‘Steering the ship not rocking the boat’: The implied stewardship and managerial roles of senior leaders in traditional international schools

The past five decades has seen four dominant models of educational leadership emerge, as the fashion shifted from managerial, towards instructional, then transformational, and the currently dominant distributed approach. At the same time, other models have emerged in literature such as moral, authentic, systems, and contingency leadership. This paper focuses attention on the leadership approach expected by the senior leader (‘Directors’) of well-established autonomous traditional international schools governed by a parental-led Board, where a complexity of tensions and dualities has previously been reported by literature. At the same time, this body of schools stands under-reported upon. Following an analysis of the action verbs found in 10 job adverts, across 10 nations globally, we can identify a strong pattern of anticipated role, characterised by the ‘old fashioned’ managerial, and instructional approaches, with the Director being expected to steer the school on a steady, continuous course rather than instigate any major change or innovation. A role of responsible stewardship emerges, with the Director being expended to maintain, continue, and oversee events as previously done by others. The lack of scope for distributed or contingency leadership seems surprising given the changing social and political environment that the schools occupy.