Taken the results and conclusions of two case studies, the paper analyzes and discuss the differences and similarities of the way distributed leadership is promoted by the management teams of two successful secondary schools located in socioeconomically disadvantaged urban contexts (Hallinger, 2018; Moral-Santaella & Raso-Sánchez, 2023). These two schools face difficult circumstances, serving a population with low prerequisites and high ethnic and cultural diversity. However, in both cases, we can speak of success because the management team has been able to care for and to improve the well-being of their educational community without giving up on demanding the best possible academic results of their students. Their common goal is that the majority of students get the maximum benefits, in a broad sense, from their years spent at the school (Day et al., 2016). The study was conducted following the theoretical framework and research protocols of the International School Successful Principalship Project (ISSPP), a project that has conducted case studies on successful school trajectories in more than 25 countries for more than 20 years, identifying the role of school leadership in school success (Day et al., 2022).

Our study focuses on the management teams´ achievements and strategies of the two schools, rather than on the individual role of their principals. The 'management team' is a collegiate school management body with a long tradition in the Spanish educational system (Pérez-García et al., 2018). As the general roles and responsibilities of the management team are set by law, they are common to all schools; however, each school adjusts its internal functioning and its relationship with the other governance bodies to the specific context needs and organizational culture. These two schools also take advantage of the formal aspects of the regulatory macro-system, although they transform and adapt them to implement their own management strategy (Leithwood et al., 2020). What interests us in this study is to show how two different styles of organizing the management team can lead their respective schools to relative success in highly challenging contexts. The theoretical framework that underlies our conclusions focuses on leadership as a distributed phenomenon (Harris et al., 2022); the role of middle leadership (Bennett et al., 2007; Harris et al., 2019) in the Spanish educational system; and the specific organizational conditions affecting schools located in challenging contexts (González-Falcón et al., 2020).

The two secondary schools are state-owned (public schools) and both are located in impoverished urban areas with a high level of immigrants from countries outside the European Union (Morocco, Pakistan, Latin American countries). They serve families with limited economic resources, limited employment opportunities and low educational level, which represents a high risk of reproducing their precarious situation in their children. Diamantino Secondary is placed in Seville, Andalusia, while Migracions Secondary (anonymized) is located in Badalona, Catalunya. The chosen methodology is the case study, which has been conducted using the recently redesigned multilevel perspective of the ISSPP project. The project protocols were updated in 2022, and translated and adapted to the characteristics of the Spanish educational system. This is a qualitative analysis methodology that collects information through primary and complementary instruments including the following: For primary data (a) a questionnaire addressed to teachers; (b) semi-structured individual interviews with members of the management team, teachers and other agents from the internal and external school context (e.g. inspection supervisor, municipal education officer, etc); (c) group interviews with other members of the educational community (students and families); and (d) non-participant observation of the management team's day-to-day activities. For complementary data, the following documents were consulted among others: general annual plans; annual reports and other official school documents; inspection reports; reports on approved evaluation indexes; news published by the school or about the school. Data analysis started with the transcription of the interviews. After transcription we proceeded with the process of coding the qualitative data by assigning labels that represent different themes. These themes or categories were elaborated both inductively and deductively, which allowed an in-depth analysis of each case and a comparative analysis of both cases. The information obtained from the interviews have been triangulated with data from the questionnaire addressed to the teachers and with the complementary sources of information.

Leadership distribution is carried out under patterns that can be very different from school to school, so the scope and the agents involved can vary greatly. At Diamantino Secondary, the management team leaves a significant margin of autonomy to the school departments, and so to the respective heads. This way of managing motivates a broad involvement of the teaching staff in decision making (García-Martínez & Martín-Romera, 2019). The case is different at Migracions Secondary, where the management team is more reluctant to distribute leadership among other school community agents. However, relationships are completely horizontal among the members, and their roles are interchangeable. Strategic decisions are made primarily by the team, although, once made, the reasoning and communication to the rest of the faculty is detailed and transparent (Or & Berkovich, 2023), which facilitates their acceptance. Besides, Diamantino serves the very high diversity of its students by organizing homogeneous but flexible groups in terms of academic performance, and by providing pedagogic and methodological resources to teachers who need them and want to apply them. The management team is responsible for maintaining groups with an ideal composition to facilitate learning, as well as to avoid disruptive behavior. By contrast, at Migracions the management of diversity is transferred to a team of course-level coordinators and, at the same time, the tutorial action is reinforced in order to offer a more personalized and direct attention to the students. Both teams achieve, although by means of different strategies, a general climate of trust and collaboration in which both teachers and students participate (López-Yáñez & Sánchez-Moreno, 2021). In both cases the leadership scheme allows flexibility and encourages adaptation, including mechanisms and opportunities for reviewing the effects of their decisions. Thus, the management team might change its strategy to achieve the needed positive impact.

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