ABSTRACT
Members of the four case study SMTs may have shared a stated commitment to a team approach to management, but what they were committed to and the depth of their commitment were far from uniform. The teams each incorporated a response to central government reforms and featured certain structural characteristics, yet there was also diversity in their composition, mode of operation, and centrality as a management strategy. This variety reflected a complex network of factors which were unique in their combination: whether the different parameters for the teams set by the heads; aspects of recent team history such as opportunities for heads to affect appointment of colleague members; the broader institutional history whose legacy included the buildings in which the SMTs had to work; or consequences of the interaction between national primary sector resourcing levels and LEA resourcing decisions for the LMS budget in each school. While heads had some room to manoeuvre within the education system wide dialectic of control to express their individual beliefs and values about team approaches, they were both empowered and constrained by school, national and, to a lesser extent, local factors.
