Decentring the leader and centring the site in education

In this special issue, each of the contributing authors considers leading, rather than leadership, in a range of educational contexts. Authors seek to examine how educational leaders lead through decentring from a range of positions and across a range of educational sectors from schools to higher education. Each paper attends to the practices of leading to ‘decentre’ normative, traditional notions of leadership that focus on the individual leader as the unit of study. Such decentring serves to understand leading as a shared and ongoing process between people rather than as an individual act. This growing body of work that uses the theory of practice architectures (TPA) is disrupting people’s thinking towards leading as a practice. Focusing on practices and their arrangements shifts the traditional, role-based educational leadership narrative to the more transformational elements of practice architectures in thinking about leading in contemporary contexts.