Over the past decades there has been a changing mindset of national governments and society in regards to faith-based schools. This shift is particularly evident in various national governments’ policy to support faith-based schools. This support has helped faith-based schools to expand in number and grow in diversity worldwide (Lawton & Cairns, 2005). Consequently, faith-based schools in several international contexts, including the United Kingdom and Australia, now educate a substantial proportion of their students (Crump & Slee, 2005; Sullivan, 2006).

There have also been significant shifts within educational leadership research and theory in order to counter the limitations created by past traditional theories, including the theories of transactional, instructional, and transformational leadership. These theories have created narrow conceptions of leadership by focusing on formal leadership positions and a tendency to separate schools from their cultural contexts (Bottery, 2004). Scholars have also argued that conceptions of educational leadership are limited because they are based on secular and Western perspectives thus there is a need to conceptualize this topic through various religious perspectives (Luckcock, 2007; Shah, 2006). As a result, several contemporary theories have emerged, such as distributed leadership, moral leadership, and servant leadership which consider leadership’s social nature and take into account its moral and spiritual aspects. Adding to this is the growing body of scholarly work and research that connects educational leadership to values (Begley, 2003) and spirituality (Dantley, 2008). Furthermore, there is a large body of scholarly work and empirical studies which demonstrate the importance of considering how various contextual factors, can influence leadership (Mulford, 2008). 

However, despite the growing importance of the faith-based school sector the field of educational leadership research has tended to place this sector of schools on the margins of their investigations (Grace, 2009). Although investigations pertaining to faith-based schools have been completed both in the UK (Grace, 2002; Shah, 2006) and Australia (d’Arbon, Duignan, & Duncan, 2002; Spry, Duignan, & Skelly, 2004) such studies are limited in number and tend to be placed in the Catholic school sector. Considering the view that leadership is important aspect of schools and helps to determine its development and effectiveness (National College of School Leadership, 2005) investigations of how educational leadership is understood and practised within different types of faith-based schools can add to our current understandings.

These considerations helped to frame the purpose of this study which set out to examine how educational leadership is understood and practised by the members of three different faith-based school management teams located in Perth, Western Australia. Informed and guided by the interpretive research approach the study’s central research question was as follows: How do the members of management teams in different faith-based schools understand and practise educational leadership? In addition, three guiding questions were formulated to give shape and direction to the research process. These questions focused on uncovering the participants’ understandings of educational leadership, how their understandings influenced their practice, and to what extent their understandings and practices varied between different faith-based schools.  

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