ABSTRACT
The Malaysia Education Blueprint is the major policy document driving reform. Shift five of the Blueprint focuses on school leadership and aims to ensure high performing school leaders in every school. It also stresses that principals should not focus on administrative leadership. However, this is challenging to achieve as administrative leadership is the norm in highly centralised systems such as Malaysia. The Blueprint makes several references to the significance of distributed leadership, stating that the Ministry will move towards a model of distributed leadership where effective, high-quality school leadership permeates the entire organisation of all schools. This chapter reports research on the implementation of distributed leadership in 14 schools across two states: Sarawak and Selangor. The findings offer a mixed picture of distributed leadership in these Malaysian schools, but the main focus is on allocative distribution, orchestrated by the principals, rather than emergent distribution, as assumed in much of the international literature.
