Within the distributed leadership framework, notions of school leadership extend to include teachers; interest in involving students as agents of educational leadership, however, has been minor. Recent research shows a significant gap between the current forms of schooling and the ideal of democratic organizations where leadership is experienced by students as an organization-wide phenomenon. This paper explores the efforts of the Voyager School, a specialist media arts school opening in 2007 in Peterborough which aspires and dares to be different in the way it embraces student leadership as two schools merge to form a school for learning in the 21st century. It investigates the journey students, teachers and designated leaders take together to design the school's internal social architecture to develop leadership capacities in young people and establish inclusive, flexible and sustainable student leadership metabolisms to involve students as agents of educational leaders in issues that matter. The project is innovative in the sense that it involves students as equal partners in the construction of these metabolisms and that it shows genuine commitment in investing in capacity building for skillful, broad-based school leadership.Qualitative interviews, field notes and a survey were used as three main data collection methods. The survey was conducted with a population of students to explore their previous student leadership experiences and investigate their ideas about the importance of engaging students as agents of educational leadership within the school. Qualitative focus group interviews and individual interviews were carried out with a smaller population of students and designated school leaders to investigate the initiation stage of the student leadership project and find out about the challenges faced and the solutions made along the initiation stage. Observations were also carried out at critical times within diverse school settings. This paper contributes to the scholarly literature on internal capacity building for school leadership, with particular emphasis on student leadership. It is a case study of practice which illustrates closeness to realities of schools involved in efforts to establish flexible, inclusive and sustainable student leadership metabolisms. Initial findings of students' previous experiences suggest that previous approaches have failed to establish inclusive student leadership practices to involve students as educational leaders. Initial findings also portray the Voyager's genuine commitment, enthusiasm and ability to involve students and teachers in the initiation stage to establish student leadership mechanisms through which students could be empowered to impact on the social architecture of the Voyager School. Expected outcomes include the importance of employing inclusive practices through which student leadership practices diffuse and extend beyond schools to engage with the community, the significance of generating the capacity for distributed leadership by investing in the development of leadership skills of young people and by investigating in the conditions that promote change and development.Alexander, E. and Sanders, P. (2003) 'Student Leadership: Creating Learning Communities', Forum 45(2): 35-38. Fielding, M. (2004) ' 'New Wave' Student Voice and the Renewal of Civic Society', London Review of Education 2(3): 197-217. Funk, R.C. (2003) 'Developing Leaders through High School Junior ROTC: Integrating Theory with Practice', Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies 8(4). Jones, C., Huber, J., and Pollard, A. (2003) Leading Learners: Experience and Aspiration for School Leadership. London: Demos. Raymond, L. (2001) 'Student Involvement in School Improvement: From Data Source to Significant Voice', Forum 43(2): 58-61. Spillane, H., Halverson, R. and Diamond, J. (2004) 'Towards a Theory of Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective', Journal of Curriculum Studes 36(1): 3-34.Thomson, P. and Holtsworth, R. (2003) 'Theorizing Change in the Educational 'Field': Re-readings of Student Participation Projects', International Journal of Leadership in Education, 6(4): 371-391. The paper will be submitted to an international journal. Possible journals includee the International Journal of Leadership in Education and Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.