Distributed Leadership in Irish Post-Primary Schools: Policy versus Practitioner Interpretations

Abstract

School leaders have faced significant challenges since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributed leadership has become the default leadership response implemented by schools to manage increased pressure. While Irish schools have traditionally operated behind a ‘closed-door’, there has recently been a movement towards a shared model of leadership, and Irish school leadership policy currently endorses the adoption of a distributed leadership model. Increased interest and policy endorsement notwithstanding, distributed leadership remains an elusive concept. The aim of this study was to explore Irish post-primary school personnel’s interpretations of distributed leadership and analyse these interpretations through a teacher empowerment lens with respect to Irish school leadership policy. This study reports the results of a thematic analysis of 363 survey responses provided by post-primary school personnel. Short’s six dimensions of teacher empowerment were utilised to inform a framework for thematically analysing the participants’ interpretations. An initial framework for enacting distributed leadership through an empowerment lens was outlined. Interpretations were found to diverge regarding (i) what is shared, (ii) who it is shared with, and (iii) how it is shared. This paper adds to the corpus of knowledge concerning how distributed leadership is understood in practice and will aid in informing future school leadership policy documents.

Challenges to the sustainability of Irish post-primary school leadership: the role of distributed leadership

“…Some participants described it in terms of contributing to leadership and management, while others referred to utilising expertise within the school community, shared decision-making, or in terms of sharing jobs or workload. It is unsurprising that participants had differing understandings of the term as this has been identified previously (Hickey et al, 2023), but it is important that this paper is read with this in mind. However, the variety of interpretations of distributed leadership is a further indication that the mechanisms through which leadership is being distributed need to be further teased out before it can be advocated for as aiding the sustainability of school leaders as the term can be misinterpreted as delegation for example.…”

Enactment of Transformational School Leadership—Insights from Primary School and System Leaders

“…Distributed leadership has many interpretations but is generally understood to be a leadership practice wherein the leadership function is shared among many individuals, who interact to achieve required results [71,[99][100][101]. In Ireland, distributed leadership is recognised as the default leadership response implemented by schools to manage the increase in pressure [102] on principals especially; it has been promoted in Department of Education policies, procedures, guidelines, national strategies, and leadership programmes and is the recommended practice in Irish educational policy [103,104]. LAOS 2022 [70], while promoting distributed leadership, also outlines many leadership behaviours that could arguably be achieved effectively and sustainably through the employment of transformational school leadership by the whole school community.…”

Does Distributed Leadership Deliver on Its Promises in Schools? Implications for Teachers’ Work Satisfaction and Self-Efficacy

“…Empirical evidence supports these claims showing that in schools, distributed leadership boosts teacher commitment and satisfaction, their academic capacity, and teaching effectiveness [9,[13][14][15], facilitates learning in communities and contributes to improvement of academic capacity and learning effectiveness [11,16]. Moreover, recent studies show that distributed leadership increases teacher trust and job satisfaction [9,17], fosters professional collaboration and teacher retention [13], and increases teachers' academic optimism, academic skills and expert knowledge [14,18,19].…”

“…In organizational settings, empowerment reflects efforts aimed at generating agency and proactivity among employees in order to increase task engagement and ultimately foster organizational effectiveness [34]. Most recent research considered empowerment as an integral part of distributed leadership practices [16,35]. Moreover, scales used to evaluate distributed leadership explicitly include dimensions like teacher empowerment, shared decision making and participation in decision-making processes concerning task planning and allocation [11,35,36].…”

“…Distributed leadership has been defined as the leadership responsibilities and functions that need to be fulfilled by different people with varied levels and types of expertise [10,16,35]. We evaluated this variable by asking participants how many individuals fulfilled leadership functions in their school, and it was coded as a dummy variable (one leader versus multiple leaders).…”