Generative conditions for shared leadership in arts-rich schools

Some schools are able to generate sustained, widespread leadership practices. This paper adds to the corpus that explains how collective leadership has been developed in a distinctive set of schools, drawing on the Researching the Arts in Primary Schools (RAPS) project. Eight conditions appeared consistently across schools where leadership was distributed and dense: mutual trust across hierarchical levels, freely circulating expertise, endemic agency, desired rather than mandated collaboration, enabling structures, shared conviction about purpose, universal continuous learning and visible celebration of contribution. These conditions function as an ecology in which each reinforces the others. The paper identifies the processes through which these conditions are produced and sustained: conversations that traverse normal hierarchical boundaries, strong symbolic messaging, consistent organisational narrative, collaborative working, whole-school occasions that build collective identity, shared sensemaking and external validation of the school's arts identity. The paper advances a school-as-design framework and shows the points of connection and difference with the extant leadership literatures.