Policy scholars and policy-makers agree that policy intentions and policy enactments are often very different. Policy makers see this as an implementation problem and seek, via funding targets and guidelines and evaluative frameworks, to limit the degree of variation in policy interpretation (e.g. explained in their own words in Blair, 2010, Campbell, 2008, Hyman, 2005). Policy sociologists understand policy to be located within broader discourses, specifically situated in a geographical/historical context, internally contradictory, and read and re-read on its trajectory through various organization scales and structures (Ball, 1993, Whitty, 2002). Leadership scholars generally see policy as a framing context within which school leaders act (Bush et al., 1999). Educational change scholars often focus on how it is that policy at system level can be used in conjunction with institutional supports and interventions to steer change in particular directions (Fullan, 2009, Fullan et al., 2004). 

In this symposium we bring these perspectives together in order to develop further the notion of the school leader as a translator, mediator and manager of policy. We present four research-based case studies – from Australia, England, Italy and Northern Cyprus - which show how it is that school leaders are positioned by policy and the problems and possibilities that this creates for them at the local level. We focus in particular on how school leaders read and rewrite policy into the vernacular and where are they able to exercise agency, at what scale, and in whose interests. In doing so we hope to produce a more nuanced set of understandings or the agency of school leaders as they are situated in specific national and local places/spaces.

We suggest that, taken together, these cases offer a contrary view to the often pan-global studies of ‘effective’ school leaders in which the importance of context and policy are acknowledged but not explored. The notion of school leader as mediator and translator allows both the delimiting and enabling affordances of context and policy to be elaborated and explored.