Reframing data use in school governance: cross-level leadership, power, trust, and conditional autonomy in a Danish municipality

Research on data-informed leadership has emphasised how leaders interpret evidence for school improvement, yet less is known about how this work is organised across school, municipal, and political levels where professional judgment and accountability intersect. This qualitative case study examines how municipal and school leaders used a locally developed Progress Report following Denmark’s 2014 public school reform, and how the arrangement mediated power and trust across municipal-school leadership relations. Drawing on longitudinal field observations, leadership interviews, and municipal documents, the analysis brings organisational institutional theory into dialogue with a Luhmannian perspective on power and trust. Findings show how reform expectations were translated into a recurring process organised around progression goals, professional interpretation of evidence, and cross-level dialogue. Power operated through the progression/results and support/control codings, with progression and support providing preferred orientations while results and control remained part of the governance relationship. Shared direction, differentiated pace, and recurring dialogue provided a basis for system trust, while school leaders retained substantive professional judgment. This bounded form of discretion is conceptualised as conditional autonomy. The study contributes a leadership-centered account of data-informed governance across organisational levels within one municipal case.