Making educational leadership policy: The case for a multilevel perspective

The authors explore a multilevel framework for educational leadership. Anchoring this framework in teaching, and drawing on a range of research findings, they explain how educational leadership is fundamentally about cultivating and channelling relationships, in order to access and activate resources to support teaching practice. In this framework, educational leadership practice is embedded in multiple overlapping relationships with teachers, students, school leaders, parents, community leaders, system leaders and other stakeholders. Educational leadership, they conclude, is conditioned by these overlapping and intersecting relationships and, for policy makers, such multilevel framing calls attention to system and schoolhouse leadership, together and in interaction, rather than in isolation.