The main aim of the paper is to measure the adequacy of current policy constitutions of inter/professional leadership for effecting the leadership culture change now needed in the complex space of children’s sector services across the UK polities, other european countries and globally, here exemplified by education and speech and language therapy (SLT), a profession allied to health, in a Scottish context. It draws on a series of earlier studies into inter/professional relations including those of leadership (Forbes, 2011; Forbes & McCartney, 2010; 2011a; Forbes & Watson, 2009; 2012). The questions that frame this paper are: How does children’s services policy constitute leadership? And: What social capital relations underlie current policy constitutions of leadership?

Our purpose is to introduce new ideas about the relationships among inter/professional working, leadership and culture change. We use the conceptual framework of distributed leadership and social capital theory to analyse key Scottish policy concerning the leadership of teachers and SLTs, relevant also to leadership of other groups across the children’s sector services.

The paper opens by introducing the trajectory of children’s sector policy in Scotland as a context for the analysis of inter/professional working, leadership and cultural change in schools and services that follows. It is argued that the kind of large-scale change, restructuring and re-culturing of co-practice envisaged in policy demands critical examination of which aspects of the children’s sector workforce now needs to be re-designed and re-modelled; and specifically what forms of future children’s services leadership will be needed (Forbes & McCartney, 2011a; 2011b).

We review selected related studies into inter/professional working, leadership and culture change in schools and children’s services, summarise the Scottish SLT/education interface as an applicable heuristic example of cross-sector working and consider models of leadership invoked as mechanisms for culture change in recent Scottish Government policies.

The key theoretical concepts which frame the paper – social capital theory (Bourdieu, 1986; Coleman, 1988; and Putnam, 2000) and theorizations of distributed leadership (Leithwood et al 2009) are discussed together with the paper’s analytical framework of leadership distribution culturally (MacBeath, 2009).

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