Distributing and intensifying school leadership

Early in the new millennium, an informed understanding of the leadership of schools requires an appreciation of two interrelated phenomena: the distributed pattern of leaders’ work and the intensification of work practices. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss each of these features and the ways in which they are reconstituting school leadership. I begin with a review of leadership and then suggest why leadership practice has taken a distributed or dispersed form. Next I consider intensification and its connection with leadership. Finally, I address briefly some implications of distribution and intensification for the recent predilection of policy-makers for regimes of designer-leadership.