This article reports on a study exploring a distributed perspective on school leadership through three headteacher case studies conducted in Scottish primary schools. Drawing from a sequence of in-depth, semi-structured and narrative style interviews conducted with each headteacher, as well as from a semi-structured questionnaire and sociometric analysis conducted with staff, the article analyses the experiences and perceptions of headteachers. The paper finds that in practice, distributed leadership is more complex and challenging than often represented, challenging five generally held assumptions in the theoretical, policy and practice frames. Implications are drawn for educational leadership at both school and system levels.

This article connects with an international debate around the place of professional standards in educational policy targeted at enhancing teacher quality, with associated implications for continuing teacher education. Scotland provides a fertile context for discussion, having developed sets of professional standards in response to a recent national review of career-long teacher education. That review called for a reprofessionalisation of the teaching profession and the revision of the standards was an element of this process. Scotland is utilised as a lens through which one country's response to international trends is viewed, with a focus on 'teacher leadership' and 'practitioner enquiry' as policy endorsed sets of practices. The analysis demonstrates the complex and contested nature of these terms and the tensions posed between the need to meet professional standards as part of teacher education and aspirational dimensions of the current policy project of reprofessionalisation. The article concludes by considering the implications for continuing teacher education.

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Social justice is fundamental to feminism. Feminist theorists place women's experiences of gender inequalities at the centre of their theorizations about leadership.Feminist critiques of leadership are set in a wider social context. In this chapter, the perspectives of women educational leaders are explored within the wider 'social justice leadership' perspective. Internationally, social justice leadership represents a major theme within policy, research and literature with a resurgence of interest into the experiences and perceptions of women in educational leadership. This chapter critically appraises women's perspectives on educational leadership, by drawing on the experiences of four women headteachers/principals in each of four international contexts, sixteen women in total. Case studies, conducted in Scotland, England, Jamaica and New Zealand, provide contrasting, cross-national contexts to compare the influences, possibilities and challenges that women school leaders experience.Each of the country researcher teams was guided by the same interview questions, adopting a common methodological approach for conducting in-depth interviews and the analysis of findings.

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