ABSTRACT
There is currently a focus in education on using networks to drive school improvement. Education networks, it is argued, can facilitate a more willing distribution of professional knowledge, enable the development of context specific strategies for school improvement, and even facilitate schools and others to share resources. To achieve such benefits requires school leaders to think and act differently. In particular, in order to benefit all teachers and students, the leaders of schools participating in networks must actively support the broad mobilisation of networked-driven innovations. One potential approach to this kind of mobilisation is enabling distributed leadership to flourish, although distributed leadership, as a means of facilitating the mobilisation of network-led innovation, is a relatively understudied area. Correspondingly, this chapter explores how a distributed leadership approach can support innovation mobilisation and what is required for it to do so effectively. A mixed methods approach (interviews, survey data and social network analysis) is used to examine models of distributed leadership within schools participating in a Research Learning Network in Hampshire. Findings suggest that approaches to distributed leadership involving a whole-school collaborative process, and where potential distributed leaders are centrally placed within their networks, tend to be most successful in ensuring innovations are mobilised.
