Leadership at the boundaries of schools: Navigating the complexities of collaboration

Abstract

This study examines how school leadership navigates the complex boundary-spanning nature of organising schools and school systems. It aims to address gaps in understanding the role of leadership in boundary work by exploring how school leaders build and sustain meaningful relationships up, across and down. Grounded in the Scottish educational context, where centralised decision-making contends with entrenched social, cultural and political challenges, this study adopts the concept of boundary spanning to examine the routines, norms and roles that define schools as organisations. It draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 27 primary and secondary headteachers to provide evidence of how leadership shapes and is shaped by organisational boundaries. Findings reveal that boundary-spanning leadership is critical for fostering collaboration and enabling organisational improvement, with implications for defining responsibilities and enhancing relational capacities. The study concludes that while organisational structures can both facilitate and hinder boundary-spanning practices, school leadership is pivotal in navigating these complexities, offering new insights into how leadership can drive collaborative improvement in schools.

Introduction

The Scottish education system, with its unique history and tradition within the member countries of the United Kingdom, has undergone significant reforms over the past decade aimed at structural and cultural changes to close the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and their peers. These reforms focus on curriculum and assessment, quality assurance and inspection, and teacher education, emphasising professional development, leadership, and innovation to create a self-improving school system (Campbell and Harris, 2023). There is a shared and often widespread narrative in support of collaboration and partnership within and between schools, local authorities and other providers in a range of sectors (e.g. children and health services, civic groups in the community, university researchers), but its implementation is at best patchy both across and within schools and sectors (Ainscow et al., 2020). The education system operates within a hierarchical framework that blends strong central oversight through national curriculum standards and assessments with substantial autonomy granted to local authorities and individual schools for managing daily operations and delivering education. However, tensions persist between central and local governments regarding policy decisions, priority setting and resource allocation, which can hinder the implementation of cohesive and consistent educational strategies nationwide. These challenges underscore the need for bottom-up approaches, where input from local educators and communities shapes policies, alongside upward learning, ensuring that local practices contribute to bridging gaps between policy and practice.

While many societal challenges rooted in the Scottish context such as food poverty, geographic isolation, cultural dislocation or social exclusion to name a few, trace back to global and systemic issues, yet some opportunities emerge from particular contexts featuring responses at local and regional levels. Given the discrepancies in the complex nature of these challenges and the persistent gap between policy and practice, most educators tasked with addressing such challenges find themselves called upon to collaborate with one another outside their normal operational space, hierarchies and across professional boundaries. For those operating at the frontline, such as schoolteachers and leaders, the challenge extends not only to ensuring authentic collaboration but also to ensuring that collaborative endeavours are sustainable and benefit all children and young people, especially those who may be at risk of underachievement, marginalisation or exclusion. That is to say, success and innovation cannot only be seen from the viewpoint of how well communication, information, knowledge, and expertise flow across sectoral and organisational boundaries, but also by the extent to which the exchanges essentially relate to and respond to the challenges faced in local communities and schools.

School leadership is especially prevalent among boundary-spanning positions in which individuals interact with multiple constituencies and often navigate conflicting agendas (Benoliel and Schechter, 2017; Millward and Timperley, 2010). Despite the growing interest in the fluid boundaries that (re)define the roles that leaders assume in schools, scholars have yet to embrace the multi-dimensional role of leadership that is inherent in boundary-spanning activities. Such activities involve school leaders engaging with external stakeholders such as policymakers, community organisations, and university researchers to bridge gaps between education and broader societal needs. This approach fosters collaboration, enriches learning experiences, and ensures that schools remain responsive to evolving challenges (Ainscow et al., 2020). Although significant thought and attention have focused appropriately on the systems, structures and models of practice that can facilitate collaboration, little is known about the pivotal role of individual actors in the management of complex problems through cross-boundary action presenting both challenges and opportunities for school leaders. Expanding the headteacher's role beyond traditional leadership responsibilities can be demanding, yet it has become increasingly essential in today's complex educational landscape. To this end, the following research question guided the study: In what ways and under what circumstances headteachers, as boundary spanners, build and sustain partnerships and collaborations as a platform for continuous improvement?

This article draws upon the notion of boundary spanning which provides a useful set of guiding principles for understanding and framing what is occurring in local settings and is applied to collaborative work that crosses borders to build relationships, interconnections and interdependencies to address complex problems. First, literature on boundary is introduced below, followed by an overview of the research approach adopted for this study setting out the analytical strategies. The findings of the study are then presented, organised around three themes. A discussion of the findings is followed by a look at the implications for future research and practice.

Conceptual basis

The concept of boundary-spanning has its roots in organisational studies and is positioned at an institutional and organisational level (Williams, 2012). Embedded in this literature, is the view that different organisations have different norms, values, cultures and routines and as organisations constantly interact with external environments, they seek information to reduce environmental uncertainties. As a result, organisations’ success in adapting to environmental contingencies relies on coordinated activity across boundaries (Schotter et al., 2017). Boundary spanning can occur at different, nested levels of organisation, including the institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels (Akkerman and Bruining, 2016), and on each level, boundaries are often rooted in socio-cultural and socio-technical complexities. While much can be drawn from the organisational literature on boundary-spanning, there are discrete features of boundary-spanning in the education context such as identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation all of which are seen as organisational learning mechanisms (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Millward and Timperley, 2010). Although learning varies at different levels, the role and position of school leaders as individual actors in an organisation is of particular importance in engaging in learning at boundaries.

School leaders as boundary spanners

Boundary research and perspectives on schools as organisations suggest that their work shapes and is shaped by organisational boundaries, including but not limited to physical, social and knowledge (Rycroft-Smith, 2022). There is also a tradition of studying the boundary spanning role of school leaders, especially principals in promoting coherent sensemaking and policy implementation across multiple actors and organisational levels (Benoliel and Schechter, 2017; Constantinides, 2022). Boundary work often includes connecting, brokering, bridging and translating. For example, Ho et al. (2020) found from their interviews of school senior leaders in Singapore that vice principals worked closely with principals and performed boundary-spanning practices by connecting middle managers together, bridging organisational levels, mediating the implementation of school vision, and brokering and translating between the Ministry of Education and schools. However, aspects of hierarchy premised on formal authority from principals were a major factor in empowering or preventing vice principals to exercise agency, make sense of and communicate contextual information on both sides of the boundary (Ho et al., 2023). In an earlier study of an elementary school in Singapore conducted by Ho and Ng (2017), the boundary-spanning aspects of work were found to give rise to tensions in the distribution of leadership. The principal and vice principal acted as boundary spanners between the heads of department and lower ranking middle managers. The authors argue that school leaders had to pragmatically resolve this tension by allowing each other space to exercise influence interchangeably in their interactions. Other studies suggest that a top-down organisational structure may facilitate rather than hinder boundary-spanning activities. Qian et al. (2023) explored three distinct types of system leaders in China – as a principal, as an expert teacher, and as a dual role of teacher leader/bureaucrat and the ways in which they enact their boundary-spanning practices. Findings suggest that the centralised educational infrastructure pointed to certain conditions that helped enable boundary-spanning practices to support cross-school learning, stimulate the sharing of expertise based on common expectations and routines and develop stronger professional values with shared responsibility for collective learning. At the same time, the hierarchically structured system created complications in building collective efficacy and communities of professional learners.

In times of crisis, research at the intersection of boundary spanning and school leadership has shown emerging patterns of responsive approaches aimed at ensuring well-being of staff and high-quality educational opportunities for all children and young people. Anderson and Weiner (2023) provide examples of principals’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis during the early days of the pandemic describing crisis leadership as boundary spanning – managing up, down and outwards. They found that principals had to translate top-down district protocols and expectations and implement external directives from shifts to online learning to continuously support teachers’ focus on instruction while catering for the evolving needs of families and communities. In the light of inevitable tensions and compromises with which school leaders and teachers have to deal, a mindset shift across levels and most importantly at the level of school leadership is needed.

Boundary spanners in collaborative networks

There is a growing body of work that has addressed how school leaders might take a less school-centric approach to seeking authentic collaboration. An observation emerging from research on collaboration is the salience of networks. Although the term is used in multiple modes of expression, some fairly vague and others highly technical, it is often used to define networks as having more emergent, fluid and organic properties than tight bureaucratic hierarchies and are bound together more by social relations than by formal structures and systems (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004; Powell, 1990). Previous research in education has explored how networks operate and how different forms of collaborative activities and structures exist (Armstrong et al., 2021; Brown and Flood, 2019; Chapman et al., 2010; Díaz-Gibson et al., 2017; Muijs, 2015; Rincón-Gallardo and Fullan, 2016; Sherer et al., 2020). What is common within the literature is that collaboration is increasingly a preferred strategy for addressing complex problems of practice pointing to the significance of ‘boundary-crossing,’ especially in facilitating inter-school partnerships and collaborative networks (Azorín et al., 2020; Chapman, 2015; Constantinides and Eleftheriadou, 2023; Qian et al., 2023). Engeström et al. (1995: 333) argued that the act of boundary crossing ‘entails stepping into unfamiliar domains’ which then creates linkages across hierarchical, functional or internal/external divides. In this sense, tensions resulting from contradictions, unfamiliarity or moments of dispute in social interactions or organisational structures can be handled to locate boundaries and guide crossing routines.

In a similar vein, an increasing number of studies has recognised that joint work at the boundaries is portrayed through research-practice partnerships, an evidence-based education movement which often involves long-term collaborations between schools, local authorities/districts, higher education institutions and community organisations (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Farrell et al., 2022; Penuel et al., 2015). Farrell et al. (2021: 5) argue that ‘These partnerships are intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work’. This ‘joint work’ focuses on a boundary infrastructure (i.e. boundary spanners, practices and objects) through which designated roles (i.e. boundary spanners), interaction structures (i.e. practices) and artefacts (i.e. objects) can transcend differences between cultures, professional norms and organisational routines (Farrell et al., 2022). To help create the conditions for meaningful collaborative efforts, an individual in a partnership embraces the position of a boundary spanner or broker when they engage in boundary crossing routines (Davidson and Penuel, 2019; Penuel et al., 2015).

Taken together, these studies suggest that boundary spanners are responsible for establishing communication systems, interacting with internal and external activities in their school environment, and negotiating power structures to facilitate equitable processes and outcomes. Yet it may be difficult to mobilise the potential of boundary spanning practices, particularly without sufficient resources, motivation for collaboration, political support or coordination of organisational arrangements and policies. To address these gaps in the existing literature, the research approach that informs this study is outlined below.

Research approach

This study employs a case study design, focusing on a cross-case analysis of 27 headteachers (13 primary and 14 secondary) in Scotland where collaborative work was seen as an integral part of transforming their schools and improving student outcomes. The case study approach was chosen for its ability to provide an in-depth understanding of complex phenomena within real-world contexts, making it particularly suitable for examining leadership practices and organisational dynamics in diverse educational settings. Cases were purposefully selected to provide a wide range of contexts, geographic spread and leadership challenges using a combination of criterion, maximum variation and snowball sampling strategies (Maykut and Morehouse, 1994; Yin, 2018). These were based on the following: (a) school leaders formally leading collaborative initiatives in practitioner-led networks, (b) information collected from inspection reports and school improvement plans and (c) reputation of schools or leaders at the local authority or national level. The purpose of this selection process was to compare and contrast perspectives on the same issue, learn about and share successful spanning practices that others might learn from and consider enacting themselves. Accessibility, which included their willingness to allow the researcher(s) to conduct interviews and observations ranging from 1 to 3 days, and to evaluate documents, was also a consideration in selecting sites for the study.

Data collection and analysis

Data were generated during site visits and through other communication mediums such as zoom videoconferencing/telephone interview. More specifically, semi-structured interviews were conducted with all headteachers. The interview questions focused on school and collaborative improvement efforts, inter-organisational relationships among schools and social networks. In addition, documentary evidence included school improvement plans, school leaders’ blogs and student attainment data in national tests. Field notes were also collected during site visits to capture insights into relationships, roles, responsibilities and events as they occurred in the field. Such form of data added richness and depth of understanding of the dimensions of boundaries and collaborative work and supplemented interview statements about boundary practices as well as documents.

The analytic process was iterative and reflected both deductive and inductive analysis (Miles and Huberman, 1994). First, deductive and descriptive codes were applied to data sources based on boundary encounters and components of a boundary infrastructure (e.g. boundary spanners, practices and material or conceptual objects). Codes were derived from the conceptual framework and literature review on boundary spanning in educational contexts (e.g. Akkerman and Bruining, 2016; Rycroft-Smith, 2022). During coding, which was supported with NVIvo 14 software, inductive codes were generated relative to collaborative processes and brokering differences within and between school boundaries to facilitate collective improvement and change. Once coding was completed, analytic memos were created to capture key patterns within and among the schools focusing on the approaches, systems and structures that schools used to spread and sustain impactful relationships and supportive infrastructure with partners. Member checking and participant feedback were used to ensure the integrity of the findings. Finally, a cross-case analysis was conducted to synthesise common findings and lessons learned across the participating schools. The aim was to compile, organise and share what was learned from the schools rather than to reduce the data to a few common themes or patterns. The following section presents the findings, highlighting key patterns and insights drawn from the data.

Findings

The findings point to the complexity and interdependence of the boundary spanning activities and the people involved in their efforts to support the learning of all students in inclusive learning environments. Headteachers were acting as boundary spanners because they focused on and had attended to almost simultaneously the following three pieces of the puzzle required for successful spanning of boundaries in transforming knowledge and relationships: (1) high sense of professional agency, (2) sensitivity to local context and (3) managing hierarchies and spanning upwards.

High sense of professional agency

Professional agency was seen as closely interconnected with headteachers’ work-related identity, infused and resourced, while sometimes constrained, by the socio-cultural context of their schools. They were able to create workplace conditions that enhanced their capacities, willingness and motivation to attend and exercise agency to influence social and organisational structures and cultures. This involved broadening their role boundaries, making their action spaces more flexible and taking a critical stance against external reforms.

We often speak about engaging learners. I think it's so important to engage your teachers or your staff, not just your teachers, your support assistants and your office people. So, it's working towards building a strong immediate team who will then model what they will build. They will work with their teams, all the way through the system and back up again. I also think you need to do it with not just your immediate staff, but partners to your school. Whether it has to do with support learning and business partners and agency partners, whatever it is, that they all feel you're part of the school because they can bring so much. Same with parents. (Secondary Headteacher)

The Scottish government, to my mind, seem to look for quantitative data. The decisions that I've made around people equity funds have been because of research and my understanding and experience, that early intervention and prevention is one of the ways to be able to improve attainment and to potentially close the gap. However, Scottish government at the moment are considering ways for us to justify and prove the impact of that pupil equity funding. How do I prove impact on something that's based on research on preventative early intervention prevention? How do I prove impact on what I have prevented? (Primary Headteacher)

We are less bound by compliance and rules and as a leader I don’t like teachers putting too many systems around rules and behaviour management. That transpires to teaching and learning and trying to be more curriculum focused rather than compliance driven. That is intentional and everything comes back to that. (Secondary Headteacher)

Motivation to attend and the exercise of agency to do so appeared to be a contributing factor to mediate, resist and find productive room to manoeuvre, maintaining strong individual and collective sense of agency within a sense of creative initiatives and suggestions for developing existing work practices. In other words, the focus on the nature of their ‘agency’ reveals the potential dynamism and contentiousness of the boundary spanning work as an inherently social process.

I have also discovered as a school leader that it takes time for people to respect and trust you. These can only be learned through shared experiences and seeing how you lead through those experiences. (Primary Headteacher)

We have always based ourselves on relationships based on our core values and the connections and the compassion for everyone like it. It was nothing new. We were a bit baffled as to why. (Primary Headteacher)

All participants used their relationship-building skills to redistribute decision-making agency between school staff, students and other external stakeholders. Notably, the integration of research into decision-making agency was intensified when headteachers, school-based staff and local partners (e.g. educators from schools and local authorities) were able to focus on problems of practice through collaborative design processes and systematic inquiry as building capacity strategies for sustained change and improvement in schools. This multi-agency approach led by headteachers created a system of evidence-based professional accountability which implied a move away from reliance on external accountability towards the development of professional capital of teachers and school leaders.

We've worked a lot with Fife's professional learning programme about quality improvement methodology and using data to analyse where our children are at in terms of using Pareto models and things like that. We've got various techniques that are our Fife learning professional learning team have put together to do small steps of change. Studies with our teachers for our teachers, with our children. (Primary Headteacher)

It's creating structures that people could work within. But given agency to stop and the space and time to discuss those structures over a period of 3 years, maybe, which is where we're coming up to now and giving people the security of knowing what they're coming in the morning and for next term and understanding the bigger picture. (Secondary Headteacher)

… I'm a big believer in professional learning networks. In order to be a head teacher in Scotland you have to complete the into headship, the in headship then complete the master's but you don't have to do it … it gives you a network of other people that have selected to do that. So that was really good because it's a lot about the difference between leadership and management and reflecting on your professional biography and how you've come to be the leader that you are. (Secondary Headteacher)

Sensitivity to local contexts

Findings suggest that principals acting as boundary spanners faced several challenges in their efforts to provide viable solutions to local problems stressing the complexity and uniqueness of their local contexts. One example of this complexity was addressing a unique set of challenges with regard to promoting equity, managing student behaviour and raising levels of student achievement. All headteachers spoke of their collaborative approaches with other schools in the area, university academics acting as ‘critical friends’ and community organisations.

And it's important to us that our children talk positively of our school … they can see what's working well for them in terms of that they feel safe and nurtured, they are making progress in their learning. And in that learning, if we were just to focus on attainment for some of our children, that's a real challenge for them in terms of their additional support needs … How do we adapt the curriculum to do that for them so that they get the best experience out of their education? (Primary Headteacher)

We've had a journey because when I came here, there was nothing. We had two years of COVID and since then actually Midlothians have been at the forefront of bringing in digital learning and inclusion. It's got a whole platform, Google and that's really powerful. And it's a really good piece of work, really impressive. (Secondary Headteacher)

Particular emphasis was placed on supporting multiple interactions among stakeholders to allow for contextualised insights to emerge in order to develop shared commitment to high standards and high expectations across classrooms, schools and the community. The drive for a sustained momentum for improvement on the ground was led by school leaders and staff in individual schools, some of which were located in highly challenging settings of urban disadvantage. Their ability to adapt to local circumstances allowed them to obtain access and power across diverse groups. Examples included expert data analysis, benchmarked against other local and similar schools and opportunities for after-school learning or becoming an apprentice (for post-16 learners) providing the impetus for ambitious target setting.

Most kids here are going into employment rather than university, so we still have about 30–40% depending on the year group. We've got university goers, but we've got twice the national average of kids going straight into employment, double the national average. And when I came here, the school wasn't catering for them. They were only catering for universities. So, I changed the curriculum to make it more vocational. (Secondary Headteacher)

You can't just take things from other places and drop it into your own school. That's one thing I have learned, and I always say if people come and ask us how do we do this or what about this. I often say to them you need to know your own school context. (Secondary Headteacher)

We've got a high proportion of children with English as an additional language, particularly in our current P4 cohort. So, the data in P4 at the moment is dipping. If you go backwards in our data we've got a lot of EAL children who again if they have no English when they start, they get directed EAL support. If they have some English, they get as much support as we can give them. But you know, there's a lot of children and not very much time. (Primary Headteacher)

The importance of deep understanding of local conditions also extends to the formulation of a rather special kind of relationship and orientation on the part of the headteacher as a boundary spanner. Several headteachers established themselves as ‘local citizens’ who became an accepted and trusted part of the local community. Their boundary work embodied a deep commitment to create what Bruner (1996: 84) called ‘communities of learners’ where the transformation of schools as learning cultures would also transform the role of leaders, teachers, parents and community partners in these learning cultures.

I suppose for getting as a head teacher, I've tried to keep that view of what can I do for others. How can I serve my community, and because I've been part of this school for such a long time, I do very much feel that I am serving the community because I know it so well. It really is about giving something back. (Primary Headteacher)

Some key ingredients to that success are collaboration, as a staff and whole staff and being well aligned strategically all of us, and sort of heading in the same direction. We’ve got whole community buy-in to what we do and what we believe as well, which we do. That's parents, children, staff etc. (Primary Headteacher)

To navigate everything, I think you need to be very skilled socially … and I suppose it has to do with the relationship with our local community and the strategies that we've used, and it has to do with trust. (Secondary Headteacher)

Managing hierarchies and spanning upwards

One of the biggest tensions inherent in boundary spanning work to form meaningful relationships up, across and down was the potential conflict between short- and long-term objectives, which may also be regarded as the tension between external demands and greater school autonomy. Strong hierarchical controls downwards from central and local government, notably in decisions to do with curriculum, and setting and regulating the performance targets expected from schools proved to be a challenging boundary spanning task. The work of boundary spanners was embedded in hierarchical and political environments with several leaders having to deal with a range of constituencies, often with conflicting demands. Despite the demands of the policy press, headteachers in the study were likely to resist and disrupt external prescriptions for their practice.

Inevitably I cannot enact every part of every policy, all the time. So, I have to prioritise and I prioritise based on what I judge to be and what my staff judge to be the needs of our young people. And that means I therefore deprioritise certain aspects of certain policies, and if I take all of the stuff that is deprioritised, it's probably quite a lot. (Secondary Headteacher)

… You had all these consultations about reform, and I think some of that was timely, I think the areas of reform that have been identified, such as SQA assessments and you know, almost having a really good inclusive curriculum. But the assessment structure doesn't fit because I do believe that the assessment structure we have currently, which is very much about attainment, attainment attainment, as a gold standard doesn't fit our world today, and it doesn't fit the world that our young people are going to live and work.

And so some great things that are happening is there's a whole range of new avenues for jobs, work for apprenticeships and so on. (Secondary Headteacher)

Quality Assurance (QA) is problematic for a start and as an organisation, Education Scotland is full of people who have certain ideological perspectives. That's been proven to be problematic and they're not listening to international experience. (Secondary Headteacher)

I'm now involved in some discussions with several civil servants around policy development. I still have this huge sense of understanding that it's really still all about just give us some numbers and figures that we can turn into pie charts so that we can show the opposition that it's making a difference rather than wanting to try and tell a story which is more likely to be able to highlight impact when you're dealing with people over time … I have great concerns about the system and this tiny, narrow lens of focus. Although the academic part of their learning is important, we're really kind of incorporating meta skills (Primary Headteacher)

Some headteachers experienced difficulties working with a large number of individuals in different schools and local authorities, balancing conflicting roles, responsibilities and priorities. However, they were able to negotiate the tensions related to their boundary spanning roles by building reciprocity of multiple perspectives around shared educational agendas to inform practice.

I've never been a head teacher in another authority, but my understanding of many authorities is that head teachers in Central Valley are very much empowered, and very much trusted to run their schools. (Secondary Headteacher)

The authority will be there to support and to hold us accountable to an extent, but we don't have them breathing down our necks and I definitely feel that initially it was quite disconcerting. I am doing everything I can to enact policy but enact in such a way that meets the needs of my pupils. (Primary Headteacher)

I'm not sure whether the Scottish Government want uniformity across the schools. Central Belt City Council certainly don't want uniformity across the schools, but I think as leaders, we welcome implementation for ourselves. We welcome autonomy for ourselves, and we say we want to empower others. But sometimes we have to consider what autonomy are we giving others. (Primary Headteacher)

There's an element of being responsive in the moment as a leader, but also being strategically responsible for what local authorities need. (Primary Headteacher)

Two secondary headteachers working in schools in different local authorities were leading a practitioner network around leadership development in their region. They created and oversaw the design of knowledge packages and brought together other school leaders in the wider geographical area to undertake capacity building activities. In doing so, participating leaders would serve as a cohort working on collaborative improvement. They noted that:

I don't think there's any kind of formal learning programme that would teach you about the day-to-day work or if there was, it would be a very boring and dry experience. I think that's something that you just need to learn on the job with the support of colleague head teachers and with heads of service and quality improvement officers who are there too. So, there's a lot of operational things. (Secondary Headteacher)

I think in my group working with head teachers from different parts of the country and also primary heads every year and having that cross-sectional group working on something, a thought piece collaboratively was really, really good. And we looked at how can you amplify the voice of head teachers and that was about to shape policy. So instead of being given a policy to implement, how do you shape it so that you can be part of it before it gets to you? So that kind of learning for me has been really really good. (Secondary Headteacher)

From a boundary perspective, these headteachers acted as a point of contact for local school leaders wishing to engage in the workshop meetings and activities through their networks. They supported ‘joint work’ and served as mediating agents and brokers for the network by crossing organisational boundaries and facilitating professional learning and skill development around collective responsibility for improvement. In the discussion that follows, these findings are interpreted in relation to the conceptual framework and existing theories followed by a synthesis of key messages, insights on limitations, practical implications and potential directions for future research and practice.

Discussion

This study aimed to understand how school leaders, as boundary spanners, build and sustain partnerships and collaborations to drive continuous improvement. It reveals that leadership in school organisational settings transcends internal management, extending beyond the immediate school environment to actively shape boundary-spanning activities. By engaging in boundary-spanning practices, headteachers in the study enhanced collective approaches, fostered innovation in school improvement, and strengthened collaborative environments where individuals actively participated in shared learning experiences, ultimately benefiting their students.

Contributing to the body of scholarship, the study develops contextualised notions of boundary spanning that address the distinctive features of educational work in Scotland. Using boundary spanning as an orienting conceptual framework, the findings provide insight into local and regional settings, situating place-based and cross-sector collaboration as strategic approaches for achieving continuous improvement. This framing highlights the pivotal role of leadership in bridging organisational boundaries to sustain impactful relationships and supportive educational infrastructures.

Through boundary spanning, headteachers in the study stepped out of their silos and modelled collaborative partnerships, bringing together diverse experiences and perspectives to address complex educational challenges. Communication was a key element of this work while at the same time knowledge (co)creation and brokering helped to set collective mindsets and establish trust; two additional key elements for effective collaboration. This collective wisdom is instrumental in identifying effective communication strategies, understanding and changing local patterns and developing practical knowledge and innovative solutions that support locally driven collaborative improvement (Bryk et al., 2010; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2015). In addition, mediating differences and establishing trust were key factors in the headteachers’ successful role as facilitators of collaboration and dialogue among diverse stakeholders. In other words, organisational boundaries magnified the importance of trust. Findings from the study point to the complexity of leadership across organisational boundaries aligning with scholarship on boundary spanning behaviour (Hawkins and James, 2018) requiring leaders at all levels to collaboratively redesign processes to achieve desired outcomes rather than conforming to custom. Such behaviour empowers them to model and drive this collective learning to enable continuous improvement to take hold. Keeping this as a guideline in mind, engaging people across boundaries and connecting with other stakeholders contributes to building a culture of trust and operate with dispersed configurations of power relationships (Weinstein et al., 2020).

Similarly, findings from the study are in line with the literature on boundary work and network leadership more broadly (Azorín et al., 2020; Constantinides, 2023; Constantinides and Eleftheriadou, 2023; Díaz-Gibson et al., 2017) and with what Greany et al. (2024) refer to these actors as ‘landscape gardeners’. These are individuals who demonstrate reticulist network-building skills (see Williams, 2012) serving as a connective tissue between several schools, organisations and relevant stakeholders in their localities. As the cases in this study clearly illustrate, headteachers acted as boundary spanners by creating linkages across hierarchical, functional and external divides as an ‘anchor point’ between organisational structures, cultures and norms. This range of functions point to the importance of individual actors in the effectiveness of the boundary spanning role holder, operating across the different layers of an educational ecosystem with the diversity of organisational contexts playing a critical role in not only determining the nature of boundary spanning activities but also in the extent of their effectiveness (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Constantinides, 2021; Ng, 2013; Toh et al., 2014). Situating schools and students as part of an educational ecosystem also draws attention to the wider social, political and environmental factors that shape, and are shaped by boundary spanning activity. That said, at the senior school leadership level, a major focus is creating and sustaining the fit between the internal organisational processes and external environment to explore a coordinated set of policy and practice solutions to address interrelated problems that manifest in school improvement (Chapman and Donaldson, 2023; Ho et al., 2020). At his level, thinking and acting systemically enables boundary spanners to negotiate with a complex array of stakeholders to move systems forward using their mutual influence for improvement across traditional boundaries (Author, 2023; Kruse, 2020; Norqvist and Ärlestig, 2020; Qian et al., 2023; Shaked et al., 2018).

Conclusions

Boundary perspectives provide powerful insights on leaders’ agency in continuous improvement efforts and the tools and actions they take to support learning and knowledge transfer. This study demonstrates that these processes constitute a form of social and cognitive boundary crossing resource that involves the deconstruction and reconstruction of practice across activities.

As some of these examples suggest, being positioned as boundary spanners is not sufficient to prepare leaders to negotiate roles, trust, culture and power in the work they do. While working in increasingly complex environments often characterised by multiple external pressures, leaders will need to continuously sustain negotiation skills with a wide range of stakeholders to move school systems forward. Achieving the right balance between embedding policy priorities and pressures into work practices also requires a level of discretionary judgement in real time, in a specific context, and in the face of uncertainties. This study highlights that professional development opportunities, open communication and ongoing monitoring efforts are strategies to navigate across boundaries. This means that leaders are well-positioned to shift and change their schools to better fit local improvement efforts. Further attention to the preparation and support of educational leaders is needed in order to develop their capacity to span traditional, often hierarchical boundaries and redefine the role of headteachers, teachers and other actors in a process of continuous learning. Currently, there are several professional development programmes available for middle and senior school leaders in Scotland, some developed and delivered centrally by Education Scotland (Government's executive agency for education), while others such as Into Headship (pre-requisite for all newly appointed headteachers) are delivered by universities, local authorities and Education Scotland working in partnership (Harvie et al., 2024). However, central and local funding cutbacks as well as the uncertainty about the amount and duration of future funding poses a challenge in developing greater capacity for brokerage that crosses professional and social boundaries, both within and across schools.

Despite the attention that often structures and systems receive in facilitating or hindering essential boundary-spanning tasks such as collaborative work, there is a need to recognise that in the end, such tasks occur ‘when individual or collective agents connect entities separated by a boundary by negotiating the meaning and terms of the relationship between them’ (Kislov, 2018: 1). This attention to agency highlights the interactions within, between and beyond schools. Practitioners and policymakers need not only to work together but also to relate to local communities and parents and ultimately to the students’ best interests that are recipients of their activities.

These findings are based on headteachers’ perceptions relying on self-report and are not representative of the many and varied ways in which the boundary spanning roles and practices are understood and taken up in all participating schools. A range of perspectives from local government officials and other local and regional stakeholders would offer multiple perspectives providing a richer picture of boundary spanning roles and practices.

Findings from this study have implications for those who engage in many forms of boundary work which require understanding the different cultures, norms, routines, languages and priorities of the organisations involved. There are also internal organisational aspects that need to be considered as some school cultures can be more aligned and attuned with an ‘emergent’ change process than others (Weick, 2000). In this respect, there is no ‘one best way to manage change’ but ‘one best way for each’ (Burnes, 1996). Equally important is the interaction between managing the school's external environment (e.g. policy pressures for consensus on outcomes) and internal work (e.g. staffing, participation and collaboration, teaching and learning, consensus building processes). This highlights a dilemma for boundary spanners who need to selectively bridge and buffer environmental and internal organisational influences in their efforts to establish and maintain communication systems, interact with individuals outside their own context, and negotiate power structures.

Crucially, various and diverse contexts lead to a need for different profiles of boundary spanners to best address needs and social realities at a local level – by local actors with a deep understanding of the places where they work and can access guidance and support systems to offer solutions to their local development strategies. Such professionals are not only embedded in political and hierarchical work contexts, but they are also deeply embedded in a local context and are connected to local communities. A key insight for future research is that boundary spanning is about the edges or channels along which spanning occurs. In other words, at its most fundamental level, boundary spanning is about connectivity.