This paper examines the place of accomplished teaching in a context where the policy imagination is dominated by the idea of ‘leadership’. The paper raises the question of whether this privileging of leadership has led to a loss of focus on the nurturing of excellence in pedagogy. Developments in the Scottish educational system reflect the policy imperatives of other systems in the UK and internationally. Since the publication of Leadership: A Discussion Paper (SEED, 2005) by central government, each of the major stakeholders has produced policy papers on the subject of ‘leadership’ including further papers from central government, the inspectorate, the largest trade union and this has been recently added to by the professional regulatory body, the General Teaching Council of Scotland, calling for the development of a standard for leadership. Common across all these documents is the idea of distributed leadership and the particular variant of ‘teacher leadership’, an ideal which changes what it means to be a teacher. Thus as the EIS, the largest teacher trade union, proposes “…every qualified teacher has, by definition, a leadership role to play in schools” (EIS, 2008: 4). This paper draws from a policy analysis research project to consider whether teacher leadership and accomplished teaching are competing ideals and the implications of this for the development of pedagogic practice.