This symposium focuses on education leader autonomy presented in three papers investigating leadership in the European country contexts of Norway, Sweden and Germany. 

Recent developments in decentralized education governance has identified education leadership in schools and at local education authority levels as a key factor for education change and development (Rorrer, Skrla, & Scheurich, 2008). Research has noted how contemporary global trends in education has assigned responsibility for education change and improving students' learning outcomes at the local education level (Farrell & Coburn, 2017). Education leaders of today must cope with high degrees of interrelatedness, multiple layers of governing, and many stakeholder groups' influences. However, research has since the early 2000s repeatedly identified barriers in mid-level administrative support that prevent education change by, for example, low prioritization of school relationships, communication based on directives rather than dialogue, a lack of understanding of school issues, and a lack of expertise about teaching and learning across districts (c f. Burch & Spillane, 2004). Studies have also displayed how education leaders do autonomously and purposefully engage in and shape their institutions in distinct ways, which lead to local differences that have been of limited focus in previous research (Prøitz et al. 2017, 2019). Thus, greater awareness of local conditions, processes, and actions is needed to better understand education leadership autonomy.

Although education leadership has been recognized and debated as distributed (Spillane et al., 2015) and recent studies have discussed issues of autonomy (e.g., Moos et al., 2016; Nihlfors et al., 2018) as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon  leadership autonomy is often characterized as a trait of the individual education leader. Education leadership autonomy is often understood and studied in terms of self-governance and something that is actively exercised by the individual leader rather than as a relational and collective phenomenon in education. 

In this symposium, education leadership autonomy is consequently discussed as a relational and multidimensional phenomenon meaning that the various actors in school systems are considered to obtain and/or lack autonomy in different educational situations (Wildy 2004, Ingersoll, 2003; Lortie, 2009). Thereby, autonomy becomes a feature of the relations and interactions of education leaders, framed by different governing styles, knowledge regimes, stakeholder statuses, and leaders' professional competencies (Wilches, 2007; Parker, 2014).

On this note three comparative studies are presented in this symposium investigating education leadership autonomy as a relational capacity framed by varied forms of governance and influences in three country contexts. Mapping and comparing education leader autonomy across contexts has the potential to offer an extended and nuanced understanding of education leadership autonomy of today. Tthis symposium aims to contribute to the discussion on leadership autonomy through three empirical studies on education leadership displaying both differences and similarities across diverse education contexts.

Burch, P., & Spillane, J. (2004). Leading from the middle: Mid-level district staff and instructional improvement. Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform Farrell, C.C., & Coburn, C. E. (2017). Absorptive capacity: A conceptual framework for understanding district central office learning. Journal of Educational Change, 18(2), 135-159. Lortie, D. C. (2009). School leader: Managing in public. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moos, et al. (Eds.). (2016). Nordic superintendents: Agents in a broken chain. Springer International Publishing. Parker, D. (2004). Narratives of Autonomy and Narratives of Relationality in Auto/Biography. a/b: Auto/biography Studies, 19(1-2), 137-155. Rorrer, A. K., Skrla, L., & Scheurich, J. J. (2008). Districts as institutional actors in educational reform. Educational Administration Quarterly, 44(3), 307-357. Schriewer, J. (1999). Coping with complexity in comparative methodology: issues of social causation and processes of macro-historical globalization. In R. Alexander, P. Spillane, J. P., & Sherer, J. Z. (2004). A distributed perspective on school leadership: Leadership practice as stretched over people and place. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Association, San Diego, CA Wilches, J. U. (2007). Teacher autonomy: A critical review of the research and concept beyond applied linguistics. Íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, 12(18), 245-275.