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We have designed and deployed a mapping framework to present and analyse knowledge production and distributed leadership in schools. Positions are identified from within the field: functional (descriptive and normative), critical and socially critical. For each position we examine the purposes, rationales and narratives within selected texts that illuminate knowledge claims about what is known, what is worth knowing, how it is known and who the knowers are. Analysis has identified the prevalence and political dominance of functional approaches and provides explanations regarding the interplay between the state, public policy and the preferred types of knowledge.

Peter Tymms has written recently (BERJ, August 2004) on the subject of measuring whether standards are rising in English and mathematics in primary schools based on pupil outcomes from national end of key stage tests. This article takes the position that the performance data debate is an interesting one but peripheral to a far bigger issue. Whether measurable (by standardised testing at ages 7 and 11) national standards in English and mathematics have risen or not, does not justify the drastic reduction of the intended ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum which has taken place to try to achieve the national percentage targets. The curriculum data on which the authors base their findings are supplied by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's own longitudinal monitoring of the school curriculum which has been carried out by the authors from 1996 to 2004.

This article examines illustrative cases of partnerships from a government-funded programme of experimental projects in England designed to test out the potential of senior business managers to provide leadership across a group of schools. The article places the programme within the context of international public service reforms and, more specifically, the re-culturation of schools along business lines. The study data are then presented and analysed in relation to the procollaboration and pro-business biases in evidence in contemporary thinking about public service delivery. This analysis raises serious questions about how competing education and business values and agendas play out in schools, and their implications for roles and practices within the schools workforce. The article concludes with calls for field members to address this important but neglected area of leadership.

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