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A few years ago, I was undertaking background research for a book, , when on these very 91���� pages, my eyes were drawn to an article about Renfrewshire Council.

It had become the first local authority in Scotland to be rated “excellent” for its progress in narrowing the attainment gap between pupils from deprived areas and those from more affluent areas. Scotland’s chief inspector of education at the time - this was 2019 - described the progress being made as “an absolute delight”.

I later met Steven Quinn, then director of children’s services for the council. We spoke about ”, whereby headteachers have a secondary focus of supporting all children in Renfrewshire because they’re senior officers of the council; collaboration for collective impact was the key to success.

The inspectorate found that headteachers, education managers, development officers and others all relayed the same message in Renfrewshire: nobody was more important than the next person in getting things right.

For me, this was the best example of distributed leadership that I’ve witnessed in Scotland. Schools and headteachers were entrusted with real responsibility by their colleagues in the wider education authority. Certainly, it was a refreshing change from the backward steps taken in the past.

Mistakes of the past

The advent of faculty heads had increased the management strata within Scottish education and provoked the demise of principal teachers. The latter were more agile and responsive to pressures for change, albeit faculties do offer opportunities for collegiality and collaboration.

The most regressive step, though, was the disbanding of the Chartered Teacher Scheme in 2012. Yet, looking back now, this scheme sits well with distributed leadership theory, which, as one group of researchers put it in 2022, “”.

Chartered teachers, as experienced teachers who wanted to remain in the classroom, were ideally placed to use their well-honed crafts to grapple with emerging issues in Scottish education - unfortunately, a substantial minority chose not to do so. As a committee member of the (ACTS), this was a crushing realisation.

The ACTS (later Scottish Teachers for Enhancing Practice, or STEP, which held its final annual general meeting in March 2026) conference was regularly attended by Scottish government officials, including ministers, a positive relationship which made our ultimate demise even harder to bear.

Today, it is pleasing but somewhat galling to see the success of chartered teachers in England under the auspices of the ; they even have a specific “”.

Leadership across the community

Prime examples of distributed leadership can be seen in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. I have seen how the principal at grants her staff carte blanche to “dream their own education” and fashion their own curricula, as does her colleague at , both in districts with high levels of immigration and poverty.

Another Rotterdam principal at l leaves behind the school gates to network with 30 partners in the Oude Noorden district; leadership is distributed not just across a school but the whole community. And all three schools, if we are to measure success in the traditional ways, achieve outstanding results.

Rotterdam has been more radical, Renfrewshire more measured - but both have shown that distributed leadership can work.

Dr Antony Luby is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Glasgow’s School of Education and a former secondary teacher. His book, School Leadership and Pedagogy for the Common Good: Building Bridges Between Faith and Secularity, was published at the end of April. He is presenting a paper at the conference in Lincoln today