Parallel leadership: the key to successful school capacity-building

Abstract

This article addresses the somewhat contentious issue of distributed leadership. It derives from a compre-hensive 3-phase research project that focused on the imple-mentation of the IDEAS Project in Victoria, Australia. The article presents a process-based model of capacity-building that was developed out of phases one and twoof the research project. In phase three of the research, the leadership underpinnings of the six ‘dynamics’ in the capacity-building model were explored in detail. Fresh insights about distributed leadership derived from this phase of the research and are outlined in the article. Based on the research, the article takes the position that distributed leadership is essential to successful capacity-building. It takes the further point that a particular form of distributed leadership, parallel leadership, is worthy of very serious consideration as a leadership model for school improvement processes.