Big teams, complex experiences? exploring leadership dynamics and teachers’ work in a large primary school

Across education systems, schools increasingly distribute leadership responsibilities among senior leaders, middle leaders and teachers. Larger leadership teams may broaden expertise, participation and professional support, but they may also generate communication overload, overlapping responsibilities and uncertainty about decision-making. These tensions are especially significant in large primary schools, where the implications of leadership-team size for teachers’ everyday work remain under-examined. This study explores how a nineteen-member Senior Leadership Team shaped teachers’ reported professional experiences in a large, multi-form-entry primary school in an urban area of England. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods case study combined a staff survey completed by thirty of forty-nine staff members with semi-structured interviews involving all nineteen school leaders. The study examined perceived work-related outcomes rather than direct measures of teaching quality or pupil attainment. Findings indicated generally positive perceptions of leadership and organisational culture, with trust, autonomy, mentoring and collaboration supporting confidence and engagement. However, participants also reported communication overload, unclear responsibilities, limited time for professional dialogue and perceived promotion bottlenecks. The findings reveal a paradox of scale: expanded leadership structures can increase organisational capacity and professional support while simultaneously intensifying coordination demands, workload pressures and uncertainty about authority and progression. This extends international debates on distributed leadership.