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blished nearly 30 years later, states that ‘Within the schools context, distributing leadership is a potential means of ameliorating some of the workload issues which are currently being faced by school leaders, by making the role more attractive and the size of the job more deliverable’ (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2007, p.8)

In many respects this simply seems common sense. Reducing the workload on overburdened principals should improve their effectiveness and job satisfaction. What is more important is what is not explained: who absorbs the distributed workload and what is the motivation for doing so?

West seems to have been one of the first to use the term co-principalship although he doesn’t define it clearly. As this study is primarily interested in the formal roles of teacher leadership (positional) rather than the informal (situational) roles of teacher leadership I concentrated on examining literature about what co-principalship is rather than devolved or transformational leadership models. However, without context, “principal” is ambiguous as it has different equivalents in different contexts in English speaking schools in the world (Fig.3).

Figure 3: Ambiguity of the term “principal” in different school contexts.

This ambiguity does create problems when reviewing the literature. For instance, Bunnell (2008) describes the “Yew Chung model of dual culture co-principalship” without ever defining the term. The location of Eckman’s (2006) study is in the US so the role of co-principal has to be guessed although Court’s (2004) study on co-principalships is well defined due to a “thick description”.

However, this study assumes shared leadership towards the top of any hierarchy will have similar correspondences, and can be effectively treated as identical for practical purposes. I expect the issues I examine will also be relevant to many types of shared positions.

Finally, I the model co-principalship needs examining. Court (2003, p.162) limits co-principalship to ‘two people sharing a dual leadership’. I find this too restrictive and see no reason why it should not be ‘two or more people’. However, Court usefully defines several types of co-principalship based on a number of studies by other academics. I have reduced this to a table (fig.4) and added Venn diagrams to illustrate possible extents of role overlap between two co-principals:

Fig.4: Types of co-principalship, adapted from Court (2003, p.162)

I have also given each type an arbitrary label for ease of reference but in no way imply that any model is fixed and I fully expect hybrid models to exist. I use the term ‘hybrid’ in a different way to Gronn (2009) who suggests ‘hybrid’ as a new unit of analysis of ‘distributed’ leadership ‘treating pluralities of leaders as numerically equivalent or all-of-a-piece, for example, an aggregated understanding makes little allowance for different levels of leadership and for qualitative differences among leading units’ (p.382) as opposed to studies that tend to prominently feature personalities that ‘do not leave the scene, but continue to exercise significant and disproportionate influence in comparison with other individual colleagues.’ (p.393).

This raises several questions about the nature of any co-principalship team. How are performance gaps addressed? What forms does leadership take and what ar