The school policy environment provides leaders with greater autonomy for learning and teaching, staffing, financial planning, and school management (Day, Sammons, Leithwood, Hopkins, Gu, Brown, & Ahtaridou, 2011; Schleicher, 2012; Moos & Hatzopoulos, 2013). This leadership autonomy has been facilitated through the decentralisation and devolution of responsibility to enable leaders to achieve strong school performance through provision of quality education as defined by centralised national curriculum models, that are aligned to assessment, reporting and accountability systems. Decentralisation and devolution of responsibility has occurred simultaneously to centralisation of curriculum and the development of policies related to reporting, public accountability (Ingvarson, Anderson, Gronn & Jackson, 2006) and parental choice (Day et al., 2011). Underpinning these global developments is the marketisation of education, on the basis that increased competition leads to improved quality school performance (Townsend, 2011). 

This paper addresses the problem of conceptualizing school leadership autonomy for each unique school context within the current policy environment by proposing the Contextual School Improvement Leadership Framework (CSILF) that identifies key perspectives and critical capabilities that are essential for leadership autonomy. It supports the need to develop a more informed understanding of how leaders perform their role and achieve success, given the limited knowledge about the contribution that leaders make (Robinson & Gray, 2019). This paper also supports the call for a shift in research focus from ‘what leaders do to how they do it’ (Hallinger, 2016, p.18), and the need to expand the knowledge base about the relationship between leadership and school context (e.g., Gurr, Drysdale, Longmuir, & McCrohan, 2019; Hallinger, 2016). The CSILF has implications for leadership selection, preparation and education, the evaluation of the work of leaderships, the development of leadership standards, and the design, implementation and evaluation of leadership research.

A design research perspective informed the overall methodological approach to the development of the CSILF. According to Anderson and Shattuck (2012) design research emerged in early 2000s ‘as a practical research methodology that could effectively bridge the chasm between research and practice in formal education’ (p.16) that is applicable in complex learning environments. Design research is relevant for complex problems (Plomp, 2007), related to significant educational goals for which there are no guidelines or consensus about the resolution of these problems (Kelly, 2007). The aim of design research is therefore to solve educational problems, through the development of ‘usable knowledge’ (Plomp, 2007, p.9) not only about the solutions but also about processes for developing these solutions (Plomp, 2007). Most significantly, design research is ‘theory oriented’ (Plomp, 2007, p.14) as theories not only inform the design of the solution but may also be built as part of the solution. There is recognition that ‘there is no simple theoretical model’ (Kelly, 2007, p.81) to solve complex problems as solutions occur in complex educational systems. The design research perspective has supported a holistic approach (Plomp, 2007) to the development of CSILF through the use of the literature review as the research methodology (Snyder, 2019) to explore the theoretical question of how leaders can exercise autonomy within this current policy environment. This methodology entailed the integrative approach to literature review to enable the development of a new perspective on the school leadership autonomy (Torraco, 2005, p.356) and enable the exploration of a theoretical problem through a theoretical resolution (Plomp, 2007), that is, via the CSILF. The literature review involved the creative collection of data and combination of perspectives from the schooling and educational leadership literature and the critical analysis and synthesis of themes and relationships (Snyder, 2019). Central to analysis and synthesis is the role of logic and clear conceptual reasoning as a basis for development of insights and generalisations (Tarraco, 2005).

The CSILF has been developed to support school leaders to exercise autonomy in decision making, school performance and public accountability in response to workplace and leadership role demands. The framework identifies essential underpinning perspectives: contextual leadership; context generality and context specificity; outside-in and inside-out; macroscopic & microscopic and mirror; and sense making; and way finding. It also identifies four critical capabilities (contextual cognition; thinking, enactment, and reflection) that leaders need to enable them to exercise their autonomy and shift from routine and procedural practices towards creative and innovative practices. These capabilities, defined as a set of ‘dynamic, interactive and multi-dimensional’ (Costa, 2014, p.63) processes are seen to support leaders to take a holistic, contextual, and organizational approach. Finally, the CSILF also identifies interconnected knowledge bases, skills and dispositions underpinning these capabilities.

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