ABSTRACT
This chapter explores these concerns in relation to matters of leadership and social justice. The significance of advocacy, truth-telling and counter-conduct in the alliance's pursuit of its telos of socially just leadership. Clementine's powerful position within and beyond the alliance in terms of its status as an outstanding and leading school enabled such advocacy and the confidence to challenge the stakes through practices of counter-conduct. Clementine's concerns resource efficiency, financial viability and the dispersion of leadership responsibility throughout the alliance are clearly warranted amid the pressure of this high-stakes environment. This focus on enterprise may compromise Clementine's ethical ways of leading and undermine its efforts to support school autonomy and independence. The alliance school's counter-conduct illustrates an awareness of the limitations of the standardised, prescriptive and decontextualised frames for what might constitute teacher quality and improvement that are offered through the alliance within the parameters of the National Teaching Schools initiative.
