School leadership attracts more attention in the practical as well as in the academic sphere. A vast deal of the attention is aiming changes in the practises and conditions of leadership. The origins of the changes comes from general leadership development (e.g. from transactional to transformational and/or a distributed view), school leadership development (focus on instructional or pedagogical leadership and/or a distributed view), and last but not least from actual conditions and requirement in the current school system. The point of departure for the paper is that these developments not necessarily do follow the same rationale or take the same direction. Still more tasks (administrative, legal, economic etc.) draw leaders away from the core activities of the school, namely the pedagogical challenges and the students. In other words, leaders are expected to practice more active at still more areas. Furthermore, schools are expected to change the way schooling are organized. This means, that leaders must create the school as a learning community. The context for the study is a reform of the Danish upper secondary school system, implemented in summer 2005. In many ways, it implies some remarkable changes for all actors in the schools. The overall responsibilities of the headmasters are repetitiously emphasized in ministerial regulations. This responsibility regards among other issues an increasing competitive environment between schools combined with a growing economic independence, an increasing attention on students’ competence rather than on curriculum, a bigger share of cross-disciplinary teamwork The guiding research questions for the paper is how do school leaders, i.e. headmasters, deal with the requirement of pedagogical leadership in an age also influenced by many other obligations raised from more administrative and economic discourses? What factors affect the actual outcome of their leadership style and practice? A particular focus will be laid on the organisational dimension of how to create a learning organization and how the (countless) leadership tasks are released from the specific leader, e.g. the headmaster. The paper has a conceptual as well as a practical approach. I will discuss the development of the concepts of instructional, pedagogical, and distributed leadership as they dominate the school leadership literature. Moreover, I will investigate how these concepts correspond to the practice and challenges for school leaders.

This paper is partly conceptual and partly empirical. The empirical data are qualitative and collected through interviews and observations during school visits in a larger project concerning changing teacher roles in spite of a reform of the upper secondary schools in Denmark. Leaders are interviewed, but also teachers and students are interviewed about their view on leadership practice.

I expected, that various solutions can be found in schools, and many of the actual solutions were not planned by the management. The decisions may arise in the actual situation and were possible due to the actual knowledge, skills, and experience in schools. The decision model may be a kind of ‘muddling through’. I also expected, that it may be difficult to define and measure ‘best practice’ in school leadership, not at least because many schools develops in various directions and are targeting different aims.