This paper seeks to explore, through a focus upon identity, how teachers are responding to the modernisation of public services in England. It reports upon findings from the UK Economic and Social Research Council project ‘Distributed Leadership and the Social Practices of School Organisation’ (SPSO) (RES-000-22-3610)

The research examines the relationship between the state, public policy, and the professional identities of teachers via an analysis of how educational practitioners engage with distributed leadership as an officially constructed and endorsed good practice within the context of the school. It analyses the identity related implications for teachers of this major intervention into their working lives, in particular focusing upon identity regulation and conflict (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002).  

National agencies in England, such as the Department for Education (DfE) and the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) have had active involvement in promoting the notion of leadership within and between schools. In doing so they have sought to frame the discourse in relation to what leadership means, who practices it and how it should be practiced. An important and recent aspect of this advancement of leadership has been the advocacy of distributed leadership as a means of transforming the practice and outcomes of schooling. This has occurred to the extent that distributed leadership has become a dominant discourse around leadership in schools with empirical work (Penlington and Kington, 2007) reporting that all participants in all participating schools thought that leadership in their schools was distributed. This process has been supported by normative literatures proposing distributed leadership as a model of good leadership practice appealing not least to the emancipatory, participatory and democratic possibilities for educational practitioners of employing distributed leadership practices (Leithwood et al, 2006; Hopkins, 2001). Others have viewed this development very differently seeing strictly limited opportunities for the participation of children and teachers in a ‘top down’ performance management regime (Hartley, 2007; Hatcher, 2005). 

The promotion of distributed leadership by state agencies as part of the process of public sector modernisation aims to construct professional identities in ways that seek to produce conformist “designer employees” (Casey 1995: 138) within a rational modernised system. In terms of the research reported upon it means that the dominance of commissioned research from bodies such as the DfE and NCSL, combined with the performance regime which is now so firmly rooted in English schooling, has strong implications for the formation and development of professional identities. The possibility exists that distributed leadership is spoken into existence through the performance regime as practitioners use the formal language, behaviours and skills in order to meet the requirements of the “deliverology” remit (Barber 2007). This is especially so when those professional identities are linked to a form of distributed leadership that is rhetorically and discursively based on empowerment and simultaneously based on a denial of choice. The opportunity therefore arises to consider whether teachers recognise that this is taking place and so take opportunities to exercise agency outside of this.

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