School Leadership: Some key ideas

ABSTRACT This article highlights some key ideas on leadership for practitioners, researchers and others. It identifies leadership by its contribution to outcomes and its influence on followers. In particular, it differentiates leadership from management by its more proactive orientation and by its inspirational qualities. The perspectives on leadership which are highlighted are situational leadership, Bolman and Deal's four frames of leadership, chief executive and leading professional, moral leadership and curricular leadership. The discussion of curricular leadership is based on literature on instructional leadership from North America. The aim of offering this range of approaches is to widen the scope of conceptualisations and theoretical perspectives from which practitioners and researchers may choose in order to analyse and understand school leadership.