ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on author's experience of school leadership in England over several decades and from reviewing the literature. It begins by discussing a context for appreciating the leadership and management landscape across the schooling landscape in England. Thus, system leadership is perceived through the lens of the solo-leader who is given parts of the system to lead. The chapter gives a profile to another way of thinking about system leadership. This resonates with Gronn's idea that distributed leadership needs to be perceived not as one leader distributing leadership, but rather as a concept of leadership being collective and properly distributed. A system leadership perspective encourages a disposition that the system needs to self-consciously build professional capacity within itself and that this ‘implies a rebalancing towards greater internal evaluation’. Leadership becomes about the multitude and diversity of voices within and across schools.
