The research questions that guide this study are:

1. How are leadership, leaders, and non-leaders positioned in education policy documents in Canada?
2. How is the agency of leaders and non-leaders conceptualized in education policy documents in Canada?

In this paper, we interrogate conceptualisations of leadership in policy documents and initiatives that relate to leadership in education in Canada. We note that the literature and policies dealing with Canadian education reform have tended to favour leadership-centred explanations of social action advancing a leader-centric vision of school reform and improvement, without consideration of the multiple and diverse political, social, economic, cultural, and ideological factors that converge in processes of organisational transformation (Alvesson, 2014). This shift towards a leader-centred explanation of social action is clearly evidenced in the recent emphasis that influential educational leadership literature has placed on 1) the role of the school leader in improving student achievement (Leithwood, et al., 2008; Leithwood, et al., 2012); 2) the effects of distributing leadership in improvement processes (Timperley, 2009), and 3) the central role of teacher leadership in improving schools (Reeves 2008). As Glatter (2006) indicated, the discursive construction of leadership as the focal instrument of reform presents a ‘danger of continuing to be trapped within the ideology of the “can-do” culture… whereby agency is always considered capable of overcoming structure’ (p. 73). By placing unqualified emphasis on the role of leadership in school change, defined in terms of student achievement, contemporary reform initiatives relinquish crucial questions about the social processes that intersect in the functioning of schools.

The repositioning of some school actors as leaders, also invites an interrogation of the ways the non-leader is construed in the literature and policies. If agency for change is bestowed upon school administrators and selected school actors, e.g. ‘teacher leaders’, then it seems safe to assume that the agency of other actors is not relevant in the accomplishment the goals of reform, thus all is needed from them is compliance. 

In his study, we scrutinise two prominent domains in which leadership has being discursively construed: 1) the creation and adoption of leader competencies or standards and 2) the emerging discourses on teacher leadership. Our examination of key policy documents and influential literature yielded four analytical themes: (a) the positioning of leadership practices as ‘causal’ in school improvement initiatives; (b) the re-emergence of the artificial distinction between leadership and management; (c) the legitimation as the ‘leader’ in detriment of the agency of the ‘non-leader’, and (d) the redefinition of the goals of education in terms of student achievement, with the subsequent postulation school leadership as the means to attain this goal. We conclude with a reflection on the epistemological and ontological implications of this repositioning of leadership as an instrument of school reform.

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