In November 2015, he current coalition government in Austria identified seven education reform packages, including the establishment of model regions for comprehensive schools, elementary education reform as well as school autonomy. The resulting policy paper for school autonomy currently under consideration includes the creation of school clusters in rural and urban areas. Especially in rural Austria, there are many small and micro-schools due to relative low-populated rural areas. School principals in these contexts are first and foremost teachers and there is often no time left for educational leadership or even school improvement. School clustering in the school autonomy policy paper should enable cluster principals to focus on Leadership for Learning and stresses the importance of educational partnerships among all schools. Since 2014, the University of Innsbruck has been consulting with and conducting research in the Ziller Valley of the Tyrol (Roessler & Kraler 2017), where regional school development is being fostered. The focal point are seven lower secondary schools. In total, 39 schools in this region would be affected by a new cluster structure. In line with these goals, the following questions are guiding the research: 1) What approaches to leadership are needed for a cluster headship? 2) Who are relevant partners for schools? 3) How do school environments change in response to clustering? The theoretical framework is based on DiMaggio und Powell’s (1983) neo-initialism and its primary tool, the organizational field. “As communities of organizations, organizational fields reflect the interrelationships of diverse organizations sharing an environment (Aldrich and Ruef, 1999).” (Zapp & Powell 2016). An online tool was employed to explore the different organizational fields. Subsequently, interviews with the three most important partners of the schools were conducted. Depending on the most important stakeholder, the schools focused their development efforts on different areas at their locations and responded differently (see Althans & Engel 2016). To enable joint regional and, consequently, uniform cluster development, processes had to be initiated, such as the formation of professional learning communities and networks (Stoll 2015) as well as Leadership for Learning. This paper intends to show the methodology and procedures of organizational field work and to discuss the leadership criteria for successful cluster headship. The question arises as to whether new roles and which are needed in the course of cluster formation and, on the other hand, how the type of leadership affects the kind of responsiveness an organization experiences with its environment.
