The concept of School Management runs through different paths, from a scientific-technical level to a perspective more humanist. Traditionally it had been reduced to administrative and bureaucratic tasks. However, the reality of schools is changing and it requires a Management Team with more complex functions. This situation has changed the concept of this, which has envolved toward cultural and educational functions.

This paper defends a kind of management that is able to develop effectively all these competences, that is a technical vision but above all humanist. Authors such as Fernández Enguita (2007) and González González (2011) advocate inclusive definitions.

In this sense, an effective management should carry out some administrative, cultural and educational functions, aimed to guide the organizational activities to achieve specific aims, promote a common scholar culture among the scholar community and facilitate the teaching-learning processes improvement. A good performance of these tasks requires the Head Teacher to have some specific qualities for leadership.

The new demands and social expectations involve a reform in the school context that can not be settled only with external policy, but it requires a transformation that should be headed internally from each school. In this context a strong management is essential to carry out all functions, especially the pedagogical one, from the leadership. A Head Teacher is needed to act as an engine of change and school improvement, able to engage and make the educational community responsible for a common project.

At the international level, the pedagogical leadership has become today an essential element for the school improvement and effectiveness, as well as a priority for educational policies in many countries.

Although School Management is one of the most powerful tools available to schools to achieve the quality of teaching and learning processes, in Spain this tradition is very weak; there is a different model of management in comparison with the rest of European countries, with the exception of Portugal (Estruch, 2000). The political history of both countries has marked education by provoking a School Management with particular features and full of difficulties that, in the case of Spain, shape in the absence of professionalism and leadership.

In this country the characteristics of the system itself prevent or make difficult the performance of the leadership, especially in educational activities; as OECD indicates, Spain is one of the countries where school management develops pedagogical leadership to a lesser extent (Bolivar, 2006). A transition to international trends of leadership is required to improve schools.

Thus, the Organic Law of Education (LOE) introduces, within the duties of the Head Teacher, the exercising of the "pedagogical leadership". Different educational laws of Autonomous Regions establish the same idea, such as Andalusia and Catalonia, among others.

This work of research, which aims, firstly, to establish how the exercise of pedagogical leadership by the management teams in pre-school and primary schools has given an " added value" to the education offered; secondly, to analyze examples of good practices; and, thirdly, to discover what patterns of distribution  present leadership in the analyzed case studies, fits in this scenario.

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