Reports a study of the perceptions of school leaders who have engaged in practitioner research, concentrating on perceptions which relate to schools as organisations. The study complements recent theoretical work on the connections between reflective practice, leadership and organisational environment. It illustrates tensions between leaders’ values and national policies, their experience of school autonomy, and approaches to developing the cultural characteristics of learning organisations. The study also illustrates the organisational implications of futures thinking, and changing patterns of surveillance and control in schools. The article concludes that the nature of schools as organisations is contested, with much of the regulatory framework within which schools operate being no longer supportive of the direction for development favoured by school leaders who have thought through their own commitment to learning.

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`It is not possible to suggest that any one scenario…(will) dominate the early part of the twenty first century…There is an urgent need for a national debate about where British education seems to be going... Without such debate it will continue to career along its existing tracks at breakneck speed, with passengers unable or unwilling to check its progress. It will move forward but we will have little control over its safe destination or whom it may harm in its path.' (McKenzie, 2001)