly

hegemonic models developed in other contexts that we are in receipt of. Work by

both humanistic (Rayner & Ribbins, 1999; Ribbins, 1997) and feminist researchers

(Blackmore, 1999; Hall, 1996) have surfaced the importance of values and how this

can be marginalized through assumptions generated within traditional structures.

Bryant (2003) shows how Native Americans have a conceptual and cultural

understanding of leadership that is located within a fluidity of practice where

individual contributions are different and each has a different role, and importantly:

‘no single entity supervises all other individual entities in some hierarchical fashion’

(Bryant, 2003, p. 220). This enables the potential of educational leadership to be

recognized because it begins with the core purposes of how we do our work and how

our participation creates meaning in regard to our social selves within a public

institution.

Our critical reading of the data has been through using Bourdieu’s tools of habitus

and field. Remodelling is a field of struggle regarding material gain such as

reductions in working hours and the staking of symbolic capital through the

distinction of doing remodelling. Entering a field reveals habitus or a ‘feel for the

game’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 9), and so the object–subject divide is bridged through

the interplay between agency and structure. Our habitus or embodied dispositions to

154 S. Rayner and H. Gunter

play the game can only be understood through the agent’s interactions with others. It

is ways of moving and talking as regularities in social actions which are both

socialized and socializing. The teacher, teaching assistant, bursar, clerical assistant as

agents within remodelling reveal their structured and structuring disposition to

practice in particular ways as illustrated in ways of thinking, doing and talking. They

will take up a position on remodelling regarding what they think, do and say, and

through this they will position others in regard to who is and is not associated with.

This process is not disconnected from the wider structures that shape what is

regarded as worthwhile work. In this way we can also see that position by the self and

by others can be understood through the school as a site for the field of remodelling

and how this is interlinked with meta-fields of politics, the economy, and culture.

The teacher, teaching assistant, bursar, clerical assistant, within remodelling face

subordination, domination, and equivalence in regard to how their practice is

experienced and controlled. We must ask questions about how remodelling, which

has been defined at a distance from work practice, is interpreted within the place of

practice, and how the workforce may accept, redefine, and match with this. In

proposing distributed practice we are interested in how the workforce talk, think and

do leadership as a relational process. As Gunter (2001) argues: ‘… demands do not

determine how field members respond when there is a mechanistic cause and effect

relationship, rather, what is significant is how and why agents within the field, linked

to their habitus … give legitimacy to particular claims for recognition’ (p. 14).

Distributed practice

The three official features of remodelling in the eight case study schools were: the

change plan; the change management team (CMT); and changes within the

organizational culture. A fourth feature subsequently emerged through our

examination of the data—a discernible distributed practice associated with how

people made sense of the relationship between professional practice and the work

involved in the Project, and it is expressed as a personal reaction to the Project

experience.

The change plan

In the way of operating a performance strategy, each school as part of the TSW

Project was required to, and produced, a change plan, reflecting the clearly stated

intention to innovate and reform approaches to professional practice. For example,

at Lakeside School the strategy was to develop the use of information and

communications technology (ICT) through the provision of laptops for teachers to

support the development of teaching resources and facilitate networking, and the

introduction of an electronic communication, attendance and reporting system to

give staff more accurate and readily available information about students. New

support staff were appointed including the Inclusive Learning Unit Officer heading

up the new Inclusive Learning Unit, a Technical Support Assistant, a Creative

Assistant and a part-time Bursar assistant. Such plans are outcomes of change

Perspectives on remodelling practice 155

processes involving the CMT and wider workforce in working through complex and

tough issues regarding purposes and practices.

The change management team (CMT)

A second formal and important site for distributed practice was the CMT. The

London Leadership Centre required all the schools to set up a CMT to plan and

oversee the change. Schools were encouraged to include membership from across

the workforce and, with the support of an external School Workforce Adviser, they

also aimed to engage in ‘blue skies’ thinking about the opportunities afforded by

the Project.

The data reveals how the disposition to contribute has been witnessed and has

structured practice:

The change teams have been fantastic! People have been constructive and helpful and

it’s good to have the ideas from a cross section of staff. It’s an interesting model of

change, but the Head is seen as being supportive and open minded about the change

management process so this has helped. We are an open school that embraces change

and staff have been kept well informed and interested in being involved. (Beacon Hall—

Middle Manager)

The management of the school has changed in a positive way, the change management

team has more positive ideas. Management has changed for the better, it is a more

positive school. (Meadow School—Support Staff 1)

The organizational culture

A third aspect to the work of reform and change management is how the Project, and

the function of a CMT, reveal a disposition to practice and to talk about that

practice within schools. There is clear evidence in the case study data of increasing

flexibility and renewed trust:

A mental shift in teachers was needed. They work long hours and are committed. Now

because of the early opening of school we say: ‘unless you need to be here, take your lap

top and go’. It is important to do this because our work never finishes, it is constantly in

your head. (Meadow School—Senior Manager)

Filling in the research diary has made me look at what I do. I do too much

administration and not enough teaching … I restructured my time and it was a great

exercise. I have started to adjust my time, and I am working at home on lighter work. I

can avoid the traffic because I leave earlier. (Meadow School—Diary debrief meeting)

The success of the Project for me is that it’s been about the team approach to problem

solving and decision-making. It’s not just for the Senior Management Team to make

the decisions it’s about all the staff being involved. (Beacon Hall—Teacher)

What is at stake through the Project is the opportunity to think differently about

work and how this interconnects with wider lived lives. What participants are staking

as capital within remodelling is how they want their identity as workers to shift and

how they are giving distinction to that in their own and others’ practice.

156 S. Rayner and H. Gunter

The Project experience: dispersal effects on agency and structure

Our reading of the data has revealed a fourth feature of the Project as a common

perception of an innovatory experience, where participation worked as a catalyst for

thinking around the practice of teacher professionality:

I have enjoyed being part of the Project and got loads of ideas from other schools. The

sharing of good practice is the way ahead—not re-inventing the wheel. (Lakeside—

Teacher)

It has been important to develop the teacher as a leader of teams. We have worked to

get teachers to understand that what they do or not do has a knock on effect. They have

a part to play in the vision and not just in a single cell classroom. (Meadow School—

Senior Manager)

The ethos of change existed within the school previously, but it can be a risk putting

diverse groups of staff together to solve problems. Usefully the staff soon realize that

ideas for change need discussion, mean difficulties and call for hard talk! (Beacon

Hall—Senior Manager)

Here the language is an acceptance of managerial labels such as vision, teams, and

problem solving. Underlying this is more complex practice of how through revealing

dispositions to participate the workforce has not only structured their encounters

with each other but have come to structure their habitus. This embodied but

generative approach to understanding practice means that inter-relationships and

inter-dependencies are both practiced and witnessed in ways that shape our

dispositions.

We must also acknowledge that in talking about change there have been two other

structural influences. First, the Project was overlain onto existing cultures and

practice, and so embedded attitudes could interrupt change or begin to take the

change idea and work in ways that may not have been initially envisaged. Accounts

of the CMT experience were occasionally coloured by criticism and disappointment.

There was some criticism of the CMT from teachers in relation to the pace of

change, conflict between SMT and CMT and the manner in which the change team

was selected. For example, at Park Vale the CMT is a multi-staff group whose

meetings were regular, purposeful, highly charged and positive. Interesting conflicts

occurred within the life of the CMT, to do with its membership, its function

and most particularly the quality of communication to staff represented by its

members:

At the end of every CMT meeting we had union meetings. The LEA was involved

through the co-option of a representative to the CMT. This was partly political but also

to keep the LEA informed. There was also co-option of a member of the governing

body. This was important as the active involvement of a school governor reporting to

the governing body was felt to be essential. (Park Vale – Senior Manager)

What also comes through is how the Project required new and additional work in

order for it to be successful, and this raises issues about the links between change and

intensification. In some ways it could be argued that the Project required traditional

teacher disposition towards over working in order to challenge that disposition:

Perspectives on remodelling practice 157

… it has to be acknowledged that our approach has seen an increase in pressure and

added workload. This was reinforced by the generation of some very complex issues

related to our change strategy (e.g. the re-structuring of the professional status of the

Special Needs Assistant). (Park Vale—Senior Manager)

We also need to take into account that the Project agenda was externally determined,

and approval for plans had to be obtained from the Department for Education and

Skills (DfES):

It was a shock to have the change plan proposal to re-structure the school year accepted

in July and then rejected. This gap between the instruction to think ‘blue sky’, then face

a ‘grey mass of rain’ was very disappointing. To some extent, this was made worse by

the DfES pushing for regular reports of progress, making it seem as if we were being

asked to ‘dig up the seed every week to check for growth’. There was an obvious need

for trust and a little show of belief in the school. Above all, the pace and time frame of

the Project meant we were often pushing against the grain. (Park Vale—Senior

Manager)

Furthermore, operational and political considerations externally imposed by the

DfES saw the pace of the Project being forced: some perceived the pace as so intense

that they commented: there is a danger of losing some people along the way and of change

fatigue (Beacon Hall—Support Staff 3), particularly since an increase in workload for

some staff, particularly senior and support staff, was needed to make the Project

work. Hence remodelling as a field of struggle is a place where through the staking of

capital as a teacher or as a teaching assistant or as an administrator is a complex

interplay between the self, others, and external agencies. While the workforce were

encouraged to challenge habits and take up new positions on work they did

experience being positioned by the state in regard to the legitimacy of those

positions.

Rethinking leadership: delegation, dispersal and diffusion

The short-term benefits of the Project linked specifically to workload reduction are

not startling but in our estimation the implications for educational leadership are

much more far reaching albeit not yet truly realized or probably fully understood.

We need to unpack the subtleties of what it means to be a post-holder within a

division of labour (e.g. what it means to be ‘head’ of as in headteacher, deputy

headteacher, head of year, head of subject? What it means to be ‘assistant’ as in

teaching assistant, clerical assistant) through how the people who inhabit the roles

understand and contribute to the processes they are working within. In this final

section we make a contribution to this by presenting a series of questions that serve

to refocus our thoughts around the core theme of the paper in rethinking educational

leadership as a fluid, multi-levelling and interactional process.

What was interesting in the data, when focusing on formal leadership work, was

the movement of a loci of responsibility for decision-making and leadership that

seemed concomitant with innovation and role change. As a number of staff

observed:

158 S. Rayner and H. Gunter

The process of working with staff is important. I hope this will promote a creative

atmosphere within the school—it has already created a focus on the structure of

meetings and the hierarchy of decision making. It has led to a more ‘brainstorming’

approach to ideas within meetings. A more creative way of working. (Beacon Hall—

Middle Manager)

The success of the Project for me is that it’s been about the team approach to problem

solving and decision making. It’s not just for the Senior Management Team to make the

decisions it’s about all the staff being involved. (Beacon Hall—Teacher)

The Project has produced a big rise in the number of meetings taking place in school.

On the other hand, it has also produced a string of good ideas for school development.

(Park Vale—Support Staff 1)

The Project gave us the opportunity to make changes on a huge scale in a very short

space of time. Experiences of change and learning about change have both been

unprecedented. It has taught me a lot about myself. The Head needs a huge reservoir of

confidence to manage this process, especially to take forward a capacity for working in a

distributed leadership fashion. (Park Vale—Middle Manager)

The nature and scope of change within the Project did involve schools in examining

the division of labour in ways that perhaps reflected a continuum ranging from a top-

down flow of delegation and empowerment through to other forms of more

grounded and bottom-up action that might be described as democratic or dispersed

activity. More interesting still, was the revelation of diffuse practices in ways that

demonstrated the interplay between the agency of the person and the structures that

stifle and encourage that agency. Our questions are around how we enable change to

happen in ways that respect the legitimacy of habitus and how we understand and

engage with structures so that the social and socializing potential of participation is

realized: how does experience of change in the workplace and wider lives impact on

how dispositions to change are revealed and respected? How do we practice

leadership in ways that challenge the structures of change so that we know what the

change is, who is promoting it, for what purpose and why?

An equal consideration for the nature of leadership as evidenced in the Project is

the question of process and outcome. Is the Project only really successful if it has

embedded ways of securing an on-going development of workforce and school

improvement? Has the leadership activity facilitated by the Project generated new

necessarily more flexible patterns of innovation that flow from a new terrain in the

curricular landscape of the twenty-first century school? Such questions are reflected

in comments made by several staff:

I’m very positive towards the change management approach as it has helped to build

teams amongst the staff. There is now a massive fund of ideas that can be used to move

the school forward. But it needs an effective process to capture and filter these ideas and

then move forward with them. (Beacon Hall—Senior Manager)

The Project has ‘opened up’ the way in which we think. (Beacon Hall—Teacher)

The process of change management here is good. All staff are stakeholders in the future

of the school. (Beacon Hall—Middle Manager)

The Project has changed our ideas on what teaching and learning is … I would find it

difficult now to work in a non Project school. (Meadow School—Senior Manager)

Perspectives on remodelling practice 159

The view drawn from these extracts is one of long-term development based upon

both short- and medium-term changes to process and structure within the school

community. It is equally clear that such change does not only involve management

practices but also has impact upon the core functions in school of teaching and

learning. Hence we need to ask: how are research questions, theories and theorizing

about leadership integrated into educational purposes and practices? How are the

experiences of the workforce in Project schools interrelated to the wider public sector

workforce and how are the issues raised ones that stretch across education, health

and welfare services? How might we use the creativity of distributed practice to

articulate the vibrancy of educational leadership so that we can resist models of

leadership that distort our practice?

In the TSW Project research the case studies were found to illustrate the diversity

of initiatives that have developed, and in this way illustrate schools as a site of the

‘modernization’ initiative. A key issue for the future identified in the Project

evaluation is whether measured outcomes owe more to the additional resources

provided at the outset or to the human resources revealed as and through distributed

practice (Thomas et al., 2004). Our work in the case study schools would suggest

that new attitudes to professionality and working practices for development resulted

in many of the achievements. This, to such an extent, that there is evidence of a set

of professional practices, attitudes and structures emerging that will demand new

forms of educational leadership. Complexity, change and curriculum as process

form an interesting mix of structural forces combining to challenge traditional power

structures inside and outside of the school setting.

The case studies initially reflect TSW Project inspired formal structures that

reflect a managerialist and transformational model of leadership. The case study

accounts could be analysed through traditional organizational models of distribution

and so we can examine the extent to which people are or feel involved and to what

effect. Therefore, we might argue that we found several forms of distributed

leadership across a continuum of delegated, democratic, and dispersed activity, but

what is more often rendered invisible through this type of theorizing, is that there are

a more interesting diffused sets of practices. Our use of Bourdieu’s thinking tools in

reading the accounts has captured the interplay of agency and structure, in context

but over time, which calls into question the more traditional forms of organizational

leadership as well as notions and understandings of professionality. Arguably,

concerns for sustainability reflect deeper tensions that resonate with uneasy

dilemmas and an uncertainty surrounding mutability, taking the school community

beyond the simple albeit pressing question of resource toward an awareness of new

needs for a modern school, leading to new practices for a re-modelling

professionality.

Distributed practice is opening up the possibilities for activism in ways that show

the workforce going beyond being merely active through participating in meetings.

By including a wider range of the workforce in the difficulties faced in

conceptualizing as well as delivering education then leadership becomes something

more than what role incumbents do in a school as an efficient and effective

160 S. Rayner and H. Gunter

organization. Instead practice is opened up to the challenges and insights of others in

ways that are social and political. The Project illuminates the demands of problem

posing more than problem solving, because by working through what the problem is

or could be, and whether it is ours and ours alone, those involved can create the

space to exercise judgement in ways that are secure. Hence educational leadership is

about having a defendable model of practice generated through the narrative of

practice and shared understanding of that practice. The difficulties with ensuring

dialogue, coherence and continuity, albeit of a much greater flexibility that can adapt

to more fluid structures, represents the greatest challenge for those who work in

educational institutions. For the post-holder, it is an emotional and intellectual

roller-coaster ride that looks increasingly like an exercise in control and crisis

management but is actually a creative constant: sharing in the process of making

sense and securing sensibility for a school community.

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