Driven by the impetus for the school system as a whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning, innovation diffusion has become increasingly an important vehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferate beyond the locale of the individual schools to form connected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. This paper articulates an ecological leadership model for enabling such system-wide innovation diffusion in the context of Singapore. Through the explication of leadership practices demonstrated by two exemplar schools that have successfully levelled up their school-based innovation, we argue that ecological leaders have to go beyond system leadership to think and act in a more encompassing way. Specifically, ecological leaders have to embody systems thinking and East-Asian collectivist beliefs to benefit other schools, converge and contextualize the kernel of innovation, align efforts by mitigating tensions and paradoxes within and across the subsystems in the ecology, leverage on resources in the ecology and manage the emergent dynamics engendered through interactions with multi-level actors. These five thrusts cut across the five dimensions of ecology: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem. With the favourable sociopolitical climate that encourages collaboration rather than competition, we posit that leaders can endeavour to forge ecological coherence. This can be achieved by establishing synergistic structural and socio-cultural connections within and across the five subsystems of influences underpinning the hub school and networks of innovation-adopting schools, thus bringing forth transformative changes in the system.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the dialectical interplay between centralisation and decentralisation forces so as to understand how schools leverage on its autonomous pedagogical space, influence the diffusion of innovations in the educational landscape of Singapore and how a centralised-decentralised system supports (or impedes) pedagogical reform for twenty-first century learning. Design/methodology/approach The paper first outlines the evolutionary stance of Singapore’s decentralisation from its past to present trajectories, thus providing a broader social-historical interpretation to its tight-loose-tight coupling of the education system; followed by situating the context of reform within the national narrative of Ministry of Education’s (MOE) twenty-first century competencies framework. The authors examine how school autonomy should be accompanied by systemic enabling mechanisms, through two case illustrations of whole-school reforms. Findings There are four carryover effects that the authors have observed: structural, socio-cultural, economic and epistemic. Middle managers from the two schools act as a pedagogical, socio-technological and financial broker outside the formal collaborative structures organised by the MOE. Such a “middle-out” approach, complemented by centralised mechanisms for “coeval sensing mechanism”, has resulted in boundary-spanning linkages and multiplier effects in terms of knowledge spillovers. Research limitations/implications Socio-cultural context matters; and what constitutes as co-learning between policymakers and practitioners in Singapore may be construed as policing that stifles innovations in other contexts. Originality/value In addition to the conceptualisation of how school autonomy may lead to school-based innovations, the paper provided some preliminary empirical evidence of how the co-production of knowledge has been engendered within, across and beyond individual Singapore schools through the mechanism of innovation diffusion. The unit of analysis is innovation ecosystem.

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