There is currently, across many parts of Europe and the world, an intense debate and academic interest in school ethos.  In many countries, including Ireland, educational research, and societal interest in general, often focuses on the religious or faith-based aspect of ethos.  This paper aims to broaden this conception of ethos and works to present a definition which is more than a synonym for religion in schools.  Ethos is argued to be concerned with more that the measurable outcomes emphasised in the literature concerning school improvement and effectiveness.   It relates, instead, to the relationships between the school leader and the school community, the way in which the school mission is developed and articulated through the goals and policies of the school and the commitment of the school community to those goals.  This paper builds on and extends previous research which argues that ethos is a distinct and identifiable aspect of the school’s organisational culture.   It is a means of facilitating and manipulating educative influence.  An understanding of ethos, then, can provide valuable insight into the processes of leadership and management of schools and the values which inform them.  The questions asked here aim to further equip school leaders with an understanding of how the school environment affects the interactions which take place there.    To do this, this paper explores two central questions.  The first asks how principals of primary schools perceive the ethos of their schools.  The second asks how they affect the ethos of their schools. While the school leaders discussed are principals of primary schools in the Republic of Ireland, their professional exposure in relatively archaic governance structures speaks to similar problems faced by other school leaders in various jurisdictions.  The paper uses a distributed view of leadership as its theoretical framework and architecture.  By adopting this normative and representational model, an exploration of the way in which ethos is used in schools is allowed.  It also permits an understanding of ethos which includes both the school’s mission and the motivations for that mission.  In other words, it considers how educative influence is understood and employed by school leaders and examines the purpose of leadership, of power relationships and of power capacity in schools. 

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