The role of school leadership in education policy implementation

In the field of education policy, ‘translating’ national policies into practice requires numerous synchronized interventions of a multiplicity of actors at different levels of education administration and its outer environment. Prompted by the lack of understanding about what may facilitate or hinder the policy success at school level and the role school leadership plays in this process, in this article we propose the use of an emerging conceptual framework organised around three analytical axes: a. contextualising the known factors affecting policy implementation within the education policy field, b. developing a typology of school leadership, and c. conceptualising an approach to explain the dynamic processes of exercising influence over the factors of policy implementation by the key school-level ‘agents’ of change – school leaders. Given the absence of a grand theory of (education) policy implementation, we argue that in designing a research framework for an empirical examination of a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon of policy implementation from the perspective of school leaders researchers need to use a holistic approach while building on the legacy of the scholarly work from the multiple academic disciplines.