If educational leadership is defined in a broad sense as “the quality and competence of exerting leading influence on educational organization members, teachers and faculty, students, and diverse stakeholders within and beyond certain educational organizations and settings towards the achievement of educational visions and goals” (Yan & Yan, 2018, n.p.)”, this then includes all actors who can exert influence as decision-makers due to their formal power (von Ameln, 2012) within the administrative hierarchy: From the school supervision (including the ministry), to the school boards, to the school level, i.e. the principals or school management teams. In school development research, some of these leadership actors, such as the principals (Tingle, Corrales & Peters, 2017) or the school supervision (Dedering & Kallenbach, 2024; Klein & Bremm, 2020; Tulowitzki, 2019), are of increasing attention. However, the role of other groups in school transformation processes, such as the ministry or the school boards, has just been as rarely considered as the interactions between these actors. Furthermore, the relevant legal requirements for these groups are hardly considered despite their factual relevance. This legal “blind spot” of transformation and school development research corresponds to the legal void of empirical educational research (Reuter, 2018). 

This surprises given the existing legal uncertainties (Finlay, 2007; Butlin & Trimmer, 2018) and the discussion about legal literacy among educational leaders in schools and school administration. Legal literacy refers to the “understanding, skills, and values that enable practitioners to connect relevant legal rules with their professional practice, to appreciate the roles and duties of other practitioners, and to communicate effectively across [organizational] boundaries.” (Preston-Shoot & McKimm, 2013). However, empirical research shows that school leaders have little to none of this legal literacy (Decker, 2014).

Knowledge of clear legal boundaries is just as necessary for school development processes as knowledge of the legal scope (for teachers, see Hugo, 2025, in press.; Gilbert, 2017). This is the only way to guarantee professional pedagogical decisions in the interest of the well-being of children without overstepping legal boundaries on the one hand or leaving legal discretion and scope unused on the other. The law thus becomes relevant for educational leaders. In a narrower sense, law or school law refers to all applicable regulations that are set specifically for schools (Avenarius, 2019). Relevant school law regulations can be systematised in a hierarchy of norms (Kelsen, 1960/2020): From the constitutional level, through laws (e.g. school acts) and legal ordinances (e.g. school regulations) to statutes (e.g. financial regulations).

The large number of regulations involved makes it challenging to gain an overview of the legal responsibilities and potential legal leeways of the respective actors.

The paper combines the outlined discourses on educational leadership, school development, legal literacy, and education law. It presents data from a research project that asks: 

What legal tasks and leeway do educational leaders involved in governance and school development have in Germany?

Due to the sovereignty of the federal states in education policy, a systematic legal review (Hugo, 2025) was carried out in two federal states (legal status: 01/2024). The selection of the states is based firstly on the different forms of school supervision (according to Hanschmann, 2019), for which the federal states are exemplary: Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (HH; unrestricted school supervision), North Rhine-Westphalia (NW; absolutely restricted school supervision). Secondly, this ensured that both city states and territorial states are represented in the data material. Due to the statehood of the German school system, which is regulated in Article 7 Paragraph 1 of the German constitution, the focus is on general public schools. The systematic legal review followed four phases according to the established PRISMA standards for literature reviews (Moher et al., 2015) combined with coding steps: (1) In the identification phase, all legal bases at constitutional, statutory and ordinance level were collected in a text corpus (nHH=29; nNW=319; total=348). Relevant regulations had been identified by searching the official legal databases of each federal state with keywords that represent the relevant actors with formal power in school development processes (ministry, school authority, school supervision, school inspectorate, school board, school administration, school management, principal). This text corpus then underwent a selection process: (2) Precoding: In the screening phase, the title and header of each regulation were pre-coded by using a coding manual with predefined inclusion criteria (general public school system) and exclusion criteria (early childhood; higher education; vocational, non-governmental, non-public, special education; schools without an educational mandate, such as driving schools). (3) Basic Coding: The full texts of the remaining regulations (nHH=8; nNW=94, total=102) were deductively coded in the eligibility phase, i.e. all passages within these legal texts were coded, that deal with at least one of the actors. In this phase again, irrelevant documents were excluded that had been classified as relevant during the screening of title and header. (4) Finite Coding: In the inclusion phase all remaining documents (nHH=7; nNW=27; total=34) were analysed inductively following two steps: Firstly, the tasks addressed at the pre-coded actor group passages and secondly, the leeway anchored therein were coded using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2022). Every coding step was independently carried out by two researchers (screening/precoding: 96,9% agreement, Krippendorffs alpha: 0.929; eligibility/basic coding: 97,7% agreement, Krippendorffs alpha: 0.979; inclusion/finite coding: 97,8% agreement, Krippendorffs alpha: 0.904; cut-off values according to Krippendorff, 2019).

This leads to three types of codings across the federal states: actors, tasks, scope. In the basic coding, 1276 actor-relevant passages were identified. Of these, 237 address school supervision (incl. ministry, 18.57%), 161 principals (12.62%) and 104 school boards (8.15%). Other stakeholders were also identified: committees (n=333, 26.10%), “the school” (n=202, 15.83%), “the responsible authority” (n=123, 9.64%) and “other stakeholders” (n=113, 8.86%). Therefore, especially the tasks of school supervision and principals are regulated – in contrast to the widespread criticism of their unclear responsibilities. Collective actors such as “the school” or committees in which several groups are represented hinder legal transparency. The fine coding resulted in 1468 task codes (several tasks/actor). These were grouped into eleven fields of action: organisation & administration (n=254), leadership (n=235), examinations, certificates & qualifications (n=229), education (n=189), finances & facilities (n=105), data (n=98), development (n=96), protection (n=96), inclusion (n=64), counselling & support (n=53) and cooperation (n=49). Second in 446 scope codings: 398 scope regulations, that provide leeway for decision-making, and 44 enactment power, or the ability to set one's own rules. This indicates that approximately one-third of the regulations contain leeway. Most of these pertain to leadership (n=119), organization & administration (n=112) or education (n=88), fewer to examinations, certificates & qualifications (n=68), finances & facilities (n=48), development (n=41), data (n=35), or inclusion (n=26); and even fewer to protection (n=20), counseling & support (n=11), and cooperation (n=7). Regarding the actors, school supervision has the most significant leeway (n=166), which in Hamburg also includes “the responsible authority” (n=74). There is also flexibility at the school level (principal: n=79; “the school”: n=88). The school board has the smallest leeway (n=53). While the scope at the school level mainly relates to education and organisation & administration, the school supervision can primarily shape leadership and examinations, certificates & qualifications (n=68).

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