Abstract
The study of leadership in schools today tends to be dominated by a paradigm obsessed with the recent, the relevant, and the principal. Drawing on past and recent reviews of the literature on middle leaders in secondary schools in the UK, eight key criticisms of the field are identified and a case made for an inclusive view to knowledge in which a humanistic, especially a historical, approach is treated seriously. In this context, the bulk of this article reports on an ethnographic study of leadership in a secondary school in England undertaken in the 1980s, and focuses on the story of ‘David Potts’ and on how he transformed the fortunes of a Department of Design Studies.
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